January 01, 1993 by Ralph D. Winter

A small bombshell exploded at a 1972 meeting of about 30 mission executives and professors. A Southern Baptist missions professor proposed that eight years later (in 1980) there would be an unusual world-level meeting. The meeting would be intentionally similar to the most famous mission meeting in all history--the 1910 World Missionary Conference. What kind of meeting was that?

In 1908 the by-now-grown-up leaders of the Student Volunteer Movement invited every Protestant missionary agency in the world to send delegates to Edinburgh, Scotland for an historic "Summit." That summit, then, would allow for coordinating and planning to address and complete the "Unfinished Task" by stressing the remaining frontier fields.

The leaders involved in the planning (headed up by John R. Mott) were so determined to emphasize those remaining fields where Christ had not yet been named that they even ruled out the whole of North America and Latin America. They not only overlooked 25,000,000 Native Americans, they considered the New World an extension of the old, speaking English and Spanish and thus possessing the Bible for centuries--not your desperate frontier mission field!

In 1974, two years after the first "bombshell" proposal, and with the same professor leading the discussion, a "Call" for the 1980 meeting was hammered out. A few days later the epochal 1974 "Lausanne" meeting took place in Switzerland, and for that meeting Arthur Glasser, Dean of the School of World Mission at Fuller Seminary, procured thousands of little red buttons people could wear on their coats, announcing the 1980 meeting.

These were passed out to many hundreds of the delegates. For the Lausanne meeting I gave a paper sizing up the unfinished task. Shortly afterward I wrote another entitled, "1980 and that Certain Elite," which described in great detail all of the background and rationale for such a conference. (Send a self-addressed envelope plus 50¢ to me by name and I will send a copy of that paper.) This paper caught the attention of Max Warren, then secretary of the Church Mission Society in England, and he wrote heartily approving the idea of such a meeting.

When the meeting was finally held--the "World Consultation on Frontier Missions," in Edinburgh in 1980--not only Max Warren's people attended but more mission agencies gathered at one time than at any other world level meeting of agencies either before or since.

One third of all the agencies represented were from the Third World. The rallying cry was "A Church for Every People by the Year 2000." Thomas Wang, founder of the AD2000 Movement was one of the plenary speakers.

Today, Thomas Wang and his right hand man, Luis Bush, have added a phrase to the 1980 slogan: "A Church for Every People and the Gospel for Every Person by the Year 2000." Naturally, a church for every people is the ideal basis on which you can claim you have taken the Gospel to every person, and thus enabled every person to become part of the body of Christ.

In 1981 the English Evangelical Mission Association took up the subject. In 1982 the German Evangelical Mission Alliance took it up. In 1976 the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association (now the Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies) took it up. In March of 1982 the Lausanne Committee sponsored a meeting to define terminology. In the fall of that same year the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association of North America took it up, coming out with the declaration printed in our last issue (p.33).

In 1989 in Singapore, Thomas Wang convened the Global Consultation on World Evangelization by the Year 2000 and Beyond, which birthed the present AD2000 Movement.

Last September the IFMA voted to poll all its member agencies to see how many unreached peoples are within their current work or proposed strategies. That poll has now gone out to the 100 member agencies.

Also in September, at the International Society for Frontier Missiology, Luis Bush of the AD2000 Movement gave the phenomenal paper (printed in the last issue pp. 54-61) showing why it is feasible still to look on the year 2000 with optimism. At the same meeting Dr. David Hesselgrave, Executive Director of the Evangelical Missiological Society, gave another phenominal paper on a new missiological approach to the interpretation of the Bible. That paper is in the January 1993 issue of the International Journal of Frontier Missions.

Now we look forward to Consultation II of the Adopt-A-People movement, drawing together a marvelously capable group of key agencies. Participants will include the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the world's largest and most technically trained group of translators, Global Mapping International, World Vision/MARC-- well you can see the details on pages 44 and 45.