Simon Cox Blog: Ralph Winter’s Missions Campus Secures a Buyer

Wednesday, 18 April 2018

Ralph Winter’s Missions Campus Secures a Buyer

Pasadena property of former US Center for World Mission will become an international boarding school, pending a final sale next year.

Ralph Winter, late founder of the US Center for World Mission (USCWM), drew experts to its longtime headquarters in Pasadena, California, to think through cultural and linguistic strategies for sharing the gospel around the globe.

The former campus of USCWM, now known as Frontier Ventures, where missions workers have spent decades strategizing to share the gospel across cultures and across languages, will now be used for a different kind of international education, pending its sale in July 2019.

Frontier Ventures and William Carey International University (WCIU), which now runs the campus, announced plans today to sell about 15 acres of property to EF Education First, a global education company.

Frontier Ventures and WCIU made their intent to sell the property public last fall, citing the high cost of the Southern California property (which it partially rented out to office and residential tenants) and a new, decentralized approach to Winter’s mission of reaching unreached people groups. The sale includes about 14 acres of WCIU’s campus proper, 16 homes, and a soccer field.

The agreement between WCIU, the current owner, and EF is expected to close next July, following a permit process with the City of Pasadena.

The pending sale has frustrated hundreds of alumni and supporters, including a group called Save the Campus, which considers the sale a violation of Winter’s ministry vision to have a single, self-sustaining think tank headquarters.

A representative of the group posted a response to the news of the deal with EF on Facebook last night.

“They are secular, they are focused on business and government and they are focused on preparing people to work in those realms in a global market,” said David ...