January 01, 1990 by Ralph D. Winter

Dear Friends, The upshot of this issue is that the USCWM has entered into a new period that is now decisively beyond a 13-year tunnel of trial and testing (for our good). Three events epitomized this new era, all occuring on one weekend:

1. Nothing in the short history of this institution could have been as significant as the “Burning of the Mortgage” ceremony a few days ago, on Friday evening, January 19, 1990. See story beginning on page 5. See also the blow by blow agonies and ecstasies of the campaign in my wife’s new chapter on page 10. The second part will be next month.
2. Then, Jan 19-21, like “a cloud the size of a man’s hand,” was the gathering of over 50 keen people in Pasadena, coming from all across the country at their own expense, to pray, plan and dream together.

The purpose of this Regional Interface Meeting was to see how, with these people’s help, we can both expand and extend the ministry of the Pasadena Center into maybe 200 local offices. These faithful, willing workers hope to multiply their own mobilizing efforts as they elicit the help of more than 10,000 other wonderful people who surfaced during our final campaign for the property. See story on page 26.

Our mission executives section reflects the potential aid this expanding grassroots network of local offices can give, functioning as “generic” mission representatives for the more than 650 mission agencies in this country—that is, for any and all who wish our help in highlighting the frontier mission work they are doing.

3. Then, beginning on Sunday afternoon the 21st, we welcomed 14 people coming for a week of New Staff Orientation. See story and their pictures beginning on page 23. Nothing could be more symbolic of what now is desperately needed. We are like “seven men running a battleship” until more can join us. In the last six months we have received some truly remarkable new people. See some of them in the story. Keep praying!

The tumble of events in Eastern Europe… …the “breaking open” of the major global spheres to the Gospel… …the spiritual secret East or West…what can happen by the year 2000

For the Communist Party to vote itself out of power in the motherland of Marxism has got to be one of the great wonders of the world.

Not in my lifetime has any single event seemed to be as significant on the level of world history!

And yet, even more significant is the strikingly spiritual tone that is seemingly ever-present in the tumble of events that come to us from Eastern Europe.

(It is a sad commentary on the anti-religious, and specifically anti-Christian press in the Western world, that the spiritual element is mainly filtered out of the public information we get.)

A few days ago, massive crowds were shouting — chanting —in the square in Romania. Our press did not translate their chant—“There IS a God, there IS a God!”

A few days ago, religious freedom was inserted into the legal code of the USSR.

A few days ago, a top U.S. official gave a pair of cowboy boots to his counterpart in the USSR, and received in return a plaque showing a picture of Jesus teaching a multitude.

A few days earlier an outstanding scientist, invited by a small group of Christian employees at the famous space-age center, Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was denied permission to speak!

Yet the same man has been invited to speak to whole groups of scientists in a series of meetings in the Soviet Union!

It is not so much that the iron curtain has been torn down by outsiders. It has been dissolved due to a mighty internal groundswell that, in some important senses, can be classified as a spiritual revolution.

It is fair to say that within just a few weeks the Soviet Union—mainly from within—has been broken open to the Gospel. Not only so, but we can hope that in the calloused, burned-over West we can receive new infusions of spiritual reality honed and hammered into authenticity by the relentless oppression of 70 years.

But God has not just broken open the world’s largest country (USSR) —running through 11 time zones. God is also shaking China, which is shuddering under the strain of the irresistible, renewing power “of the meek inheriting the earth.”

There, rooted within the world’s largest population, the irretrievable PRESENCE of God’s SPIRIT is moving to harness and humanize the excesses of an already mighty movement born in the West—the communist movement itself. It constitutes a kind of Christian heresy which pursues with essentially demonic cruelty all kinds of ideals which themselves were derived from Christianity (human social welfare, etc.).

The Islamic world may also be broken open if only Jesus can be known more fully. The Koran is no match for the Bible. Thousands of earnest Muslims right now are reading the Bible instead of the Koran, and are praying in the name of Jesus right in their own mosques. It is not beyond imagination that Jesus soon will be better known among Muslims, and age-old hatreds of the warring, violent Crusaders will retreat in their minds as the person of Jesus becomes more prominent than ever.

In the last issue we published a bombshell article about a new approach to Islam. We are currently seeking permission to publish another which is even more detailed. Don’t suppose for one second that there are not many, many Muslims who are close to the Kingdom.

And the Hindus. No country of the world is “wired for sight and sound” like India, the world’s largest producer of motion pictures. And films on Jesus—at least three—are impacting India with unprecedented force. Literally millions of Hindus may soon find in the person of Jesus what they are earnestly seeking, and still remain culturally Hindu.

One thing we need to guard ourselves against. We must not suppose the marvelous social change in Eastern Europe is what is crucial. What if an exact political replica of Washington D.C. were created in Moscow? Would not political and personal corruption be just as possible as in the days of Beria and the torture skills of Soviet secret police?

Let us not, as simple-minded sheep, go along with the secular media which praise the structural changes in Europe instead of noting the evident seeking of the living God. In our country we have enough examples of long-standing winking at sin in high places to recognize that a corrupt capitalism is not all that different from a corrupt socialism.

In my reading in Deuteronomy 13 this morning, it is seduction, enticement that is the danger (see v.5,6). The West has been seduced by a terrifying degree of freedom, which has produced the world’s highest divorce rate, crime rate, pornography rate, drug rate, prison population—all in the name of freedom.

Someone said, “Discipline without democracy is workable, but democracy without discipline is unthinkable.” But even that person may not have understood that discipline of the inner spirit is not the product of a certain political system. When will we realize that without the kind and quality of people who speak and testify at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast, no structural change will suffice? That is precisely the dilemma of Washington D.C. today—there may not be enough of such people in our own dear country. Can we do without the 800 praying pastors who gathered two days ago for three hours of prayer in Los Angeles? That is where the battle lies—in every country of the world. How about you, me?