Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Rosalind Rinker.
Rosalind Rinker spent fourteen years in China as a missionary and another thirteen counseling college students for InterVarsity. Her little book Prayer: Conversing with God, published in 1959, taught a generation of evangelicals to pray in short, honest sentences, as though a group of friends were sitting together talking with Jesus.
She spoke at Camps Farthest Out in the 1960s and led prayer schools with Reg Goff. She had spent years learning how to pray herself before she ever taught anybody else.
Rosalind Beatrice Rinker was born April 2, 1906, in New Rockford, North Dakota, the oldest of six children. Her father had come to Dakota Territory as a young man, and her mother proved up a homestead claim. On Sundays, the family hired a two-horse rig and drove out to the sheep ranch. “It was eight miles, but it took us all day to drive out and all day to drive back.”
She grew up Methodist in the holiness tradition. Her childhood had plenty of rules. “I had to wear black stockings, long black stockings, I had to wear long sleeves, I had to have my hair long, no lipstick, no jewelry, I couldn’t go to the movies.”
At fifteen, her mother took her to a young people’s conference. There she gave her heart to Christ. “And it seems to me the whole purpose of my life changed.”
In 1926, when she was twenty, Rosalind sailed for China as a secretary with the Oriental Missionary Society. “I used to think China was millions of miles away until I got there.” She worked in the mission office in Shanghai. She did not like it.
She also spent years looking for a spiritual experience that would settle everything for her. Five times she thought she had found it. “And you know what happened to me? I became the world’s best rationalizer.” Then an English missionary gave a testimony about Christ living in you. Something changed. Rosalind stopped looking for an experience and began looking for Him.
Around the same time, the Chinese evangelist John Sung preached in Shanghai, and revival broke out among the seminary students. The missionaries watched. Their theology said that only unsaved people needed to confess their sins openly. Rosalind fought the idea for three years. Then she became seriously ill after surgery and nearly died. She recovered. And she began making things right.
Rosalind’s new way of praying grew out of a friendship with Mildred Rice, a missionary in Korea. The two women began praying together differently. Instead of one person giving a long prayer while everyone else listened, they prayed about one subject at a time, using short prayers. They admitted their faults as they came up. Then they brought the practice into the larger missionary prayer meeting.
“It took me three months after I started praying like this to really get so that I could pray and say anything that I thought I wanted to do anything in front of anybody.” She was learning that prayer did not require religious language. It required honesty.
Eventually Rosalind was freed from the mission office. She learned Chinese and went into the villages of North China, preaching and teaching people to read their own language. The first time she prayed aloud in Chinese, an old man told her that God must have some dumb children who had never prayed out loud. “I knew I was one of them.”
In Peking, she faced another kind of conviction. She owned two fur-lined coats while beggars were freezing in the streets. She was ashamed. She added up what the coats had cost and gave that amount away to people who came to her in need. She spent her last seven years in China as an itinerant evangelist. She came home in 1940.
Rosalind finished her degree in English literature at Asbury College in 1945. Students began bringing friends to her door at all hours. At an E. Stanley Jones ashram in 1943, she met Anna Mow. “And we became friends immediately.” That friendship became important to the rest of her life.
From 1945 to 1958, Rosalind counseled college students for InterVarsity, first in New York City and later in the Pacific Northwest. She lived in Portland and worked with colleges in four states. Looking back, she was amused that nobody seemed to recognize what she was good at. “But you know, I worked with two organizations, one for almost 14, 15 years and another for 12 years and nobody told me I had any gifts.” She simply kept doing the work.
Through Anna Mow, Rosalind met Eugenia Price. Eugenia told her to write. “She said, you get busy and write a book for young people. And now I wrote my first chapter that day.” The book became The Years That Count, published in 1958.
Anna Mow then gave her another push. “Roz, she said, you’ve got to get out from behind Genie Price’s skirt and leave her and go on your own.” Rosalind did. Her little book Prayer: Conversing with God appeared in 1959. It was only eighty pages.
Years later, when Christianity Today named it the most influential book among evangelicals of the previous fifty years, Rosalind was amused. “It only has 80 pages to read, and the print is rather large.” She eventually wrote seventeen books, including You Can Witness with Confidence and Conversational Prayer.
From a base in Chicago, she traveled for months at a time leading prayer workshops in churches of every kind. The book was not a theory. It was the way she had learned to pray.
Rosalind’s first CFO was the first camp in Florida, where she shared the platform with Frank Laubach. She never forgot one thing he said. “God is speaking all the time, all the time, all the time.”
She spoke at Nebraska in 1964, Ohio and Kansas in 1965, and Kansas again in 1966. At the camps, she led prayer teaching and demonstration groups and sat with teenagers in their prayer circles. She had a simple system for prayer workshops. Groups were kept small—no more than seven people—and each group met first to be prepared for what they were about to do.
Reg Goff led prayer schools with her, including one in Wichita that drew about eight hundred people. He knew what she had given to the church. “I think she has taught more people to pray sensitively to God than any ten of the rest of us put together.” In 1975, Rosalind and Mary Virginia Parrish spent six weeks leading prayer missions at U.S. military bases in five European countries.
Rosalind could put her method on a card. Jesus is here. Thank you, Lord. Help me, Lord. Help my brother. She taught it at camp after camp. “Now, prayer is a heart language.” The method was simple because she wanted people to actually pray, not learn how to sound as though they were praying.
Honesty was at the center of it. “You are more honest when you pray than when you talk.” “You can’t tell lies to God when you pray.” She taught people to pray for what they could actually believe. “But ask for what you can believe, not for what you can’t.” The whole thing could be reduced to one sentence: “The secret of walking with Jesus is talking with Jesus.”
Rosalind eventually stopped describing the Christian life as a life of victory. She had learned something better through her failures. “I have learned that through my failures, I find the loving touch of the Savior more than through my successes.”
That was the woman behind the little book. She had spent years trying to find the right spiritual experience. Eventually she discovered something much simpler. Jesus was there. So talk to Him. Rosalind Rinker spent the rest of her life teaching other people to do exactly that. In her last years she lived at Emerald Heights in Redmond, Washington. She died there January 11, 2002, at ninety-five.
*Note:
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