Last night, on Wednesday, May 20, 2009, Ralph D. Winter passed away at age 84 after a long bout with multiple myeloma. Perhaps the foremost missiologist of our time, he was the founder (in 1976) of: the U.S. Center for World Mission (part of William Carey International University) in Pasadena, California; the International Society for Frontier Missiology (which also publishes the International Journal of Frontier Missions); and the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, a class (and textbook) that educates the laity about what God is doing in the world today. He had recently just finished editing the fourth edition of this textbook.
He earned his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Cornell University, was a Presbyterian missionary to a Mayan tribal group in Guatemala from 1956-66, and was a professor at Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission, all prior to the above achievements.
Winter was on par with missiological giants like Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch. He was an innovative strategist, thinking “outside the box” and in 2005 was ranked as one of the “25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America” by Time Magazine.
My one and only encounter with Ralph Winter was in September 2004 in Pattaya, Thailand, for the Lausanne Forum for World Evangelization. He was sitting on the bus right in front of me as we journeyed from the Bangkok airport to the conference center in Pattaya. I was still a young graduate student and did not feel worthy to be theologizing in the same missions conference with such a giant of our discipline! But Dr. Winter was gracious enough to chat with me and a few other younger theologians not only on that bus ride but during that week-long conference, offering wisdom and encouragement.
I remember my former missions professor saying that for every ten ideas that Ralph Winter had, seven of them would be absolutely crazy and wouldn’t ever work—but three of them would be pure genius and would redefine how we think about and do missions! One of his greatest contributions was to rethink what we mean by “nations” by identifying and categorizing unrecognized “unreached people groups”—we take this for granted today, but he was the innovator who first came up with this idea and brought awareness that the missionary task was still so much greater than we ever anticipated!
Dr. Winter leaves behind a wife, Barb, four daughters, and fourteen grandchildren. With him passes a significant era of missiological studies.
