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Anthropology historically played a key role in American mission-training structures. Under linguists and anthropologists of the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the American Bible Society (such as Jacob Loewen, Kenneth Pike, Eugene Nida, and William Smalley), thousands of American missionaries received training in linguistics and/or anthropology subsequent to the 1930s. Hundreds of undergraduates planning to be missionaries majored in anthropology at colleges like Wheaton, Bethel, and Biola, and thousands more picked up a course or two on the subject. (The most famous such graduate is Billy Graham, who majored in anthropology at Wheaton.) For decades the only place for doctoral work in missiology was the Kennedy School of Missions at Hartford Seminary, which fielded a faculty of noted linguists, comparative religionists, sociologists (such as Peter Berger), and anthropologists (Absalom Vilakazi, Paul Leser, Morris Steggerda, Edwin Smith). George Peters, Charles Kraft, Dean Gilliland, and Charles Taber were among those who received doctorates here before this mainline Protestant school closed in the mid-1960s.
In 1965, Fuller Theological Seminary opened its School of World Mission, intentionally modeled on the recently closed Kennedy School of Missions. Donald McGavran was dean and Alan Tippett, an anthropologist, was the first full-time faculty member. Fuller's School of World Mission grew quickly, adding new faculty, including linguist-anthropologist Charles Kraft. Fuller was the only school offering doctoral missiology during the 1970s.
So when Fuller came calling in 1977, Paul was very attracted to the possibility of teaching within a doctoral program that valued anthropology and was strategically educating the next generation of missiologists—including the professors teaching mission courses offered in hundreds of Christian colleges and seminaries. This, he said, was a "return to mission, as I understood it." And indeed he found Fuller an intellectually exciting place. Initially he struggled to maintain ties to the secular world of anthropology. But with a heavy teaching load, minimal funds to attend academic conferences, and a very different institutional and community set of priorities, Paul soon redirected intellectual efforts into the world of missiology. For the first time he was able to devote teaching, writing, and interaction with colleagues and doctoral students to issues of gospel and culture, contextualization, and mission theology.
Soon Paul's essays on conversion (contrasting "bounded-set" vs. "centered-set" thinking), critical contextualization, split-level Christianity, and self-theologizing were establishing many of his ideas as core concepts of the discipline. Paul sometimes wrote for missionary practitioners, as in his Anthropological Insights for Missionaries (Baker, 1985), which has sold over 50,000 copies. But many of his writings aimed, successfully, at influencing missiology as a field. For example, according to Darrell Whiteman, former editor of Missiology, Paul's essay on "Critical Contextualization" has been employed as a theoretical framework in more missiology Ph.D. dissertations in the last twenty years than any other single missiological contribution.
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