The Venture Center is a collaborative mission base located on a 17-acre campus in Pasadena, California. The Venture Center currently functions around seven hubs of frontier mission focus, which include prayer, research, innovation, media, education, strategy, and mobilization with a continued focus on unreached people groups. The U.S. Center for World Mission archives reside at the Venture Center’s Latourette Library and house collections by Ralph D. Winter and Donald McGavran. Many ministries had their genesis at the center or have been resident for a season before moving on to new locations throughout the world.
In 1974, the Institute of International Studies arose out of a need not only to train people as missionaries but also to provide an intensive foundation on what is happening in the world and what needs to happen. Now called the "Perspectives on the World Christian Movement", or "Perspectives" for short. With over 100,000 alumni in North America alone, the course covers information crucial to any person interested in "God's global purposes" and has said to be a "life changing experience" for many who have taken it. Building on these ministries, the Winters founded the U.S. Center for World Mission in 1976 in a few rented offices on the 17-acre campus of Pasadena Nazarene College. Their purpose was to pull people together to concentrate on the unreached people. The U.S. Center went on to purchase the campus which was up for sale at that time. The money came primarily through small gifts of individual Christians around the country, and through the tireless efforts of televangelist Dr. William Davis who not only promoted the project on national television, but also traveled across the country to meet personally with wealthy Christian donors. The final payment for the campus was made in 1988. The efforts to establish the U.S. Center have also led to the development of a wide-ranging movement to the frontiers of mission that now involves thousands of people and hundreds of missions organizations. The Center seeks to serve this growing movement with resources, information, and strategic insights that can help the movement grow and effectively reach all the unreached peoples. In 2015, the US Center was renamed the Venture Center.
Unreached People Groups
Originally called "hidden people groups", mission leaders later agreed to change the name to unreached to better capture the image that the Gospel had yet to reach these people in their own language and culture. An unreached people group is one where there is no viable, indigenous, evangelizing church movement. In 1976, when the USCWM was founded, there were an estimated 17,000 unreached people groups. The latest figure as of 2009 places the number of unreached people groups at about 7,000, but some of that decrease is from a better understanding of the situation "on the ground" in any given people group.
