Obituary for the Reverend Doctor Robert Ian Hitching (1950-2024)
Robert Ian Hitching (or “Bob” as we knew him) was born in an East London family in 1950. After a challenging youth, he had a profound conversion experience and joined Operation Mobilisation in 1970. He travelled overland alone to India and Nepal as a missionary. The main focus of his work during this decade would be in Turkey, where he spent time in prison for distributing Christian literature, and among Turkish people in London. In the eighties, Bob developed a media ministry (Reach and Teach) in Eastern Europe and Asia. During this time he also pioneered a film ministry for several unreached minority languages in India. He wrote and produced the well-known documentary “More Than Conquerors” for Georgi Vins, the Russian Baptist pastor persecuted and exiled by the Soviet authorities. The film brought the story of the persecuted Unregistered Church in the Soviet Union to the Western churches. While based in the United States, he also served as working chairman of the board of the mission organisation Pioneers. He founded and grew the leadership for a new field, the former Yugoslavian regions of Croatia and Bosnia. In the nineties, he continued writing and teaching on missions, Islam, and the Middle East, while studying for a Masters degree on the work of Leslie Newbigin and Jaques Ellul.
2003 was a pivotal year in the life of Bob and his second wife Nancy. They moved to the UK and then to Croatia to begin their work with Roma people. This ministry continues as the Roma Bible Union (RBU). One of the unique features of RBU is the focus on literacy in the mother tongue. The UNA Kid’s Clubs for Roma children have been held in Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Another area of activity was Bible translation, in particular for the Bayash of Croatia, southern Hungary, and northern Serbia. The Bible translation project initiated and drafted by RBU continues under The Word For The World and has published translated Scripture in other Roma languages as well.
Bob was ordained deacon in the Protestantska reformirana kršćanska crkva (the Reformed Episcopal Church in Croatia) in 2017 and ordained presbyter in 2018. He served as parish priest in Kapelna, a Roma village west of Osijek, till he could no longer do it for health reasons. Bob continued to study and received his D.Th. from “Mihael Starin” Theological Seminary in 2022. Ever on the move, he began exploring a new mission field, this time among the tribal people of Northern Europe. In May 2024 Bob and Nancy relocated to Denmark for a sabbatical. One hot day, on July 16th, while travelling to a doctor’s appointment in Pecs (Hungary) Bob collapsed and died. The date was exactly 21 years after his start with the Roma work in the UK. His remains were buried in Máriagyűd near Siklós. The cemetery overlooks the Baranya mountains dotted with Roma villages which he loved so much.
Personal reflection
Bob was a brother, a friend, and a mentor. With a larger-than-life personality, he uniquely combined a deep sensitivity, raw energy, and strategic thinking. While waging war on the kingdom of darkness, he always had deep compassion for broken people, because he knew his own brokenness so well. He was a real pioneer, not afraid to try new things, and not afraid to pull the plug on things that don’t work either. At the same time, he was a strategic thinker who would invest time in studying history, culture, philosophy, and current affairs. He did this to develop a deep understanding of the shape of things to come and he shared his insights with us as co-workers in the mission. Bob was always incredibly generous, both with his energy, his time, and with any money he had. “I simply cannot see suffering” he would say, so while he did not own a house himself, he was able to raise funds to buy houses for four Roma families in the community he served. From personal experience, I know that he was very committed to the people he worked with and a loyal friend who was able and willing to give himself and go deep with people.
Organizations are usually shaped by the vision of their founder. This is certainly the case for Roma Bible Union. In many ways, Bob was an entrepreneur and RBU operated as something like a “Business as Mission” avant la lettre. The mission was missional to the core and Bob was like a 19th-century missionary who willingly gave anything and everything he had for the sake of the mission. It was existential and very personal for him, a world apart from organizational policies and corporate risk aversion. At the same time, Bob used his entrepreneurial skills to raise funds, develop new methods, and open new fields. One example of this was his innovative use of media in the eighties in the documentary about the Unregistered Church in the Soviet Union. Within RBU we used an “incubator” model to help us go from idea to pilot to distribution of new ministry projects. The agility and small-scale approach made it possible to move quickly with new initiatives. Bob was able and willing to initiate projects that other, more established missions would disregard as risky or impractical. At times this led to misunderstandings and tensions with others on the field. Like all pioneers, he was not always acknowledged by others who would run with an idea that he had initiated. But also in these cases, he had the spiritual maturity to rejoice in the success of others.
Missiological reflection
This is not the place to evaluate fifty years of ministry, but I think three missiological themes are typical of Bob and will remain relevant for us in the future.
1 Missiology in tension
Bob would sometimes quote George Verwer who remarked that missiology in reality is often”messyology”. No matter where we are in Central and Eastern Europe, we have all seen examples of this. But Bob was convinced that the problem runs deeper because we are operating in the tension between a missiology from above and a missiology from below. Questions about the place of the social sciences in relation to the distinctly theological nature of missiology are of course not new. The important thing is that Bob, who had a social sciences background, did not make it a simple binary question. However, he was able to articulate how the internal tension at times could derail the missiological praxis. He wrote about the philosophical work of Jacques Ellul, who helped him articulate the problems with a technical approach to organisations. He often referred to the work of the sociologist Peter Berger about patterns of secularisation and desecularisation. These thinkers enabled him to think about the state of the church and of mission in Europe in new ways. While Bob started with a fairly standard North American evangelical mission worldview, both personal experiences and his unconventional academic work forced him to dig deeper and move beyond.
2 Becoming deeply rooted
Bob was by no means unique in his search for a deeper theological grounding of his personal spiritual life and missional praxis. Like many of us, he studied theology and church history and gradually found his theological home in a Catholic Anglicanism inspired by the Oxford Movement. What was so attractive about this? For him, the visible connection with the apostolic tradition settled questions of truth and authority. The sacramental tradition typical of Anglicanism (but by no means limited to it of course!) also embodies the theological conviction that as human beings we are fundamentally persons in relationship. Bob once described walking down a busy London street after a midday Eucharist with a profound sense of the blessing of God not just for him, but for the people who he saw walking towards him and who he blessed in prayer. This is what he would sometimes refer to as “eucharistic socialism.” In his Doctoral work, he made the theology of the Oxford Movement relevant to Roma missions. If there is a theological equivalent of “science fiction” Bob wrote it. In “When the Ravens Leave the Tower”, even the architecture of an English village church becomes part of the eschatological drama unfolding in the story. This catholic tradition, combined with a strong appreciation for Orthodox theologians such as Bulgakov, opened a theological depth and imaginative width that was so inspiring for many of us. What is unique about Bob’s thinking is that this creative theology fueled his mission work, he was able to connect it directly to the Roma world and the work of RBU.
3 Identifying marginal movements
Bob was a pioneer who was called to marginal groups of people not yet ‘reached.’ The Roma, the largest marginalized minority in Europe, are a clear example of this focus. One Roma sub-group, the Bayash was of particular interest to Bob. The Bayash lived in Romania as slaves and were driven out once slavery was abolished. They ended up along the Danube and Drava rivers in north Serbia, Croatia, and south Hungary. Rather than a typical evangelical church planting project, Bob and Nancy initiated a mother tongue literacy project at the core of their mission, to bring human dignity to a group of people who believe that they are cursed. The UNA Kid’s Clubs for Roma children provide basic literacy in an accessible form which in turn helps Roma children with their move into regular education.
Another example of Bob’s pioneering research was his work on emerging religious movements. He did not follow the traditional approach which is mostly focused on demographics (for example: we focus on ‘students’ or ‘elderly women’). Instead, he used a psychographic approach, which asks questions about the psychological reality of people. What is the worldview? What are their expectations? “How do people seek to influence metaphysical realities?” The subgroup that is most underrepresented in church and mission is the group of “spiritual creatives.” People who are very open to spiritual realities and who create non-traditional creative spiritualities. It is a diverse field ranging from Witches on Tiktok, to revived Norse paganism and Greek goddesses, or neo-pagan fusions of Tarot and aboriginal animism. The urgent missiological question is: why do our post-Christian children become pagans? And once we know why, what might the answer be? The missiological relevance of this is clear, but most churches and missions seem to have other priorities. Bob continued to wrestle with these questions till the end. This is why he read Bulgakov and wrote about the Oxford Movement in relation to Roma mission. And it will be our task to continue the meditation on the beauty of holiness, revealed in the liturgy, and to pray and hope for the restoration of all things.
Legacy
The legacy of Bob is more than just an organisation and a body of work. The lives of many have been touched and will continue to be touched through the work of Roma Bible Union. RBU continues with its mission with a new sense of purpose. Bob’s literary legacy consists of theological papers and works of fiction. Many of his papers have been published on Academia.edu: https://independent.academia.edu/BobHitching and there are plans for a print publication. His works of fiction will be (re)published in the future as well.
I finish with a quote from the Roma Diary of July 19th: “Get back up. Carry on. Bob embodied this resilience, patience and long-suffering. Difficulty after difficulty, through hardship and pain, he always got back up, dusted himself off, set his jaw and kept going, but never lost his compassion for people. He really was something else. And he will be dearly missed. May his soul, by the mercy of God, rest in peace.”
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Jelle Huisman is Chairman of the board of Roma Bible Union (www.romabibleunion.org). Between 2015 and 2019 he lived and worked with RBU in Osijek (Croatia). He lives in The Netherlands and works at the Protestant Theological University, while also pursuing a PhD in (Bible) Translation Studies at K.U. Leuven..