EMQ » October–December 2020 » Volume 56 Issue 4
By Alan R. Johnson
Frontier Missiology involves a complex of perspectives on the Bible, mission, history, culture, and the status of the Christian faith that together focus on the telos or end goal of God’s mission in the world: A church among every tribe, language, people and nation. This view of God’s global purpose led to new understandings of “people groups” and the mission task. In this article, I explore some of the foundational ideas and core concepts put forward by one of the movement’s primary spokesmen, Ralph D. Winter (1924-2009), founder of the U.S. Center for World Mission (now Venture Center). Winter’s original insights about people groups are part of a set of interconnected ideas that laid the foundation for what we now call “frontier missions.”
Missiological Foundations
Winter’s ten-year working relationship (1966–1976) with Donald McGavran at the School of World Mission (SWM) at Fuller Seminary exposed him to ideas that laid the groundwork for his key insights. He singles out four things that he calls pure McGavran church growth thinking: (1) the sociological observation that in terms of evangelism cultural factors are more important than linguistic ones; (2) that there are settings where a “sphere” of people, such as a caste, can only be penetrated by a new form of the Christian faith; (3) that if in a conglomerate (mixed member) church, a person is present from a people segment that does not have the gospel, they can become a “bridge of God” to take the Good News to their own people; and (4) in this way the gospel can spread quickly among the same people and become a “people movement to Christ.”[1]
Two of McGavran’s ideas were particularly formative: (1) people need to receive the gospel in a culturally relevant form and (2) persons who have come to faith elsewhere can serve as strategic “bridges of God” to take the gospel to their own people.
The Two Original Insights that Launched Frontier Missiology
Winter extended McGavran’s insights by exploring the implications for non-Christians in a different people group or segment: What if there is not a culturally relevant version of faith available, nor a bridge person to share the gospel with them?
Winter’s first big insight had to do with the significance of barriers. He “began to realize that if it is true that even minor cultural differences can separate people and keep them from going to the same congregation, etc., then this fact has horrendous implications for the existing mission movement.”[2] His teaching on the expansion of the Christian faith showed that non-Christians in one segment of people did not automatically respond positively to the form of the Christian faith they were seeing in other people segments. This seemed true even when the two groups shared a common language. Furthermore, the same cultural differences that were a barrier for those “outside” a group to come to faith also hindered the Christians “inside” from “seeing” their non-Christian neighbors as people with whom they should be sharing the gospel.
Mission agencies inadvertently reinforced these barriers. Winter’s historical lenses revealed that agencies operated with a faulty premise when it came to church planting: “They do not expect nor seek to have two or more different forms of Christianity; the form that develops in their first major beachhead [in a country] tends to be considered good enough for all the other groups.”[3] The assumption that one cultural version of faith will naturally flow outward to other people segments turned out not to be true. Thus, in evangelism and church planting, one cultural or “national” church “version” of the faith decidedly does not fit all.
The second insight grew from Winter’s reflection on what happens when there is no bridge person present to carry the gospel to their own people.[4] McGavran felt that strategically the best investment of missionary effort was to work with groups where there were bridge people. Winter asked, “So what about the other groups for which there existed no bridge?”[5] He saw that the lack of a converted person from (or relevant fellowship within) the same cultural group meant there was no near-neighbor witness to share the gospel with their own people. Gospel penetration, by definition, would require cross-cultural effort.
Putting these two insights together enabled Winter to see a world of peoples needing access to a culturally relevant version of the gospel. He came to the startling conclusion:
… statistically speaking, … from this perspective a very large proportion of world population is sealed off, as it were…. It meant that precisely those hermetically-sealed pockets of people around the world that had not yet had any kind of a penetration constituted by themselves the major remaining frontier of Christian mission [emphasis added].[6]
It is important to note that this “sealing off” from the gospel is social and cultural. This vision of the reality of the culturally-shaped forms of faith, and the resulting need for gospel access in large “hidden” swaths of humanity, made true cross-cultural pioneer evangelism – not simply the diffusion of existing versions of faith – the “highest priority.”
Core Understandings and Interrelated Concepts
The notion of “people groups” who need the gospel, however, cannot be understood in isolation. The people group concept is at the center of a constellation of interrelated concepts and understandings that serve to clarify these original insights. None of these concepts stand alone! They are useful for strategy development and best understood only in relationship to Winter’s clear-sighted focus on gospel access.
Why is this important for our current understandings of peoples? Because too often Winter’s critical insights have been lost in wrangling over notions of “peoples,” “groupness,” and “reached/unreached,” and the various lists that attempt to document them. These concepts and understandings are human constructs that serve the larger vision of gospel access.
What follows here is a brief look at the core understandings and concepts in frontier missiology and how they serve Winter’s central point.
ACCESS: Christian World Mission is About Gospel Access
Winter’s two original insights shifted the focus of missionary work from “individuals” who were not Christians to “peoples” without an indigenous Christian tradition among them. His preferred term to describe such groups was “hidden peoples,” demarcated by “the absence of a church leaving people unincorporable. . . .”[7] If a culturally relevant church tradition was present allowing people to be incorporated into those churches, then near-neighbor, ordinary evangelism would do the job. For Winter, gospel access was more than just hearing, but the opportunity to become part of – incorporate into, a living fellowship. The kind of ecclesial embodiment he had in mind not only provided stability and durability but developed culturally appropriate forms that makes people feel they “fit.” In the absence of such a church movement, these peoples would not hear the gospel unless cross-cultural workers brought it to them. What set Winter apart was that he not only saw this as a remaining frontier of mission, he conceived of pioneer work as the fundamental missionary task, with the goal of bringing about an initial breakthrough – a “missiological breakthrough” – on which all other cross-cultural work builds.
PEOPLES: Frontier Missions is About Penetrating People Groups
The reality of culturally-shaped forms of the faith means that one size does not fit all when it comes to evangelism. The history of Christian mission confirms that while some people will respond to a particular version of the faith, others will reject it. Frontier missiology takes us beyond a geographic view of mission, reaching individuals, and planting our preferred style of church. Rather, reminiscent of Paul in Romans 15, frontier missions is an “ambition” and call to relentlessly cross boundaries to penetrate segments of people who have no near-neighbor access to the gospel.
It is critical to understand that the concepts of “peopleness” and “groupness” in frontier missiology were developed from the perspective of evangelism, and not anthropology. A “people group” was defined “for evangelistic purposes” as the largest possible group within which the gospel can spread as a (viable, indigenous) church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.[8] Winter was looking for the largest pockets of cohesiveness that could make up a “people segment” and felt free flowing internal communication was the best indicator.[9] To express this idea, he coined the term “unimax people” as a “group unified in communication and the maximum size where gospel communication can proceed without encountering a barrier of acceptance or understanding.”[10]
BARRIERS: Encountering Barriers of Understanding or Acceptance Signals the Need to Launch New Pioneer Church Planting Efforts
The unimax concept meant that you could never fully know how many unreached groups there are because you need boots-on-the-ground to encounter the barriers which indicate the need for a new cross-cultural church planting effort. For Winter larger cuts of humanity like cultural blocs, affinity groups, sociopeoples and ethnolinguistic groups were just ways of getting an initial baseline of areas of greatest need for gospel access.[11]
CULTURE: Every Cultural Group Must have a Culturally Relevant Gospel Message and Church Movement
Segments of people require cross-cultural workers to hear the gospel when there is no culturally relevant indigenous church movement among them to bear near-neighbor witness. Winter’s E (evangelism) and P (people) scales highlight this need on two dimensions. The E-Scale compares the cultural distances the messenger needs to move in order to communicate the gospel with others, while the P-Scale compares the different cultural distances that potential converts need to move in order to join the nearest church. Scaled from zero to three, E-3 means the evangelists are working in a culture very different than their own, which is a highly complex task. P-3 means the only option for a new convert among this people would be a Christian movement that is vastly different culturally from them. Thus P-3 peoples lack a culturally relevant indigenous Christian tradition among them. The reality of peoples who still lack gospel access means that E-3 work among a P-3 people remains a critical need. This complex labor to “pick the lock,” as Winter was fond of saying, of a people segment in order to see a viable indigenous church movement started is not the work of amateurs on forays. It requires long-term, language- and culturally-competent workers.
CHURCH: Breakthrough Involves a Viable, Indigenous Evangelizing Church
Winter saw the initial goal as a “missiological breakthrough,” resulting in the creation of a viable indigenous church. For Winter a viable church is where:
…a true breakthrough has occurred when at least a minimal…yet sufficiently developed indigenous Christian tradition, is established that is considered capable of evangelizing its own people without E2 or E3 help. All it means is that the missiological breakthrough has been made.[12]
Missiological breakthrough represents a robust ecclesiology with the vision of a visible, living fellowship that endures across generations. Viability is not about size, but the presence of the spiritual vibrancy that ensures ongoing replication so that the church survives on its own; it is indigenous in that it is rooted in local forms and not seen as foreign; and it is a church planting movement because it continually produces intentional fellowships that can evangelize the rest of the people group.[13]
MOVEMENTS: Breakthrough Involves a Christ-ward People Movement
For Winter a viable church was just a minimal goal.[14] Like McGavran he envisioned a flow of whole families embracing Christ not just discrete individuals. Winter was exposed to movements in the thinking of McGavran but came to see them as having greater significance than just propagating the gospel. It is the flow of communication, what McGavran called “intimate social life within the boundaries of their own society,” that plays a role in creating and sustaining a sense of “groupness.” But it was the power of a culturally relevant gospel flowing through the channels of intimate social relations that allowed for movements. Thus movements, the embedded nature of our versions of faith, and the need for cultural relevance were closely connected for him.
Winter’s familiarity with mission history enabled him to recognize that movements often take place beyond, or in spite of, missionary efforts, church/mission constraints and structures, and current Eastern or Western conceptions of what it means to be Christian.[15] He observed near the end of his career that many do not realize that missiological breakthrough “almost always produces a church movement considerably different from what might be expected, just as Paul’s work was very difficult to understand for Jewish believers in Christ. … the rapid growth of our faith across the world is mostly of a movement of new indigenous forms of faith that are substantially different from that of the missionary” [emphasis added].[16] In his subsequent writings Winter started to unpack the implications of this, showing how movements to Christ are radical, messy and out of the box. Winter saw radical contextualization and the development of novel indigenized forms of “church,” as a normal, even necessary, corollary of the God-driven expansion of the Christian movement into new frontiers.[17]
FOCUSED: The Frontier Missions Task is a Narrow Focus that Guides all Expressions of Cross-cultural Ministry
For Winter, planting the church among peoples where it does not exist was at the heart of the world Christian movement. At the same time, he also saw value in the broad cross-cultural activity that grows out of pioneer labor. However, all mission efforts must be aligned with that larger vision and passed on to the new church movement.
A primary focus on developing indigenous church planting movements did not in his view “…imply that any such church anywhere should be considered totally independent of the world family of Christians, nor that it cannot both minister through and profit from continued cross-cultural contacts and expatriate help.”[18] For Winter mission differs from ordinary evangelism: the latter is “monocultural,” whereas mission “is an activity involving the special problems of cross-cultural communication and contextualization.”[19] Nevertheless, he argued that a laser-like frontier focus does not devalue regular mission work with the existing church. In his view, “the mission that continues in evangelism and allows and encourages an overseas church movement to become missionary is doing a very strategic thing” [emphasis added].[20]
For Winter, the four stages of mission activity – pioneer, paternal, partnership and participation – each involved important work.[21] He was adamant that the most strategic thing in reaching the unreached is not mass redeployment of existing missionaries – despite accusations to the contrary that continue to this day,[22] but their mobilization. He wanted to see:
… our existing missionaries (as well as those who join them), right where they are – wherever they are – catching a new vision. For what? A new perspective on whatever they are doing, making sure that prayed into and breathed into everything they do is a new vision for the so-called younger churches to get involved in their own mission sending” [emphasis added].[23]
Note Winter’s insistence that all stages of mission be imbued with vision and impart a vision for mission. The “continuing post-pioneer part of the picture is bright and shining and a blessed reality” when existing missionaries, anywhere and everywhere – and the churches they establish, teach and serve – “get involved in their own mission sending.”[24]
HOPE: Mission to the Unreached is Rooted in the Unchanging Purpose and Promise of God
Planting the church among peoples where there is no church is not some kind of missiological fad or innovation, but a firm hope. Winter’s optimism and original insights into the “all peoples” vision were rooted in the heart of the living God as revealed in the Scriptures, as well as the outworking of that purpose in human history.
In 1980 Winter and his wife did a series in Mission Frontiers on missions in the Bible. His personal study led to the “radically new idea (to us) that the Great Commission was right there in Genesis 12.”[25] This understanding led him “to rearrange my thought patterns to conform to the perspective of the Commissioning of Abraham in Genesis and to the Great Commission itself, which speaks of the discipling of peoples.”[26] He saw throughout Scripture, from Genesis 12:1–3 to Revelation 5:9; 7:9, God’s purpose to be glorified among all the diversity of humanity. He came to see the Bible not as a “bundle of divergent, unrelated stories as taught in Sunday School,” but as a single coherent drama of “the entrance of the Kingdom, the power and the glory of the living God in this enemy-occupied territory” where “we see the gradual but irresistible power of God reconquering and redeeming his fallen creation through the giving of His own Son.”[27] Winter’s faith, hope, and frontier missiology were grounded on God’s “gradual but irresistible power.”
Winter’s knowledge of mission history made him both optimistic and realistic. His sense of the mission significance of Acts 1:8 was that bearing witness to Jesus necessitates crossing cultural boundaries to make disciples among the ethne (Matthew 28:18–20). He recognized Divine purpose behind the history of the Christian movement. Nevertheless, God’s people have not always responded to His irrepressible call to mission. Our own sluggish generation could be passed by. But Winter saw how the Spirit repeatedly raised up people with vision to take the gospel to places and peoples where Christ was not yet known. The gospel breaks out and breaks through all barriers, even those within the Church. He himself was one of those used by God to call the Church to find and go to those without the saving message.
Conclusion
We are approaching fifty years since Winter’s plenary on cross-cultural evangelism at the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization rocked the missions world. He had the same facts in hand as many other people but saw them differently and was able to articulate them in a way that became a call to action for the Church.
Ralph Winter’s core insights and the concepts that arose from them generated a quantum shift in the way missions is envisioned. His clarification of the task around reaching peoples without access to the gospel had a prophetic impact on the Church. We now know the places and peoples that have little or no access to the gospel and we cannot be honest with ourselves that we are engaging God’s mission unless we grapple with how we will respond to this reality.
Winter’s original insights and core understandings and concepts remain relevant and powerful for missionary practice today. His original challenge to cross-cultural evangelism remains critical with 25% of the global population living in peoples who are 0.1% Christian or less. In a globalizing and urbanizing world of people on the move, where “missions” and “missionary” continue to be defined in terms of geography, travel, and activity, the call to cross-cultural outreach and culturally relevant forms of the faith are much needed lenses to ensure all peoples have gospel access.
Alan Johnson has served in Thailand with Assemblies of God World Missions (AGWM) since 1986. He is a member of AGWM’s missiology think-tank and is the secretary on the Missions Commission of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship (WAGF) that seeks to catalyze cross-cultural sending to unreached peoples from the WAGF national churches. He also serves as an adjunct professor for the Intercultural Studies Doctoral program of the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary.
Notes
[1] Ralph D. Winter, “Part I: Eleven Frontiers of Perspective,” International Journal of Frontier Missions 20, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 77.
[2] Winter, “Eleven Frontiers,” 78.
[3] Winter, “Eleven Frontiers,” 77–78.
[4] Winter, “Eleven Frontiers,” 78.
[5] Winter, “Eleven Frontiers,” 78.
[6] Winter, “Eleven Frontiers,” 78.
[7] Ralph D. Winter, Penetrating the Last Frontiers (Pasadena, California: William Carey Library, 1978), 40.
[8] Ralph D. Winter and Bruce A. Koch, “Finishing the Task: The Unreached People Challenge,” International Journal of Frontier Missions 19, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 19.
[9] Dave Datema, “Defining ‘Unreached’: A Short History, International Journal of Frontier Missiology 33 no. 2 (Summer 2016), 55–56.
[10] Ralph Winter, “Facing the Frontiers,” Mission Frontiers (Oct–Nov 1982), 13.
[11] Winter and Koch, “Finishing,” 17.
[12] Ralph Winter, “Frontier Mission Perspectives,” in Seeds of Promise: World Consultation on Frontier Missions, Edinburgh ’80, ed. Allan Starling (Pasadena, California: William Carey Library, 1981), 65–66.
[13] Ralph D. Winter and Bruce A. Koch. “Finishing the Task: The Unreached Peoples Challenge.” In Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, edited by Ralph D. Winter and Steven C. Hawthorne (Pasadena, California: William Carey Library, 2009), 538.
[14] Winter, “Frontier Mission Perspectives,” 65–66.
[15] I am grateful to Len Bartlotti, who worked with Winter at USCWM in the early 1980s, for this insight. Email communication, 15 June 2020.
[16] Ralph D. Winter, “I Was Bombed by an Explosive Idea,” in Frontiers in Mission: Discovering and Surmounting Barriers to the Missio Dei, 158–60. (Pasadena, California: William Carey International University Press, 2008), 160.
[17] Len Bartlotti, email communication, 15 June 2020.
[18] Winter, “Frontier Mission Perspectives,” 65–66.
[19] Ralph D. Winter, “From Mission to Evangelism to Mission,” in Frontiers in Mission: Discovering and Surmounting Barriers to the Missio Dei, 155–57. (Pasadena, California: William Carey International University Press, 2005), 155–156.
[20] Winter, “From Mission to Evangelism to Mission,” 156.
[21] Ralph D. Winter, “Four Men, Three Eras, Two Transitions: Modern Missions,” in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader, edited by Ralph D. Winter and Steven C. Hawthorne, 253-62 (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1999), 256.
[22] Cf. Darren Carlson & Elliot Clark, “The 3 Words That Changed Missions Strategy – and Why We Might Be Wrong.” The Gospel Coalition, September 11, 2019. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/misleading-words-missions-strategy-unreached-people-groups/. Accessed June 18, 2020.
[23] Ralph D. Winter, “Are 90% of Our Missionaries Serving in the Wrong Places?” Mission Frontiers Bulletin (November-December 1991): 35.
[24] Ralph D. Winter, “The Role of Western Missions in the 21st Century,” in Frontiers in Mission: Discovering and Surmounting Barriers to the Missio Dei, 114-17 (Pasadena, California: William Carey International University Press, 2005), 114.
[25] Winter, Ralph W. “Twelve Frontiers of Perspective.” In Frontiers in Mission: Discovering and Surmounting Barriers to the Missio Dei, 28–39, (Pasadena, California: William Carey International University Press, 2005), 29.
[26] Winter, “Facing the Final Frontiers.”
[27] Ralph D. Winter, “The Kingdom Strikes Back: Ten Epochs of Redemptive History,” in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader, edited by Ralph D. Winter and Steven C. Hawthorne, 195–213 (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1999), 196.
EMQ, Volume 56, Issue 4. Copyright © 2020 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
