Winter on Over-Optimism in Frontier Mission

July 3, 2015
John Lambert
Missiology
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CC image courtesy of Alexandre Normand available here.

In the booklet The Challenge of Unreached Peoples, Ralph D. Winter outlines some of the potential dangers and opportunities faced when we consider how to reach the Unreached Peoples of the world.

In this post, part of a series, we look at the first challenge and opportunity, what Winter calls "Over-Optimism."

Over-Optimism

We cannot be too optimistic about the power of God, but often we expect things to be too simple, too easy. We want desperately to believe that "there must be an easier way." This is sometimes true. But not always.

For example, very sincere British Methodist young people in the early 1800's went to West Africa year after year. They died of disease very shortly. They kept going. In 35 years more than 35 missionaries left England for Ghana but none of them lived more than 24 months.

It might have been better for them to ask why than to continue.

Some missionaries have assumed that their home church has a new, more powerful form of Christianity than earlier missionaries possessed and have assumed that their task is merely to go to the field and find Christians who are not enjoying the special benefits of their new, "super" brand of Christianity. This is nice of them, but it is not exactly missions to unreached peoples.

Actually thousands of churches, especially in the cities, have been founded by "new" groups, drawing mainly on Christians already there. Notably, many of these new "super" forms of Christianity fail, however, when they try a pioneer field. All they know how to do is "renew" former Christians.

This may be a worthy work. We all need to be renewed. But the challenge of the Unreached peoples is much more than revamping existing Christian communities.

Finally, some believers have over-optimistically believed that the Holy Spirit would teach them the language in a miraculous way. We do not see this happening in the Bible.

Or, they believe that some new approach will work more rapidly.

Maybe so.

We should be open to improvements, but we must not demand that God release us from hard work. If we believe God can do wonders then assume He will make things easy for us, we may be doomed to great disappointment.