This is part of a series of articles about the life and ideas of Dr. Ralph D. Winter, whose memorial service will be held this Sunday, June 28. Winter, the co-founder the U.S. Center for World Mission, passed away on May 20, 2009, after a long battle with cancer. He was 84.
PASADENA Calif. – Dr. Ralph D. Winter, his wife Roberta, and his secretary Prudence had only about $100 in cash when they placed a bid for the $15 million campus of Pasadena College in California in 1976.
The educational institution of the Church of the Nazarene, which had recently been renamed to Point Loma College, was trying to sell the campus after having purchased a new and larger campus in San Diego three years earlier, in 1973.
But already on the campus was a cult known as Church Universal and Triumphant (Summit Lighthouse), whose members revere a mixture of “ascended masters” including Buddha, Krishna, and Jesus. Although they claim to be Christians, the members do not believe Jesus died on the cross for their sins. Moreover, they believe a person may experience multiple rebirths through reincarnation until their soul reaches a state of perfection and becomes one with the Universal Soul or “God.”
Summit was renting space on the main campus when Winter offered to buy it. When the cult’s leaders heard that someone wanted to buy the campus, they also offered to purchase it with the millions they had on hand.
Winter, on the other hand, had no salary and no staff after quitting his tenured teaching position at Fuller Theological Seminary in order to focus full-time on establishing the U.S. Center for World Mission (USCWM). Moreover, he had four unmarried daughters with two of them still needing to go through college back home.
Despite all the reasons he had not to create the think-tank for world missions, Winter had the “conviction” that God expected him to do something to help reach the 2.5 billion hidden (or unreached) people at the time, Roberta recalled in I Will Do A New Thing, the book she had written prior to her death in 2001.
“I must admit,” Dr. Winter told other professors, according to Roberta, “that this project may very well fail. But I am overwhelmingly convinced that God wants someone to try it. No one else seems willing, so I guess I’ll have to.”
Inspiration behind USCWM
Two years earlier, in 1974, Winter had delivered a groundbreaking presentation at the Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization, where he introduced the term “unreached people groups” and used statistics to show that over two billion people still could not hear the Gospel in their own language and cultural setting.
At the time, many Christians had begun to assume that the work of missions was over as the Gospel had gone to every continent and nearly every country. But, as Winter showed in a paper circulated prior to the Lausanne conference, even if every Christian in the world shared the Gospel with their neighbors, only half the world would hear it.
“The awesome problem,” he wrote “is ... that most non-Christians in the world today are not culturally near neighbors of any Christians.”
To reach them, Winter added, will take “a special kind of ‘cross-cultural’ evangelism.”
After returning to America from the conference, Winter tried to get Fuller Seminary and other mission leaders involved in setting up a world missions think-tank, but people felt the plan was too big and risky. No one except his wife and secretary joined him in the challenge.
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