While acknowledging the passing of a number of celebrities this past week, was reminded of the way CS Lewis quietly slipped away just before his 65th birthday on Nov 22, 1963, the same day that JF Kennedy was assassinated.
Something similar happened this past week when an important spokesman for unreached people quietly passed from our world into the next.
Ralph Winter is known for popularizing the terms “10-40 window” and “unreached people group” and did much in his time to help the Church of our day recognize the number of people who continue to have no knowledge of Christ.
In a BreakPoint article, Chuck Colson writes that, “Winter burst onto the international stage in 1974 at the Lausanne Conference on World Evangelization. There among Christian leaders like Billy Graham, Bill Bright, and John Stott, Winter blew the lid off some of the most pernicious misconceptions of the day. Because the Gospel had gone to every continent and nearly every country, many people had begun to assume that the work of missions was over…Winter knew that if every Christian in the world shared the Gospel with his neighbors, only half the world would hear it.”
Colson, adds, “Ralph Winter’s strategic emphasis on reaching not simply every nation with the Gospel, but every people group, dramatically altered the strategies and budget allocations of missionary organizations around the world. In fact, Billy Graham wrote, “Ralph Winter has . . . accelerated world evangelization.”
In 2005, Time magazine named Winter as one of the top 25 most influential evangelicals.
One obit notes, “History will record Ralph Winter as one of the half-dozen men who did most to affect world evangelism in the twentieth century. At 84 Winter continued to work full-time, finding personal satisfaction in addressing a wide range of new challenges and perplexing questions. John Piper noted on his Weblog, “He did not waste his life, not even the last hours of it. He was busy dictating into the last days. He taught me long ago that the concept of ‘retirement’ is not in the Bible.” Greg Parsons of the USCWM observed, “He died with his boots on.”‘
Am guessing that the quiet passing of Ralph Winter on earth may have been soon replaced by the celebration of found “unreached people” welcoming him in heaven.
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