Frontier Missions — EXTENDING THE SCOPE

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.

It 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 1974 (see footnote 1), 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 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.

Mission scholars are cognisant of the urgency of the task but at the same time, they are cautious of an uncritical adoption (see footnote 2) of nomenclatures such as unreached people groups or unengaged unreached people groups (see footnote 3). In a provocative paper, missionary and scholar Rebecca Lewis, Winter’s daughter wrote:

I believe we will continue to have little success in these remaining frontier groups if we do not return to the fundamental biblical principles of frontier missions that have been demonstrated again and again in people groups throughout history – and as were first put forth by the Apostle Paul. Much more discussion and research is needed on this subject (see footnote 4).

I think her call for the church today to reclaim a biblical principle of (frontier) missions is very much needed. While mission scholars and organisations whose research and observations inform us of various trends and best practices are indeed important, we must be cautious of our uncritical preoccupation with “keeping up with the Jones.” We must indeed extend our scope - but rather than an exercise in missiological navel gazing, we should perhaps start with hearing more clearly God’s call. For God will indeed call some to minister along the frontiers. Yet, this is also the same God who calls all of us to join Him in reaching out to “the last, the least, and the lost” who are located along the peripheries, along the margins of societies, be it local or international, whether here in Singapore or among the unreached peoples beyond our shores.

This is also the same God who calls all of us to join Him in reaching out to “the last, the least, and the lost

Footnotes

1 https://lausanne.org/content/the-highest-priority-cross-cultural-evangelism

2 https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/may/redefining-unreached-people-groups-frontier-unengaged-missi. html

3 Kate Shellnutt, “Why Missions Experts Are Redefining ‘Unreached People Groups’”, in Christianity Today, 22 Apr 2019, https://globalfrontiermissions.org/gfm-101-missions-course/the-unreached-peoples-and-their-role-in-thegreat-commission/

4 Rebecca Lewis, “Clarifying the Remaining Frontier Mission Task”, in International Journal of Frontier Missiology 35:4, Winter 2018, 167, https://www.ijfm.org/PDFs_IJFM/35_4_PDFs/IJFM_35_4-Lewis.pdf