Seventy years ago, in the western Sudan of Africa, Ernest Weinhardt was given a vision. He was a young Lutheran missionary from the midwest. The year was 1929.
Weinhardt envisioned a missionary connection between those who had received the Gospel and those who had not. It was a simple and compelling vision: "That God will take out of the Lutheran church a large number of men and women as missionaries to bring his Gospel to the great unoccupied areas of the world." He described with passion "the great unreached territories" where the Good News was not yet known. "Wherever there are people who have not heard the Gospel," Weinhardt wrote, "to them we must go, no matter how few in number they may be."
Weinhardt’s vision was to become the fiery spark that gave birth to the World Mission Prayer League-and it guides us still today, seventy years later. Our Handbook pledges us to the same passionate center: to proclaim the Good News about Jesus "especially among peoples where Christ is unknown or little known" (Ï11).We organize our work administratively with a view toward "constant advance within the bounds of God’s will for worldwide missions" (Ï41).We understand ourselves called "to preach the Word of God to all people everywhere" (Ï105e).
This is the "value" that underlies our valuation of prayer, community, simplicity, and the rest. We exist for the frontier. We pray, gather, organize, administrate, send and go-all in order to press back the frontier between faith and unbelief. "…that [we] might by all means save some" (1 Corinthians 9:22).
What frontiers beckon us today? Weindhardt pictured the "heartlands" of Asia, Africa and Latin America-vast continental "interiors." But the picture is no longer adequate. Today we must picture the world’s vast cities. We must must envision the world’s scattered unreached people groups. And we must be prepared to find them where they are. It is true: we will find them in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But we will find them in Chicago, too, and in Toronto and in Los Angeles. I recently heard that there are more Somalis-almost entirely Muslim-settled in Minneapolis than anywhere else in the United States.
Acuatlly, Weinhardt himself pled for missionary outreach "wherever there are people who have not heard the Gospel." Are we ready to find them, today?
"The Way I See It", September 1999
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