November 01, 2002 by Ralph D. Winter

It is heartening to see a greater willingness for missions to work together than at any time prior to or since the era of the Student Volunteer Movement, when the International Missionary Council (IMC, founded in 1921) provided a truly extensive service to the mission movement.

The IMC was so successful, in fact, that the .ood of 22 resulting National Christian Councils around the world (made up of mission agency personnel) gradually added to their membership many repre­sentatives of newly-planted church movements. These kinds of addi­tions continued to the point where virtually all 22 mission partnerships were replaced by National Councils of Churches. Most of these newly reconstituted bodies then excluded the representation or voting rights of mission agencies!

Right now, however, the “Table 71” group is made up of mainly mission agency representatives, not church leaders. That is signi.cant, and all to the good. The three major agencies originally represented were Wycliffe Bible Translators, the Southern Baptist International Mis­sion Board, and Campus Crusade; in recent years Campus Crusade has become more and more of a standard mission agency, organizing church fellowships and dealing with addi­tional languages and peoples beyond the reach of the present mission movement.

For me it was a pleasure a few days ago to see Wycliffe’s new and expansive, recently dedicated Orlando headquarters (USA, not In­ternational), deliberately built right next door to the even larger Campus Crusade international headquarters.

It would be somewhat of an overstatement, however, to portray this new “Table 71” collaboration as a major missiological breakthrough, no matter how important it is organi­zationally. This group has warmed over the “tried and true” de.nition of an unreached people group without adding any novelties beyond reword­ing.

That’s OK. But the tried and true definitions in this area were probably the only de.nitions in the history of missions ever hammered out by as prestigious a group meeting for that sole purpose. (It was in March of 1982 in Chicago, a Lausanne- and EFMA-sponsored two-day meeting of 35 widely representative mission executives.)

The “Table 71” people were not all involved back in 1982, although Wycliffe and the Southern Baptists were there. It is true that the succinct technical definitions produced in 1982 have been extensively ignored and misinterpreted, but they really have not been improved.

In one area of implementa­tion (see the last two lines on page 11) a strange and unwise concept is now being introduced by Table 71: “A significant corollary they have insisted on is that the process should not be entered upon in any Unreached People Group unless there is an indigenous partner from the beginning.”

It is actually impossible to find an indigenous partner if you are entering a truly unreached people group, since such groups by de.nition have no in­digenous church with which to work.

If, however, a partner external to the unreached group is what is meant, then that external partner cannot be called indigenous to the unreached people group. Furthermore, it is tragic but true that almost all remaining unreached people groups are enemies of their near-neighbors. To expect to partner with a near-neighbor group, even if Christian, would be like partnering with North Ireland Catho­lics in trying to evangelize nominal Protestants there. Or, it would be like trying to partner with Iraqi Christians (there are 500,000 in Iraq) in outreach to the Kurds of Northern Iraq, whom they despise and hate. Or, it would be like partnering with Pal­estinian Christians in an evangelistic outreach to Jewish Israelis.

Such things are not necessarily the best strategy, since unreached peoples are almost always surrounded by a sea of hostile peoples. Partnering with such groups is rarely wise (mis­sionaries have tried this hopelessly many, many times), while partner­ing with indigenous believers within the unreached people itself is totally impossible in the beginning. (It may be delightfully possible once you get started and the group is now no longer “unreached.”)

Empowering new believers in a new group, in fact, hardly needs to be “insisted upon.” Amusingly, when Ziegenbalg and Plutschau disem­barked in India in 1706 (one hun­dred years before Carey), they found letters from home that arrived there ahead of them, asking anxiously if they were busy raising up national leaders. Nothing new about that!

But who can deplore this new burst of enthusiasm for completing at least the task of initial breakthrough? That continues to be the more crucial need, since once that breakthrough has been made, the growth of faith and the proliferation of churches is much simpler to achieve.

Here is one way to look at it: Anyone can open a door and walk through it, but only a locksmith can deal with a locked door. Missions is “locksmithing” new groups. Once the lock is open (a very special skill), ex­panding the number of churches is by comparison a relatively simple task.
Two cautions

First, multiplication of churches is not likely to happen no matter what strategy is employed, in certain major places like, say, Japan, where (as astute observers indicate) the all-important initial missiological breakthrough to the Japanese culture has not yet been achieved. That is, there is not yet a truly Japanese church movement.

Second caution: Churches?

The New Testament portrays to us prominently the “ecclesia,” a family or household-level fellow­ship, the kind of thing which makes the Mormon movement so strong. The New Testament would clearly seem to value weekly family worship and accountability more highly than “churches” planted from gathered fragments of families, as we do in most of America.

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Lastly, something personal

I now have terminal cancer. It has been six years since my first wife contracted a slow-but-sure type of terminal cancer called myeloma which invades the bones and slowly destroys the bone marrow which is essential to fight off diseases. There is no written-up story of her fight for her life, although you may have gained hints from time to time in these pages.

This is a fairly rare form of cancer. It does not seem to be contagious. But a few weeks ago the doctors in my HMO concluded that now I, too, have this same incurable disease. Many cancers can be cured. Multiple Myeloma is slow and can be slowed a bit in some ways, sometimes, but has never been cured. The prognosis is “two to four years.” My wife lived five. It could be less or more than that.

For me, for whom not a whole lot of time is left anyway (I’m 77), know­ing fairly exactly what time I have left is sort of convenient. It is also nice, if you have to die prematurely, to get a disease which you already know so much about—you don’t have to rush to the library to read up on it or listen frantically to bits of information from doctors.

Okay, dear reader, your days are also numbered. “Teach us to number our days so we may apply our hearts unto wisdom,” is one Biblical counsel.

One thing this means is that my involvement in the Roberta Winter Institute cannot flag by slipping my mind, especially now with a marvelous second wife at my side! For the .rst few months I will face very few disease-related burdens, if things go as they usually do. I just signed in again to the local support group for myeloma patients, this time not as a care-giver but as a patient. Very, very gradually, new drugs are being discovered to fight cancers.