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About the Author:
Ralph D. Winter is a senior mission thinker who has been actively involved from the beginning of the massive mission transition from simply thinking in terms of countries or individuals to thinking in terms of peoples. He is founder of the
U.S. Center for World Mission,
and is currently chancellor of
William Carey
International University. |
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From: To:
Sent: Saturday, June 08, 2002 1:05 PM
Subject: Re: Early history of the idea of “Hidden Peoples”
Dear Jason,
I am very delighted indeed to discover another person wrestling with the facts of mission history and teaching the same.
You said, "I teach about Carey and Taylor and Townsend (and McGavran) and I also teach about Winter! I focus on Townsend's language emphasis, with the key year being 1932, and on your 'hidden peoples' emphasis, with the key year being 1974."
On the one hand, your "fourth era" is not as resoundingly different from the third as the third, and second were different from each of their preceding eras, since buried in the insights of both McGavran and Townsend were, respectively, the reality of the vertical and horizontal "segmentation" of humanity, in, respectively, vertically deployed castes and horizontally deployed tribes and other societies.
On the other hand, McGavran's perspective did in fact tend to head missions away from unpenetrated groups toward the fostering of "people movements to Christ" within societies already possessing some sort of breakthrough which he called "bridges of God" (meaning a seeker from one group worshipping already on the fringe of another group) and because of this perspective he precisely and logically did not embrace the unreached peoples movement for several years.
He was unvaryingly friendly to me as a person but was, early on, quite dubious about expending limited mission forces on totally unapproached groups when there were groups already penetrated that badly needed "discipling to the fringes." And, Townsend's perspective focused on the practical task of translating the Bible (and a good deal of this kind of challenge even today Wycliffe is investing on groups that are already "reached") but he certainly did highlight the plight of groups isolated by language differences (needing not so much a church movement as the Word in their language).
A comment may also be due concerning the phrase "hidden peoples." I was on the ground floor when the early thinking was developed for bypassed peoples, and felt that "unreached" was a bad choice due to its previous and current use with the phrase "unreached people" (meaning individuals unconverted) which is actually a distinctly different concept from the need of a group within which there is not yet a viable indigenous evangelizing church movement. Furthermore, and even more importantly, I felt that the World Vision office assisting with the Lausanne Congress unwisely defined what an unreached people was (in the early stages, "less than 20% Christian").
Thus, at the U.S. Center for World Mission, rather than dispute that definition, which presently was affirmed by the Lausanne Strategy Working Group (somewhat dominated by Ed Dayton of World Vision), we simply chose a different phrase (Hidden Peoples) and defined that kind of an entity as a group lacking "a viable indigenous evangelizing church movement." The "official" Lausanne-backed definition ran immediately into opposition all over the world on the grounds that the ambiguousness of the term "Christian" (nominal or born again) seesawed the definition between two absurdities. If "nominal," then many groups would make it as "reached" which really weren't, or if "born again" then no group in the world would make it as
"reached."
But, for a brief period of years the Strategy Working Group (SWG) felt pressured to talk of "born again Christians" and thus had successively to revise the percentage down to ten, five, two, etc. Meanwhile we employed "hidden peoples" in all our literature. Early in 1982, Ed Dayton approached me with the thought that if we would accept their term "unreached peoples" and give up "hidden" they would accept our "presence-or-absence-of-the-church" definition and would convene a suitably representative meeting of mission executives to endorse that change. They convened the meeting (March 1982 in Chicago, sponsored by EFMA and the Lausanne Committee) and the change was made and we no longer referred to "hidden" peoples (somewhat reluctantly due to the inherent disadvantages of "unreached" as above).
Equally important in my eyes at the same meeting the group endorsed a definition I suggested (actually worked out on the plane going to the meeting) for the kind of people group we were trying the reach: "the largest group within which the gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance," and these words were duly added to the already existing but somewhat indefinite Lausanne SWG wording "a significantly large group of individuals. sharing..."
Soon after the 1982 meeting, and without the backing of the group that attended in 1982, the SWG dropped out the phrase "as a church planting movement" apparently because World Vision did not deal with the planting of churches. However, in all our literature, Perspectives Reader, etc. we have held to the original March wording. This is not because groups that would not qualify for "church planting" (lacking male, female, old, and young) are not of exceedingly great evangelistic strategic importance, but rather the fact that unless an integral population is encom- passed you really don't have the conditions of church planting.
Well, I hope these comments may be of some help. I am enthusiastic about anyone teaching mission history. I am eager to be of any help to you I can.
Warmly,
Ralph D. Winter |
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