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HARVESTFORCE 2021 • 2
Frontier Missions — I
Rev Dr Andrew Peh MMS ExCo Member and a CAC diaconal minister at Charis Methodist Church. He lectures in the area of missions at Trinity Theological College.
t was almost fifty years ago that Ralph Winter used a simple “pie chart” to bring a new awareness of the thousands of people groups who were overlooked by mission agencies and churches around the world. In his address at the first Lausanne Congress on World Evangelisation in 19741, Winter introduced a new awareness to evangelical leaders, as he warmed of “people-blindness” and “hidden peoples.” Employing graphs and charts, Winter demonstrated that some geographic countries had simultaneously both very evangelised as well as completely unevangelised groups of people. His challenge was for those gathered to begin missionary work among the estimated 17,000 people groups had no churches of their own, nor any missionary presence among them. In the following years, Winter’s notion of unreached people groups was increasingly clarified and redefined. The various Lausanne Working Committees in the late 1970s and 1980s collaborated and consulted in the quest to define the people-group concept and then continued to define “reached” and “unreached” peoples. This hence gave rise to the term “unreached people groups” that describes the spectrum of peoples from various geographical regions who have yet to hear the Good News of the Jesus Christ. Subsequently, Winter, convinced of the urgency of the task, resigned from Fuller Theological Seminary and dedicated the rest of his life to researching, publishing, clarifying, and mobilising for what he called the “frontier mission” task: going where no missionary has gone before.
