Roberta Winter

Life

She is reported to have been born in 1930. Her maiden name was Helm. In 1951 she married the missiologist Ralph Winter (1924–2009), and the couple had four daughters.

The couple went out as American Presbyterian missionaries. After studying Spanish in Costa Rica from 1956 to 1957, they moved to Guatemala in late 1957. There they lived among the indigenous Mam people in a highland region at an elevation of about 2,400 meters (roughly 7,900 feet) and worked for about ten years. Some sources, however, give the period of their Guatemalan ministry as 1956–1966.

After battling cancer for several years, she died in 2001 of multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, about six weeks before the couple's fiftieth wedding anniversary.

Ministry and Accomplishments

• Mission in Guatemala: Alongside her husband, she ministered among the Mam people and sustained the family's life on the mission field.
• Preparation for the Lausanne Congress: At the International Congress on World Evangelization, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, Ralph Winter gave a presentation on people groups cut off from the gospel by cultural and linguistic barriers. Roberta helped prepare this presentation. The congress later gave rise to the Lausanne Movement. After the congress, the couple concluded that a base was needed to address these barriers in a concerted way.
• Founding of the U.S. Center for World Mission: In 1976 they co-founded the U.S. Center for World Mission, renting a few offices on the campus of Pasadena Nazarene College in Pasadena, California. The center's purpose was to mobilize organizations and individuals on behalf of unreached people groups—that is, ethnic groups among whom the gospel had not yet been adequately proclaimed. The center later acquired a campus of about 17 acres (about 6.9 hectares), which it paid off in full in 1988. The center operated until 2019.
• Writing: She recorded the story of the center's founding in I Will Do a New Thing, first published in 1987 and reissued in 2003.

Influence on the Korean Church

There is no confirmed record of Roberta Winter having a direct relationship with the Korean church. Nevertheless, the concept of "unreached people groups," which the center she co-founded helped popularize, has become a commonly used term in Korean mission circles. The Korean church is reported to have drawn on this concept in shaping its overseas mission strategies.

Assessment

In the history of the mission movement, she is less well known than her husband, Ralph Winter. However, Frontier Ventures, the organization that succeeded the center, credits her vision and perseverance with helping to shape the movement's early years. In 2001, the year of her death, the organization established the Roberta Winter Institute in her honor. No notable criticism of her personally is known.