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Paul Gordon Hiebert, Distinguished Professor of Mission and Anthropology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, arguably the world's leading missiological anthropologist, died in March of 2007 of cancer. He was 74.
Paul combined attributes not easily combined: anthropologically and theologically informed scholarship and a passion for God's global missionary purposes. The story of how Paul fruitfully merged these commitments is worth telling.
Born in India (1932) to second-generation Mennonite Brethren missionaries, Paul was deeply influenced towards missionary service by his evangelistic and erudite father, Johann Hiebert, whose single-minded missionary commitment led him in 1947 to reject the tempting offer of a faculty position in Indian History at the University of Southern California.
Paul often told the story of how, at Taber College (Hillsboro, Kansas), where he studied physics and history, he approached a young lady:
"Miss Flaming."
"Yes?"
"I'm Paul Hiebert. I'm going to be a missionary. Would you like to have dinner with me?"
So began a romance that would last 57 years, until Fran's own death from cancer in 1999.
A missionary needed theological education, which Paul acquired at the Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary (Fresno, Calif.). Inspired in college by missionary anthropologist Jacob Loewen, whose lectures were "exciting," "iconoclastic," and "made so much sense," Paul felt missionaries needed anthropology. And in a family that took education seriously - four of his seven sisters would earn Ph.D.'s - only the Ph.D. would do. So Paul completed Ph.D. coursework in anthropology at the University of Minnesota while also pasturing a church. Then in 1960 he went to India for fieldwork and a six-year term of service with the Mennonite Brethren Mission Board. Here Paul unlearned the simplistic missiology he was taught in seminary, and began rethinking missiology for a postcolonial age.
Inherited models were strong. Old-timers challenged him, "Do you really have the call of God? Are you going to be here for forty years and not quit? Are you going to stay and die here and be buried?" Paul's answer? "Yes!"
But God had other plans. While on furlough Paul completed his dissertation in Anthropology (Minnesota, 1967), which established him as a rising scholar. When his Mission was unable, temporarily it was thought, to arrange his return to India, he took a one-year appointment in...