The Austin Stone Community Church

Last night at approximately 9:05PM a great man died on this earth.

Dr. Ralph Winter now worships God in the very company of so many formerly unreached peoples that he, by God’s hand, helped to reach with the Gospel.

When “giants” in the Kingdom of God die, we have an incredible opportunity to obey Hebrews 13:7:

Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. 

What can we learn when we “consider the outcome of [Dr. Winter’s] way of life”?

• Live a wartime lifestyle. Dr. Winter once wrote in his classic article “Commitment to a Wartime Lifestyle: “I believe that God cannot expect less from us in our Christian duty to save other nations than we in wartime require of ourselves to save our own nation. This means that we must be willing to adopt a wartime lifestyle if we are to play fair with the clear intent of Scripture that the people who sit in darkness shall see a great light. Otherwise, as Isaiah said, ‘I faint when I hear what God is planning’ (Isaiah 21:3).”

• Use every skill that you have for the advancement of the Kingdom of God. Dr. Winter had a blazing extraordinary skill: his mind. Oh how many paradigm shifting articles Dr. Winter wrote! Untold are the full influence of his work on sodalities and modalities, the history of the Kingdom, the existence and the priority of unreached peoples, the real war between God and Satan, and more! He thought years ahead of his audiences and saw the world through several lenses (structural linguistics, anthropology, missiology, statistics, sociology, history, and so on). Hence, like all classic apostolic agents in the Kingdom, he often left audiences either mad or invigorated with passion and new insight.

• Never forsake the priority of reaching unreached peoples with the Gospel. Dr. Winter helped establish the priority of reaching unreached peoples and he has unyieldingly waved that banner since 1974.

• Don’t underestimate the value of world Christian mobilization. Dr. Winter was a great missionary in his early years in Guatemala. Yet he spent the vast majority of his life mobilizing others to world mission. Dr. Winter once stood before a crowd of college students and challenged them, “Suppose I had a thousand college seniors in front of me who asked me where they ought to go to make a maximum contribution to Christ’s global cause. What would I tell them? I would tell them to stay home and mobilize. All of them.”

• Be patient for the fruit that comes only by decades of faithfulness. It is SO easy for young people (including myself) to overestimate what we can accomplish in a few months, or in a few years. So often we overvalue and overestimate momentum in ministry. Everybody should read the story of the founding of the US Center for World Mission (Once More Around Jericho; The Story of the U.S. Center for World Mission, by Roberta Winter). It is a story of incredible faith, radical audacity, and the faithfulness of God to come through in the right time. They did not realized at that time how much God would use the Center over the following decades. Take a look at what Dr. Winter accomplished, by God’s grace, over a series of 56 years of vocational ministry. Amazing!! He leaves a legacy of a new university, of a center for world mission, of a new school of world mission at Fuller, of a worldwide influential course on mission, of a new journal, of a new publishing agency, of a new way of mass discipleship (Theological Education by Extension), of millions of people mobilized to the unreached because of his writing, speaking, and leadership, and of a new way of thinking in world mission! But this did not happen all at once; nor did it happen due to a few years of momentum. Rather, Dr. Winter’s legacy was built over 5 decades of faithful and relentless pursuit of mission.

• Never give up and never retire. I saw Dr. Winter speak in both a large and small group setting last year. He was about 83 at the time. He was still full of new thoughts, fresh passion, and relentless devotion to the mission of God. Dr. Winter never gave up. He never retired. The effect of his energy grew exponentially as he grew older.

Links for more information on Dr. Winter: 

• Ralph Winter’s Autobiographical Web Page: An autobiographical presentation of epoch-making discoveries in mission. 
• Time Magazine named him one of the top 25 most influential evangelicals in America.  
• The US Center for World Mission