In review:
Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change,
Paul Hiebert

Matthew Moffitt was on staff at CMS NSW as Mission Education Assistant for three years before beginning a Howard Guinness Project ministry apprenticeship this year, serving alongside students in the Sydney University Evangelical Union (SUEU). He shares his reflections on Paul Hiebert's Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change.

Paul Hiebert's Transforming Worldviews (2008) is a tour de force study on how to approach mission in the twenty-first century. A missionary child, Hiebert served as a missionary in India for six years before spending the last 30 years of his life teaching mission studies, first at Fuller Seminary and then at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He also lectured in anthropology at several secular universities in the United States. Needless to say, then, Transforming Worldviews comes with a wealth of wisdom and experience - and it's much more than the usual popular level paperback worldviews book. Written at a scholarly level, and engaging with academic debate and research, this is not just an introduction to worldviews: Hiebert outlines how worldviews are formed and how they can be transformed.

Converting hearts, converting worldviews

What does conversion to Christianity look like? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries missionaries looked for a change in behaviour or belief. But though these signs were considered to be the leading indicators that Christian conversion had occurred, Hiebert argues that these are insufficient. Twenty-first century mission is going to be characterised by both a conversion of behaviour and belief and of the worldviews that support them.

Approaching worldviews from an anthropological perspective, Hiebert comprehensively overviews the origins, history, philosophy and meaning of worldview. He concludes that worldviews operate as the blueprints and guidebooks for individuals and cultures. Worldviews allow cultures to interpret reality: they help people to explain the world as they find it and to validate how they respond to the world. They also provide emotional and psychological security to cultures in a world that is chaotic and uncontrollable.

For Hiebert, it is at the level of converting people's worldviews that mission needs to operate in the twenty-first century:

Conversion to Christ must encompass all three levels: behaviour, beliefs, and the worldview that underlie these. Christians should live differently because they are Christian. However if their behaviour is based primarily on traditional rather than Christian beliefs, it becomes pagan ritual. Conversion must involve a transformation of beliefs, but if it is a change only of beliefs and not of behaviour, it is false faith. Conversion may include a change in beliefs and behaviour, but if the worldview is not transformed, in the long run the gospel is subverted and the result is a syncretistic Christo-paganism...Christianity becomes a new magic and a new, subtler form of idolatry.¹

The transformation of world views, argues Hiebert, must be the central task of mission in the twenty-first century. Worldviews subsist in three dimensions - beliefs, feelings, and values. It is through these three dimensions that people and cultures run their experiences of reality, and these three dimensions shape decision-making and behaviour. All three of these dimensions must be transformed if we are to see genuine conversion that is not syncretistic or idolatrous.

Transforming Worldviews provides detailed analysis of several worldviews that today's missionaries must engage with, including modernity, postmodernism, and peasant worldviews. Hiebert addresses the impact of such worldviews on Christianity and mission, and provides a biblical counterpoint to them. He then offers suggestions for gospel ministries that seek to transform worldviews, drawing particularly on his field of expertise: anthropology.

Three great reasons to read Transforming Worldviews

I found Transforming Worldviews a helpful book to read for three reasons. Firstly, I really appreciated Hiebert's emphasis on conversion as more than just a 'one moment' event. His refusal to compartmentalise conversion and discipleship is at the heart of Hiebert's explanation of transformation:

Normally when we think of conversion, we think of radical paradigm shifts. Conversion replaces an old set of beliefs and practices with new ones. It involves turning from an old path and beginning a new one. At the worldview level it changes the fundamental ways in which we configure our view of reality. But most worldview transformations are an ongoing process in all individuals and societies...We must see worldview transformation as a point, conversion, and as a process, ongoing deep discipline.²

Conversion is a point and a process. It is a helpful reminder in evangelism that we are calling people to discipleship for life. Conversion as transformation involves every area of our being: our beliefs, feelings and values. And because transformation is about the whole of life, we need to teach the gospel in ways that engages the three dimensions of culture: cognitive, affective, and moral.

Secondly, knowing how worldviews work helps us to speak the gospel of Jesus effectively to many different people. As I was reading Transforming Worldviews in early 2010, it struck me that everybody has a worldview. This means that the students I meet at work don't come to me from a historical or cultural vacuum: they come from particular cultures, and have been shaped by particular stories and symbols. It is really valuable to understand how their society and culture have formed them in working out how to engage with them - how to bring the message of Jesus into different parts of their lives.

Thirdly, as I was reading Transforming Worldviews, I couldn't help but think about the major symbols and stories that my Christian culture tells. Hiebert's analysis of the major worldviews details how Christianity has been affected by each of them. How much of our church life and our 'Christian' assumptions have been shaped by non-Christian worldviews? And how can we use the connections and differences between the biblical worldview and other worldviews to speak the gospel to people and transform lives? Transforming Worldviews is the book to read if you want to start thinking through the answers to these questions.

Transforming Worldviews is a book that comes with high praise on the back cover, and I found that it didn't disappoint. To be honest with you, not being an anthropologist myself, I found some of the early chapters a little hard going as Hiebert interacts with several prominent members of the field. But where Transforming Worldviews really proves it worth is in the discussion of today's major worldviews and how the gospel can transform people lives. Highly readable and practical, this is a book that anyone involved in mission - whether overseas or in Australia - should read.