Roberta Winter Institute

The Purpose of the Roberta Winter Institute
Ralph D. Winter

Many friendly people implied to me and to my wife, before she died, that Jesus could heal any disease and that it only takes faith to make it happen.

Okay. Why did Jesus heal? One missionary reminded me that healing people does not get them into heaven. But what CAN attract people to heaven is telling people about a God who, like His beloved Son, was and still is deeply concerned about physical deformities and disease and suffering, and is not simply in the business—perish the thought—of inflicting people with pain to deepen their spiritual lives. If that were simply God’s initiative, why did His Son go around relieving people of pain? Jesus did not necessarily demonstrate how we should heal, but THAT we should heal.

We have not yet spend sufficient time to know exactly what to do with certain tiny global terrorists, like malaria. Missions spend at least $500 million per year raising children up only to see four die of malaria every sixty seconds. Why not raise an extra $5 or $10 million for an all-out war against the source of this pathogen which terrorizes 300 million new people (more than the total U.S. population) each year, and is now lapping at our doorstep in the United States. Would raising that money not glorify God? Is our God properly described as unaware of these tiny terrorists?

The primary focus of this institute will not be laboratory science but public and mission awareness of the need for a new theological sensitivity, destroying the works of the devil.

It is truly astonishing how much greater the impact of our missionary evangelism will be if the true spectrum of concern of our loving God is made clear and is backed up by serious attention not only to treating illness but to eradicating the root causes, the works of the devil.

If it is true that “the works of God are to declare His glory” then every missionary needs to carry both a telescope and a microscope!For example, missionaries in West Africa for a hundred years have merely “lived with” an evil microbe called Guinea Worm. This pathogen starts out as a tiny bundle in your drinking water, too small to see with the naked eye. Within your body it grows destructively into a 32 inch snake, eventually breaking the skin and winding out slowly over a period of weeks. You can’t pull it out or it will

break off and kill you. You must gradually “spool” it out, winding it on a stick. Did God design this?Do you know anyone who has ever identified this pathogen as a work of the devil to be destroyed in the Name of Christ?

I know of no one who has. Our passivity in missions in this crucial area might seem to declare that our God doesn't know or care or is unable to do anything about such things! All we normally offer to our sick and suffering followers around the world is 1) sympathy, 2) a suspension of criticism of a good God for the evil in this world, 3) admonitions to be resigned to the pain and suffering while awaiting God’s making some good out of the evil, and 4) a way out of this world into eternity.

However, in the case of Guinea Worm, 3.5 million people were afflicted twenty years ago. Yet the number now is almost down to zero. Why? Because one Christian layman visiting in West Africa (not a missionary, not a pastor, not a theologian) decided to return to the U.S. and muster efforts to eradicate this particular pathogen, “to wipe it from the face of the earth.” That was Jimmy Carter (just a Sunday School teacher) harnessing his Carter Institute.

This new challenge for missions could lead to a drastic reduction in our annual outlay to care for diseased people (it being the chief factor in poverty). It may also radically add power and beauty to the very concept of the God we preach, and thus become a new and vital means of glorifying God among the nations.