Ralph Winter (1924-2009)

Summary 

Ralph D. Winter ranks among the most influential missiologists of the 20th century. He was a pioneering missiologist, inquisitive theologian, and a creative educator educator who committed his life to pursue significant contributions to the advance of the Gospel and of the understanding of the relationships between Christianity, Christians, and the cultures around them. He argued that Christianity should not be imposed on cultures, but rather should be contextualized and lived out in a way that is appropriate to each culture. Winter looked at problems like a tinkering engineer. To him, the first and most important step is to identify the right problem to solve.

Winter’s strategic insights and endeavors have helped transform the evangelical mission movement since the 1970s. Mission leaders, missiologists, and Christian leaders around the world have recognized Winter’s many significant contributions to the evangelical approach to the Great Commission. He was included as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America in TIME Magazine in 2005.[3]

Three main areas of focus were: Theological Education by Extension (TEE), the roles and relationships of Sodalities (mission structures) and Modalities (church structures) and the Unreached People Groups of the world (cultures without a viable church movement).

His formation included formal and non-formal aspects:

• BS from Caltech – 1944 (done in 2.6 years because of WW2)
• Served in the U.S. Navy from 1944-August 1945 – Pilot training
• Attended Westmont College – 1945-46
• Attended Princeton Theological Seminary – 1946-47
• Attended Fuller Theological Seminary – 1947-49
• Attended the Summer Institute of Linguistics – Summer 1948
• Attended Prairie Bible Institute – Fall 1949
• MA in TESOL – Columbia University Teachers College (N.Y.) – 1951
• PhD Linguistics from Cornell University – 1953
• Attended the Summer Institute of Linguistics (2^nd time, with Roberta) – 1952
• BD from Princeton Theological Seminary – 1956

 

Family 

Born in 1924 in Los Angeles California, to Hugo and Hazel Winter, Ralph was a middle child between two brothers. Hugo was a self-trained engineer, known throughout the Los Angeles planning department as “Mr. Freeway” because he gained approval from more than 70 cities for the specific routes of the Los Angeles-area freeway system.

The “boys” all excelled. The oldest, Paul, became a respected structural engineer. Ralph followed and became a civil engineer. David was convinced by Ralph to get into anthropology and served as the President of Westmont College for more than 25 years.

Ralph married Roberta Helm in December of 1951. In 1956, after more education and now with a growing family, they attended a six-week missionary training course and headed to the mission field with the Presbyterian Foreign Mission Board of the United Presbyterian Church.

 

Field 

Ralph and Roberta attended Spanish-language school in Costa Rica from 1956 to 1957. While they learned the language well enough, Ralph apparently spent more time trying to redesign the way the instructors taught Spanish than in study.[4] In late 1957, they moved to Guatemala, where they served ten years as missionaries with the Mam people group at an elevation of about 8,000 feet. The Presbyterians had worked in the country starting in 1924 and had established churches with local leadership. The Winters sought to further equip those functional pastors. They set up education programs so they could get officially recognized degrees to validate their ability. They also set up a Christian school for the children of the many workers – including Bible translators ­­– in the region.

Ralph sought to address a wide range of issues, both practical and spiritual. He saw the need of pastors to make a living and so set up a number of small businesses, including the largest furniture-making business in the area, a weaving business with the best color thread, silk-screening service, basic dentistry service to pull rotten teeth, photography business, a local ambulance service (which included driver training!) and others. Most of these were “portable” so the pastors could continue to utilize them should they change churches.

 

TEE 

Ralph and his closest friend James Emery sought to empower local pastors so they could fully lead the entire work in the region, but the closest residential seminary program was too far away to be practical. They helped to launch Theological Education by Extension (TEE) in the area, and then promoted it around much of Latin America and other regions. TEE was the best way to “get training to the pastors, rather than the pastors to the training” – like most seminaries did.

As TEE spread and opened opportunities to share the ideas around the world, Winter was feeling increasingly constrained by work in one location. In his 1965 personal report, he reflected on how he saw himself and his gifting, setting the stage for a potential shift in focus to broader ministry,

My life revolves around planning and scheming. My forte is less that of following through doggedly in routine details. Yet one of my greatest natural bents is struggling together with individuals in their personal problems. These two poles of theory and practice keep me intensely busy. Books flow endlessly into this house and ideas pour ceaselessly out of my heart and life.

Laying aside from discussion all the ideas fantastic and unfulfillable, there still remain many insights that are safe and solid opportunities for arduous and gratifying work. If I suffer, then, it is because I cannot, even now at 41 to 42, depend on assistants … to help me fulfill what knowledge and experience lead me legitimately to expect to be able to do.[5]

Those “books” continued to “flow endlessly” throughout Winter’s life. The Ralph D. Winter Research Center’s holdings include more than 8,500 books in Winter’s library.

Winter wrote a short article titled “Gimmickitis”, which referred to the tendency of missionaries to get into various good activities that might keep them from strategic things! He sent it to Donald McGavran, who published it in the Church Growth Bulletin.[6] McGavran, with Alan Tippett, had just moved the Institute of Church Growth from Oregon to start the School of World Mission (SWM) and Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Winter was asked to be a visiting professor and to lecture during the weekly gathering of all students [7]. As things progressed, he planned to be at the SWM half-time, spending half-time in Guatemala. Naturally, he could see that this was a fruitful platform to share insights with key mission leaders. At the same time, he soon realized that he needed to return from Guatemala for additional reasons, and in 1966 he joined the SWM faculty fulltime.

Over the next 10 years Winter taught nearly 1,000 experienced missionaries and national leaders from around the world. With others, he helped start a number of organizations, including William Carey Library (now William Carey Publishing), a publisher and distributor of mission-related literature.

Ralph continued to promote TEE: he edited one of the first WCL books published, which was a 600-page book, Theological Education by Extension.[8]

 

Structures for the Task 

While at the SWM, Winter explored in-depth the distinctions between church structures and mission structures. To him, there were clear differences in what a “mission” does as the gospel goes out to new places and what a local church does to nurture its flock.

In 1969, a few years into his teaching at the SWM, Winter first published an article about how we might structure mission for effectiveness. He proposed the idea of “vertical and horizontal” structures in that first article.[9] Then in 1970, he changed that to the idea – using a textile analogy – in The Warp and the Woof: Organizing for Mission, a small book written with Pierce Beaver.[10] Ralph continued to expand the idea, as did some of the SWM students in their theses. This was reflected in a 1972 presentation given to the two largest North American mission associations. It was a call for mission workers to plant mission agencies.[11]

One of Winter’s best-known presentations, The Two Structures of God’s Redemptive Mission,[12] was given to the growing missions world at the All-Asia Mission Consultation in Seoul Korea in 1973. He and convener David Cho encouraged the audience to start hundreds of agencies in Asia to spread the gospel, Asia being the largest area of need.[13]

 

Problem of Gospel Access 

Winter’s teaching at the SWM varied, but many students were drawn to his approach to church history. Like everything else, he taught that from a creative and helpful view which he preferred to call “the history of the expansion of Christianity” – following the approach of Yale scholar Kenneth Scott Latourette’s approach to history. During the in-depth discussions with faculty and experienced students, Winter began to notice there were gaps in the spread of the gospel. He used to say that the Fuller SWM “did not have students come from fields they had not been sent out to!” He began to write about this topic. Much of the focus of the SWM became how to get existing churches to grow. Winter prodded anyone he could to consider the need to go where there are no churches!

Both Winter and McGavran were asked to give plenary addresses to the Lausanne Congress in 1974. Ralph’s writing folder on this event demonstrates the work he and Roberta did on the presentation. Later evaluations from that Congress noted that this presentation became foundational in advancing the concept of unreached peoples, which was defined as people groups who have little or no access to the gospel of Jesus. The whole experience of preparing for and participating in the meetings in Switzerland greatly impacted Ralph and Roberta. In 1976, it led them to decide that Ralph should leave his tenured position at Fuller, and together they established an organization focused on the unreached peoples of the world. They called it the U.S. Center for World Mission (now Frontier Ventures). The purpose of the ministry was to “raise the alarm” that there were many cultures around the world with no viable churches or any known believers. At first, the phrase used was “Hidden Peoples” because these peoples were “out of sight” from the existing Church. The USCWM (now Frontier Ventures) would seek to strategize, mobilize, train, and serve in order to encourage, strengthen, and “prod” mission agencies, churches and students toward deeper engagement of the Unreached.

A few months later, in 1977, the Winters also founded William Carey University.[14]

Its goal was not to compete with seminaries or Christian colleges, but to provide distance studies with a broader focus. WCIU was one of the ways Winter applied the idea of TEE, but in this case, rather than pastors, it was for those who might go cross culturally to work in other cultures.

Another need Winter noticed was that college students and others were catching a vision for serving globally, but didn’t really know how to get there. Growing out of InterVarsity’s Urbana student conventions and in the wake of a big increase in students pledging to go overseas, Winter worked with other professors and students to create a follow-up, college-credit course that would soon be called Perspectives on the World Christian Movement.[15] In the next few years the team developed a Reader with more than 170 articles and side bars from 150 mission scholars as well as a crucial study guide which directs and focuses the learning. The course was soon conducted by trained coordinators in churches and other locations, allowing it to multiply first in the USA and then in other countries, now with 500,000 alumni globally.[16]

 

With His Lord 

In Ralph’s final months, he wrote extensive theological reflections on disease. This was motivated in part, by Roberta’s death in 2001, after a several year battle with cancer. About a year later, Ralph began his fight with the same cancer and later other issues which lead to his death in 2009.

In assessing his life, he often said that he was not gifted more than others, but that anyone who is willing to give up their small ambitions and open themselves to whatever the Lord wants can be an instrument of God’s work in the world.