Ralph D. Winter

In the last year of his life, Winter helped organize the Tokyo 2010 Global Mission Consultation, which was held in May 2010. Tokyo 2010 brought together around 1,000 mission leaders to discuss the unfinished task of reaching the world's remaining least-reached peoples.

Winter died on May 20, 2009, at the age of 84 from multiple myeloma and lymphoma.

He was presented the 2008 Lifetime of Service Award at the North American Mission Leaders Conference of Missio Nexus (formerly The Mission Exchange).

In 2005, Winter was named by Time magazine as one of the 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America. Dr. Ray Tallman, shortly after Winter's death, described him as "perhaps the most influential person in missions of the last 50 years and has influenced missions globally more than anyone I can think of."

In 2005, Winter was named by Time magazine as one of the 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America.

At Princeton Seminary, Winter met future Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC) founder Bill Bright. The two Christian leaders maintained a close friendship throughout their lives until Bright's death in 2003.

Winter's first wife, Roberta, died of multiple myeloma in 2001, just six weeks shy of their 50th anniversary. He remarried on July 6, 2002, to Barbara Scotchmer, a long-time family friend. In total, Winter had four daughters (Elizabeth, Rebecca, Linda and Patricia) with Roberta. All four of his daughters are involved in mission activities. At the time of his death, Winter had 14 grandchildren, two great-granddaughters and one great-grandson. He had two brothers, David K. Winter, president of Westmont College for many years, and Paul Winter, structural engineer. His parents were Hazel Clare (Patterson) Winter and Hugo H. Winter, also known as "Mr. Freeway" for his role in the early development of the freeway system in Los Angeles County.

Calling himself a "Christian social engineer," Winter helped found a number of other organizations and groups, in addition to William Carey Library, including William Carey International University (1977), the International Society for Frontier Missiology (1986), and the Institute for the Study of the Origins of Disease (1999).

His 1974 presentation at the Congress for World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland – an event organized by American evangelist Billy Graham – was a watershed moment for global mission.

It was also in these years that he founded the William Carey Library, (now, William Carey Publishing) which publishes and distributes mission materials; co-founded the American Society of Missiology; launched what is now the Perspectives Study Program (first called the Summer Institute of International Studies); and presented the idea of the "hidden peoples," which later became synonymous with the phrase "unreached peoples," at the 1974 Lausanne Congress in Switzerland.

After the 1974 Lausanne Congress, Winter and his wife Roberta felt there needed to be a place to tackle cultural and linguistic barriers hindering the sharing of the Gospel with all peoples. In 1976, Winter left his secure, tenured position at Fuller Theological Seminary to focus on calling attention to the unreached peoples. In November 1976, the Winters founded the mission think tank USCWM (now Frontier Ventures) with no staff but their secretary and only $100 in cash.

Donald McGavran at Fuller Theological Seminary's School of World Mission was so impressed by the TEE education and other writings by Ralph, that he asked Winter to join the faculty with him and Alan Tippett, a noted anthropologist. Winter was a professor at Fuller from 1966 to 1976. During this time, Winter taught more than a thousand missionaries who he said helped him learn about the global mission fields.

In 1951, Winter married his first wife, Roberta Helm, with whom he would later establish the USCWM in Pasadena. The couple, along with their four young daughters, served as Presbyterian missionaries to Guatemala from 1956 to 1966.

Winter grew up in the Los Angeles area. His father, Hugo, was a self-trained engineer who ended up leading a division of the L.A. planning department with 1,200 engineers under his leadership and was instrumental in the development of the greater L.A. Freeway system. When World War II broke out, Ralph was too young to enlist, so he studied for just two and a half years at Caltech and earned his B.S. degree, in order to join the U.S. Navy's pilot training program. Before he finished that training, the war ended and he was discharged, but his service in the Navy helped pay for his further education. He then went on to earn his MA at Columbia University, and PhD at Cornell University, and then a B.Div. at Princeton Theological Seminary. With childhood friend Dan Fuller (son of revival preacher Charles E. Fuller), he also studied at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., the first semester the school was open in 1947. He would later teach there. Winter was one of the Donald McGavran, the founding Dean of the Mission School, early faculty hires. It was during Ralph’s era at Fuller Theological Seminary that he created the E-Scale evangelism which was one of his greatest contributions to global missions as this change the missionary outlook from focusing on countries to people - groups within nation-states.

Ralph Dana Winter (December 8, 1924 – May 20, 2009) was an American missiologist and Presbyterian missionary who helped pioneer Theological Education by Extension, raised the debate about the role of the church and mission structures and became well known as the advocate for pioneer outreach among unreached people groups. He was the founder of the U.S. Center for World Mission (USCWM, now Frontier Ventures), William Carey International University, and the International Society for Frontier Missiology.