P REFACE

TO

THE

1970 EDITION

t has been an exciting task to try to sum up the events standing immediately behind us, and in so doing to discover, rst, that the past twenty-ve years constitute a massive historical transition, as foreboding as it is unique for the past 1500 years; and then to measure the development of the worldwide Christian movement throughout this period to discover the astonishing fact that in an hour of gloom on every side, with church rolls and giving sagging, and crime and immorality ballooning, that Christianity, as a movement, had never been in better shape. But this is not merely an isolated attempt to discuss the past twenty-ve years. The many references throughout this essay to the late Kenneth Scott Latourette make it clear that this is a conscious attempt to continue on from the point, 1944, where his work A History of the Expansion of Christianity left off. But we did not merely start there and work on our own from that point on. These pages could not, if we tried, be totally independent of his many other writings. For this reason the rst two items in the appendix will introduce the reader to both the man and his other signicant books which were written before and during the period under discussioneven though in none

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of them did he attempt to sum up these twenty-ve years as a period. While we could not imitate his style, much less repeat all the materials in his other writings on this period, we do hope to have written with his same fact-based, optimistic perspective, and to have done so in one sense especially. One of the unusual elements in Latourettes perspective was his desire to go beyond mere church history and to describe what may be called the infrastructure of the Christian movementthat is, to describe Christianity as a movement which is more than an account of the rise and development of the various church structures. This matter of infrastructure is a crucial issue at this time of the wholesale rethinking of the Christian cause and its structure. The purpose of this study, then, is to offer hope and insight to students, laymen, pastors and even to missionaries. There is nothing honorable about a pessimism that is unwarranted. Such pessimism is a poison that can pollute the environment. It can pervert industries, nations, churches, and young peoples minds. A British visitor in the U.S. recently observed that Americans have been overtaken by a t of compulsive pessimism. Everything is assumed to be going wrong on both the foreign and domestic fronts. Newspapers daily add a new load of gloom. Christians, whose hopes encompass the world, are offered little cause for rejoicing. Yet on the home front there is eminent reason for hope. In eight years the number of people listed as living in poverty has dropped from 22% to 13%, and the number of black families earning more than $15,000 per year has gone from 20,000 to 400,000. Is this hopelessness? Or when Christians think of Asia as impenetrable, do they forget that in the city of Seoul, Korea alone, there are now 600 Christian churches? (But let us not anticipate the text). Latourette cannot be held accountable for any of the specic conclusions in this essay, although whatever valid insights it has are to be attributed either to him or to the many friends who have read this in manuscript and have made many specic suggestions. They too must remain unblamed, though not

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unnamed: David Barrett, Dale Brunner, Raymond Buker, Sr., Harry Burke, Clyde Cook, Harold Cook, Ralph Covell, Edward Dayton, Arthur Glasser, Harold Lindsell, John A. Mackay, Donald McGavran, Robert Munger, George Peters, Paul Rees, Alan Tippett, and Peter Wagner. My wifes collaboration has been on a scale that sets her apart from all others.

P REFACE

TO

THE

1980 EDITION

hree magnicent, heaven-sent surprises, each equally unbelievable to the uninformed greet us as we look across the 1969-1979 decade. This decade is the one immediately following the 25 year transition (1945-1969) which I dubbed Unbelievable when this book was written in 1969. The rst of these three surprises is actually no surprise to those who through the years have kept in close touch with the missionary movement, but for most people it seems unbelievable when they are told the details of the surprising expansion and power of the Christian movement. That is to say, in view of the agonizing and demoralizing quarter century retreat by the Western powers following World War II, it was hard in those days to believe that in former colonial areas Christianity could have even survived, much less grown stronger, yet it was true. And those facts are likely still unbelievable to people now who have to look back through the period of the sixties, when the young people were so encompassed by despair, cynicism, and futility that many ung themselves hopelessly and destructively against the cage of the very structure of society. Of course, it may well be that this lost generation of youth has found many useful ways to improve, not just tear down,
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THE TWENTY-FIVE UNBELIEVABLE YEARS

the past. Nevertheless, the enduring tragedy of the darkened 60s was the unfortunate fact that most serious Christian youth simply had no way to get at the facts this book contains, so as to be surprised. Here in this book many previous editions have marshalled the evidences for realistic optimism about what really countthe worldwide progress of the Gospel. Here can be seen the growing, not retreating, inuence of evangelical Christianity in virtually every land, and the convergence of church history and secular history as religious issues regain prominence in world affairs. But there is no trace in this book of the second surprise, which emerged distinctly beyond the period it covered. The second surprise is sketched briey in the Epilogue. There you will see a ten-page extract from a 1974 address at Lausanne, where the author was himself ve years later only barely discovering the surprisingly large mission task remaining to be dealt with. Obviously the rst surprise, essential to counteract the poisoning pessimism of the syndrome of the 60s, must necessarily be qualied by the second surprisethe vast but not inconceivable scope of the remaining task. The fact that this newly discovered task is truly vastmore vast than I had ever imaginedis not as important as the fact that it is conceivable. Thus, this second surprise is not really bad news. The surprising largeness of the remaining task merely constitutes the much required of those to whom much has been given. At rst, we could easily be dismayed by the content of this second surprise, and by the realization that four out of ve non-Christians in the world live within some 16,750 social units within which there is not yet a church. At the same time we can be awed and thrilled by the fact that more than any other faith, the Christian faith 1) has pervaded more cultures of mankind, 2) has made itself at home as an astringent, purifying power and challenges the morals and the ethics of a wider variety of societies, and 3) has done so to such an extent that it can truly be said there is really only one world religion today. Islam is the next largest religious tradition, and although it is now changing rapidly, it still is, by comparison, Mecca-bound, Arabic-bound,

Preface to the 1980 Edition

xvii

and obscurantist. Its holy book remains in ancient Arabic unintelligible to all but a handfull of even the mere 7% of Muslims who speak some variety of Arabic. For every Islamic book about Christianity there are 1,000 Christian books about Islam. But, in view of the mood of the 60s, the third surprise is the most unexpected of all. It would have been impossible in 1969 to predict the massive positive shift in the attitudes of college students. In actual fact, my analysis of the attendance at the series of IVCF-sponsored student missionary conventions at Urbana actually shows a declining percentage of students signing cards, despite a rising attendance. I did not know (but the evidence would have predicted) that the attendance of the next meeting in 1970 would be still greater and the card signing percentage still lower. That was true. However, contrary to this pattern, it was a total surprise in the 1973 and 1976 when not only did the attendance continue to increase but the card signing jumped from 8% in 1970, to 28% in 1973, and to 50% in 1976. There is every evidence that the 1979 meeting will sustain this new trend. IVCF is to be praised for a new kind of staff which specializes in Missions, and for planning Urbana Onward follow-through conferences. Of course Intervarsity, Campus Crusade and Navigators have all along been working on campuses around the world, but now IVCF is linking up more closely than ever with the traditional mission societies in its Urbana Onward conferences. And Campus Crusades own mission agency, Agape, is going out of its way to share its verve and management style with the older missions in a series of executive seminars. Everything seems to point to a new era of collaboration between campus organizations and mission agencies. This has no precedent since the days of the Student Volunteer Movement. However, the third surprise, on closer inspection, turns out to be vastly more than a change in the student world. There is a signicant rustling in the tree tops, a quickening of the pulse, a turning of the tide, all across the world. The Berlin Congress of 1966 was by contrast just an early voice crying in the wilderness. By 1974 the International Congress on World Evangelization at

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THE TWENTY-FIVE UNBELIEVABLE YEARS

Lausanne was enabled to go much further. Even the 1971 Green Lake, Wisconsin meeting of IFMA/EFMA mission executives the largest such meeting in the last 70 yearswas still too early to do more than explore the nature of the relationships of successful mission agencies to the new well established younger churches in the mission lands. Green Lake was in some ways the capstone of an era. However, by 1976, a whole profusion of initiatives began to herald the beginning of a distinctly new era in missions. All of a sudden it has become clear, to this writer, that in the past decade we have been confronted by an amazing mixture of apparently conicting trends that can best be understood as the overlapping of two considerably different phenomena: rst there are all the expected characteristics of the end of one era, and at the same time we see appearing the radically different traits of the beginning of a new era. In regard to this interpretation there is space here for only a few brief hints. Let us suppose that the rst era of modern missions began in the 1790s and ended about 1865. In that latter year two things happened: the oldest American board, the ABCFM, withdrew all missionaries from Hawaii, and the rst of a whole new era of missions, frontier, inland, interior, regions beyond, and unevangelized elds missions were born. Then the older missions, in a massive shifting of gears, picked up the scent of new, geographical frontiers and Era Two was in full swing. Era Two dragged a little longer than Era One because, for one reason, the new frontiers of Era Three are less easily seen. They are cultural, not geographical, and as such took longer to acknowledge, accept and to pin down. It is still not widely understood that the magnicent achievements of missions in India have planted churches in less than 100 of the 3,000 castes, sub-castes and tribes of that sub-continent. The peoples still beyond are Hidden Peoples. They are not within the evangelistic outreach of any present church or standard church-planting mission. But now, as we enter the last 20 years of this century, the year 1980 must surely be the full, ofcial Year of the Hidden Peoples. This is the threshold year for a 20-year countdown

Preface to the 1980 Edition

xix

to reach out to 16,750 Hidden Peoples, with a new watchword that must read A Church for Every People by the Year 2,000. There is Pattaya, Thailand, in the Lausanne tradition, building on a brilliant series of regional congresses, facing the leadership of the worldwide evangelical movement with the challenge of the Hidden People. There is the World Consultation on Frontier Missions at Edinburgh planned for 1980 (see page 67), a world-level meeting of the executives of mission agenciesnot just western societies, but now Asian and African mission societies to concentrate on the actual organizational coordination necessary to deploy new mission teams to the 16,750 Hidden Peoples. Reporting as we are toward the end of 1979, we already know of many major mission agencies that have restructured to give new emphasis to the frontiers. The EFMA fall executive retreat this year is given over wholly to Unreached Peoples. The Third Era is upon us. The tide has turned. I did not know in 1969 that the number of career workers would decline for the whole following decade. Now Era Three will reverse that trend, and well see many new faces from many nations that are not now sending nations. We may pray also for a growing world-wide network of locally supported centers, concentrating, along with the U.S. Center for World Mission, on the peoples still beyond. The story continues.

P REFACE

TO

THE

2005 EDITION

t is fascinating to know what happened in the past. It is especially interesting to know specically what people thought was happening to them and what they thought was going to happen in the near future. Really, we are not properly prepared to foretell our future today in 2005 if we cannot get a feel for how easily people in the past misunderstood what was happening to them and what their future actually held for them. But that is not the main reason this book is not out of date. It also accentuates the amazing contrast between the deadly pessimism of those days and the radically different view the author of this little book held at that time. The main reason why this book is not out of date is because few people even today realize that those precise twentyve Unbelievable Years clearly constitute the most historic event of the twentieth century. Wait, you say, how about the biggest war of history, the Second World War? No, that war was merely a triggering mechanism for what was going to happen soon in any case. Or, you say, how about the emergence early in the century of communism as a world force, or better, communisms incredxxi

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THE TWENTY-FIVE UNBELIEVABLE YEARS

ible step backwards in the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union? Granted that the latter would well be a second-most important event. How different the relatively pacic revolution in virtually all of the non-western countrieswhich took place in the twenty-ve years this book describes! Was it really a far more profound event penetrating to even the tiniest rural settlements on this planet? That IS the thesis of this book. This thesis is all the more relevant precisely because, as is implied above, few people even today realize that those precise twenty-ve Unbelievable Years may be understood as the best key to unlock for us the future of this planet in 2005. Even the two earlier Prefaces are still highly important since they accurately reect the understanding of at least the author of what was understood at those two earlier dates, the second Preface itself being written almost a quarter of a century ago. Finally, the purpose of any of these prefaces has not been, and is not now, an attempt to extend the story of those twentyve years. They are over. They were a single event. We can at best try to understand the subsequent impact of those days, which had never happened before and can never happen again. What happened? Very simply and signicantly, it was the sudden release of virtually the entire non-Western world from subordination to the Western powers. No global phenomenon of that extent had ever occurred, nor could ever happen again. What specically can we gain by reexamining these previous prefaces? Neither in 1970 nor even in 1980 did anyone foresee the sudden and almost total reversal of the juggernaut of global Communism in the Gorbachev updating in 1991 which, with a mighty, tumultuous wrench, terminated the Soviet Union and its global inuence. No one in 1970 foresaw the amazing emergence of the Unreached Peoples vision which by 1980 was just appearing to sweep the mission world, but by now is well established everywhere. Still more amazing, in 1970 and even 1980, few foresaw what was already growing unnoticed in the West: the phenomenon of Third World Mission Agencies, that is, mission

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agencies born and bred within the former mission lands where practically all Western mission agencies had been content to plant only churches, not churches and mission agencies. Yet, in 1980 the Friends Missionary Prayer Band in India (one of the largest mission agencies in the world today) had already been burgeoning for twenty years. Note that though I had participated for several years in highlighting the early evidences of this Third World Mission movement, I did not even mention it in the 1980 Preface. No one even then could have predicted the massive developments in this movement in the next 25 years. Suddenly, by looking back this way, we must ask ourselves Are we not today just as likely to be blind to major events in our future? Future studies are not widely pursued in church and missions today, although hosts of books talk somewhat carelessly about what is about to happen. David Hesselgrave notably produced a whole book about ten megatrends in missions. I personally have listed twelve frontiers of mission that have emerged in his thinking over the past twenty ve years. However, right here is not the place to consider the future in detail, but simply to give a few examples of how looking back at the Twenty-ve Unbelievable Years can heighten our awareness of certain aspects of the future. The most powerful lesson of the 25 year period under discussion, while not obvious to everyone, is its revelation of the degree and vigor of the overseas movement of the Gospel in the absence of missionaries. That alone should enable us to see more clearly the fact that by 2005 in the former mission lands there were more believers than in the former mission-sending homelands. Note, for example, the fact that this overseas movement consists in large part of movements inspired by the Christian faith which do not easily classify as Christian. In India, for example, reports vary from 14 to 24 million Hindus who, while still culturally Hindu, are devout Bible believers, daily reading the Bible and worshipping the God of the Bible. They do not choose to call themselves Christians. Barrett and Johnson, in the World Christian Encyclopedia indicate 52 million followers of Christ in Africa in the AIC (African Initiated Churches,

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THE TWENTY-FIVE UNBELIEVABLE YEARS

once African Independent Churches). Everyone has heard of the many many millions of followers of Christ in China, most of whom quite possibly would not easily t the standard category of Christian. Has Christianity gone out of control? Or, to put it otherwise, has the Gospel of Christ gotten out of control of the cultural tradition called Christianity? Does the World Christian Encyclopedia need then to be renamed the World Encyclopedia of Biblical Faith? That question and many others may more easily be answered if this little book enables a more realistic interpretation of a sudden, massive change of ownership and management in the entire non-Western world.
Ralph D. Winter Pasadena, California January 1, 2005