Interview: Dr. Ralph D. Winter on Frontier Missions in India

The focus of this year’s gathering of the International Society for Frontier Missiology (ISFM) was India – a country where Christianity is the third largest religion despite the fact that Christians make up only 2.3 percent of the entire population, according to official government statistics.

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At the annual gathering, held this year in Dallas, attendants heard from a number of speakers including Hindu followers of Christ, former missionaries, an evangelism and church growth consultant, and an expert on global Christianity.

Also speaking was Dr. Ralph D. Winter, one of the founders of the ISFM and the U.S. Center for World Mission, who has been noted by Time Magazine as one of America’s top 25 evangelicals.

At the conclusion of ISFM’s Sept. 15-17 meeting, Winter spoke with The Christian Post to share his views on frontier missions in a land containing one of the world’s largest unreached populations.

The following are excerpts from the interview with the world renowned missiologist:

CP: Why is India the focus of this year’s ISFM conference? Is it because there is not enough mission attention on India or perhaps because the mission approach to India has been wrong?

Winter: Well, I wasn’t involved in the decision so I’m not sure what was the exact reason, but India is one of the most astonishing problems of contextualization. Islam is so near to Christianity that it doesn’t seem like a big leap, but Hinduism is so radically different from Christianity that it seems to be an impossible leap. Therefore it is more of a critical area.

CP: The specific focus of this year’s ISFM conference is sharing Jesus Christ with caste Hindus [The conference did not focus only on “high” caste Hindus per se, it simply did not focus on Dalits or tribals.]. Why has this population not been reached in the past? It is well known that there is a large Christian population among the Dalits (formerly known as untouchables). Are higher-caste Hindus more difficult or is it just that they’ve been neglected?

Winter: Strictly speaking, there are more than 600 million caste Hindus and, as a bloc of peoples, they have been neglected. However, the number of caste Hindus in India who are devout followers of Jesus Christ but who don’t call themselves “Christians” is estimated to be upwards of 14 million. That’s more than the number of devout followers of Christ who do call themselves “Christians” – perhaps two to three times as many! Because even in the United States, people who call themselves “Christians” – like Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists – are not all necessarily devout followers of Jesus.

Indian mission has successfully penetrated the Dalit sphere and that is a wonderful thing. You would have thought they would start with the top people – and they did try to – but it was their servants that they won to Christ by their examples. Somehow God takes the weak things to confound the wise; that is His way of doing things.

He took a young man from Nazareth of all places – in northern Palestine – when you would think He would have chosen someone from Jerusalem. He took a man named William Carey from Northern England, from a little town, to change the whole world.

So God has chosen the Dalits to prove to the rest of the caste system the transforming power of Christ, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the system is going to become Dalit to become Christian.

So the question is ‘Can we give this treasure over into a different earthen vessel?’ and that has not been done.