Jacob A. Loewen honoured for lifetime achievement

The late cultural anthropologist Jacob Loewen, known to some as the “Educating Tiger,” was honoured for lifetime service by the Association of Anabaptist Missiologists (AAM) this fall.

Tiger, a name given to him as he studied Colombian dialects of the Choco, was one of the most influential missionaries to work for MB Mission and Service International. A bibliography of his works runs 19 pages long. He wrote in Spanish, German, French, and Low German, and many of his articles can be found in the journal Practical Anthropology.

Jacob Loewen

Jacob’s widow, Anne, received an award for their lifetime service at Canadian Mennonite University, Winnipeg, as did three other Manitobans – Menno Wiebe, director of Native Concerns for Mennonite Central Committee, and Ben and Helen Eidse, past president of Steinbach Bible College and longtime church planters and translators in the Congo.

Loewen is perhaps best known for improving relations between indigenous people and Mennonites in the Chaco, Paraguay. His wide range of interests allowed him to observe the cultural forces that influenced the character of churches at home and abroad. Loewen had the uncanny ability to teach Bible translators new approaches.

“His life helped us think more deeply about how we read and interpret the Bible in cross-cultural contexts,” said former student, Peter Kroeker, in tribute. “As a missionary he had to learn to leave his cultural bias at home. He learned that he worked best as a catalyst, putting his ear to the ground to hear where God was working in the aboriginal culture.”

“The questions he raises are ones we are increasingly forced to raise in the era of a global church,” said the late Paul Hiebert, in a review of Loewen’s 2000 book, The Bible in Cross-Cultural Perspective.

Loewen once asked a study group, “If your culture is blue and you go and work in a culture that’s yellow, what colour will you be when you return home?” “Blue,” they answered. “Oh no,” said Loewen, “you will be green.”

Between assignments, he taught at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kan., and worked in Bible translation with the American Bible Society in South America, Iran, and Africa for the next 20 years.

After a stroke in 1993, he lost the use of his right hand and learned to write with his left. With his wife Anne as transcriber, he authored Educating Tiger, which recounts his field learning as a cultural anthropologist. Loewen died in Abbotsford, B.C., January 2006.

—with files from Faith Eidse and Peter Kroeker