Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18-20)

In our pluralistic society, it is one thing to have faith in the God of the Bible and to commit your life to being a disciple of Jesus Christ.  But it is another thing entirely to be a missionary and to spend your life trying to live out Jesus’ words in Matthew 28:18-20, to go and make people of other nations, cultures, and faiths disciples of Jesus Christ.  Seeking to “convert” people, while true to the last words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, will win you few friends in the world, where thinking your religion is superior to another is in many minds one small step away from being a terrorist. 

 But if Jesus was right, and if His life, death, and resurrection is the only cure for our broken world, then we have a lot to learn from those fearless men and women who devote their lives to reaching those who have never heard of Jesus, even if they may be anonymous or even hated in the eyes of the world.  One such man was Ralph Winter, a great man of God who died this past week at the age of 84.  I would encourage you to learn more about this man and his contributions to the modern missions movement and to the kingdom of God (you can learn a lot about him at www.ralphwinter.org).  Let me briefly share two of the ways Ralph Winter impacted the kingdom of God.

 The first was Winter’s realization that most missions organizations were wrongly assuming that simply by establishing a church in a country, that they had brought the gospel to that nation.  What Winter realized as he listened to missionary after missionary come through his classes at Fuller Seminary was that most countries of the world were comprised of so many different people groups with their own languages and different ethnicities, that each instead of treating them all as the same, missionaries would need to see each people group individually.  Most countries were not a “melting pot” like America where people groups would assimilate into the larger nation.  As a result, Winter began to promote the idea of “unreached people groups,” in order to communicate to churches and mission organizations that reaching a nation for Christ was more than just setting up a church, but building a church in each different people group. 

The second contribution was that once Winter realized the need to promote missions to every tribe, tongue, and nation, he took a giant step of faith at age 51 towards creating a missionary training organization that would work towards fulfilling Jesus’ Great Commission.  Beginning with no backers, no mailing list, and only $100, but armed with a great, Biblical vision, he began what would eventually become the US Center for World Missions, of which he served as General Director from 1976-1990, and William Carey International University.  Of this decision, Winter writes:  “After we made the decision to leave Fuller we did not at any point in the next thirteen years, during which we paid off the campus, feel that God had promised us success. We only felt that the value of the goal was sufficient justification to go all out, sink or swim. I coined the phrase, ‘You do not evaluate a risk by the probability of success but by the worthiness of the goal.’ We were willing to fail because the goal we sensed was so urgent and strategic.”  From that humble beginning, the Center eventually became self-sufficient, enrolling over 6,000 new students a year and drawing upon over 900 professors and teachers from all over the country, and sending missionaries all over the world.

I encourage you once again to learn about the life of Ralph Winter, and to learn about other men and women who devoted their lives to missions, keeping in mind Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15:58:  Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

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