Teaching from the heart: Dean Sieberhagen’s love for Christ and people drive his ministry

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Southwestern News.

When Dean Sieberhagen, interim dean of the Roy J. Fish School of Evangelism and Missions, returned to his seat after he was awarded the David S. and Lanese Dockery Teaching Excellence Award during the May 5 commencement ceremony at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, tears were streaming down the former missionary’s cheeks.

A native of South Africa who has taught at Southwestern since 2013, Sieberhagen is known across Seminary Hill for the intentional investment he makes in his students in the classroom and, alongside his wife of 35 years, Sandra, outside of the classroom. The Dockery Award, an annual recognition that honors a Southwestern professor who is nominated by faculty colleagues for faithful teaching and care for students’ spiritual development, was a surprise to Sieberhagen, but an affirmation of his philosophy as a professor.

“I think any role we play as professors here is way beyond the classroom,” Sieberhagen explains. “I think it’s a life calling. This is not a job.”

For Sieberhagen, part of his calling to serve at Southwestern is seeing “every student I have [as] an opportunity to disciple somebody and to see how it can help them in their call to ministry, specifically missions.”

Sieberhagen, who served 13 years as an International Mission Board missionary with his wife and their four sons, is part of a line of generations of missionaries but was the first known believer in his family’s history. Growing up in his native South Africa, he says he does not “even remember a Bible in our house” and that Christianity was “cultural” with his family attending church on Christmas and Easter.

However, when the family moved to Johannesburg due to his father’s job as a banker, his dad allowed Sieberhagen and his three brothers to participate in a Sunday school class that was held in the elementary school he was attending. The couple teaching the class led Sieberhagen to the Lord and his brothers soon also professed Christ as Lord and Savior.

“We then worked on my parents and finally my parents came to the Lord,” Sieberhagen recalls. “Through all of that, we all ended up in full-time ministry; even my parents ended up as missionaries.” Sieberhagen’s father came to faith in Christ as a 47-year-old man and became a missionary at the age of 55 years old. Today, two of Sieberhagen’s brothers are pastors in the United States and one of his brothers is the director of Africa for Christ Evangelistic Association in South Africa.

“God has been so incredibly good to us and to me and to our family, just through redeeming us and preparing us,” Sieberhagen reflects.

While attending an all-boys boarding school, Sieberhagen met his wife who was a day student at a partnering all-girls school. Sieberhagen and his future wife were responsible for planning the equivalent of Fellowship of Christian Athletes events together. Several years later they were married and Sieberhagen began to put his Bachelor of Commerce degree from Rhodes University to work as he ran his own business.

However, following the abolition of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, the Lord revealed two things to Sieberhagen: a love and skill of teaching and a desire to take the Gospel to the nations. Sieberhagen began teaching accounting to “black African students who had a disadvantaged education to help them make a bridge into university.”

“I found through that I really loved the teaching,” he remembers. He explains that it was “so fulfilling” to begin the year with the students and see them change as they “knew more” and he was able to “have influence on them.”

“I just loved that, and I just thought, ‘Okay. Somehow teaching has to be part of my life,’” Sieberhagen says. Simultaneously, the Lord was working in Sieberhagen and his wife’s hearts to show them the need for the Gospel around the world.

He recalls while both he and his wife were active in their church – he was a deacon, taught Sunday school, and they led missions teams – the “Lord just impressed upon me one time that most of my life I was holding business books in my hand and in my spare time I was holding the Bible in my hand.”

Sieberhagen says he “felt this burden that it should be the reverse” and he had a “conviction of ‘I want to teach eternal things’” as he wanted to “teach” and “touch lostness full-time, not just part-time. Not just in my spare time.” Sieberhagen says he and his wife “couldn’t get over that 2,000 years after Jesus said, ‘Go to all the world,’ there were still those who have never heard.”

He adds the “calling” on their lives “became to do our part to change that.” With two small sons, and a third on the way, the Sieberhagens “went from a house and three cars and dogs and everything to eight suitcases,” as the family moved from South Africa to Wake Forest, North Carolina, so Sieberhagen could begin in the 2+2 graduate-level program at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. The program allowed Sieberhagen to take theology and missions courses on campus for two years and then spend the remaining two years of the degree program on the mission field.

Following two years of classroom study, and the birth of their fourth son, the Sieberhagens began 13 years of serving the Lord in Central Asia asmissionaries with the IMB. He explains during their time as missionaries they were “privileged by the Lord” to experience all six components of the IMB missionary task, including entry, evangelism, discipleship, healthy church formation, leadership training, and partnership and exit.

When Sieberhagen, who earned a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of South Africa in 2013, began teaching at Southwestern that same year, he was able to draw from his missionary experience as he taught in the classroom. He was elected to the faculty as assistant professor of missions and Islamic studies – with a promotion to associate professor in 2017. Sieberhagen began occupying the Vernon D. and Jeannette Davidson Chair of Missions in January 2018. During the October meeting of the seminary’s Board of Trustees, Sieberhagen was elected to the Charles F. Stanley Chair for the Advancement of Global Christianity. The chair is named after the late Southwestern Seminary alumnus and pastor emeritus of First Baptist Church of Atlanta, Georgia, Charles Stanley.

“The blessing for me is when I teach, everything I teach, I can refer to something I experienced, because I got to experience all of that,” he explains. “I can only use my example because it’s limited to just where I was, but I can always talk about ‘This is what I saw and this is what I experienced’ – both good and bad.” Sieberhagen adds he draws from his “mistakes,” “things that went well,” “opposition,” “challenges,” and “spiritual warfare that took place” as he teaches.

However, Sieberhagen also notes that “one of the things that is very successful on the mission field is the whole idea of hospitality and living life with people.”

Alongside his wife, he says the couple wants to “model” hospitality and living life together for the students as it complements what he teaches in the classroom: “If you’re going to most of the unreached parts of the world today” the principles of “hospitality and friendship” are “very important virtues.”

“Every student that comes to Southwestern is someone for us to treasure and disciple and live life with; not just see me in the classroom,” Sieberhagen adds. “If I have a closed door to my office where you don’t know if you can come in, that might work in a secular company. That’s not who we are. We’re God’s institution and these are God’s people He’s given us to minister to and care for.”

The open door Sieberhagen has to his office is the same open door the couple has to their home. Weekly, the Sieberhagens have an “open table” for Sunday lunch following church when they invite people to join them in their home for lunch around a home-cooked meal. Depending on the Sunday, he says the group can include five or six people or as many as 15 people.

Gatherings with students are not limited to Sundays, however. It is not uncommon for the Sieberhagens to have as many as 30 international students in their home on the United States Thanksgiving holiday and to have students join their family Christmas celebration. The couple learned how to brine a turkey using a recipe from Pinterest and have perfected it to make it their own over the last decade.

Sunny Choi*, a student enrolled in the 5-year-degree program at Southwestern, is one of the students who has joined the Sieberhagens for U.S. holidays. Choi, who is originally from East Asia, says the time at Thanksgiving is filled with “giving thanks to the Lord for what we are thankful for in this passing year” and praying together. In addition to the meal, the celebration also includes playing games past midnight, she says, adding that the Sieberhagens usually go to bed at midnight while everyone continues to play.

Choi, though, first met Sieberhagen through the Everyday Evangelismteams he leads to share the Gospel around Fort Worth. In 2015, Choi explains, she was taking English as a Second Language (ESL) at a Fort Worth area university. A new believer at the time, Choi built a friendship with the Sieberhagens that resulted in them discipling her and having her over for meals and family gatherings. Following a car accident that resulted in a concussion, and subsequently needing to leave the university and her campus housing, the Sieberhagens invited Choi to recover in their home.

She recalls the time in the Sieberhagen home allowed her to see how they “love people” and “welcome people” and “what missionaries should be.”

“I think this family gave me kind of encouragement and example of what a marriage life should be,” Choi says. She said the couple is a “very good example of working alongside each other to serve the Lord.”

The experience also clarified God’s calling on her life, Choi adds, as she was “at a crossroads” as she realized she “needed to give my unknown future to God” and to “let God use my life for His kingdom and His people.” The Sieberhagens prayed with her, discipled her, and had conversations with her, she says.

“There was one time I had a conversation with [the Sieberhagens] and they said, ‘Well, you can think about coming to seminary to get equipped,’” Choi remembers. The result was her enrolling in the 5-year-program at Texas Baptist College and Southwestern that allows her to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in five years. The hope is that following graduation in May 2025, she will return to her country to be an ambassador for the Gospel.

Though the Sieberhagens have four sons – two who serve with the IMB, one who uses his vocation as an engineer to be a missionary in his Dallas-Fort Worth area workplace, and one who just graduated from college – Choi says, “Obviously, their spiritual children are all over the world.”

Another one of the Sieberhagens’ spiritual children is Soja “Bosco” Soajoro, a native of Madagascar who is also enrolled in the 5-year-program at Seminary Hill.

Soajoro came to faith in Christ in 2015 when Sieberhagen, who was leading a mission team from Southwestern, led a Bible study at the Fort Dauphin, Madagascar, English club he was attending. Soajoro, who says he was “very far from God” at the time, resonated with Sieberhagen as he talked about “moving from darkness to light.”

“He said, ‘We all are in sin, we all live in darkness, and whether you go to church or not, and so you can’t get out of darkness, by your work by the good deeds that you do,” Soajoro recalls. He adds Sieberhagen presented the Gospel of Christ, and gave an invitation, “and I just knew God was pressing on my heart. This was my time to come to the Lord.” While the IMB missionaries followed up with Soajoro and began discipling, he explains they would relay that Sieberhagen would check on how the new disciples were growing.

When Soajoro expressed a desire to “study theology,” he says Sieberhagen encouraged him to study at Southwestern. He adds this is when he and Sieberhagen “began to talk personally.”

“He helped me from the beginning of the process up to now,” Soajoro explains, adding that when he arrived in Fort Worth in January 2022, the Sieberhagens connected him with other people from Madagascar and he lived in their home until he could move into the dormitory on the Southwestern campus.

Upon completion of his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Soajoro says he will return to Madagascar to teach at the Fort Dauphin Baptist Theological Seminary while he works on his Ph.D. online. The Madagascar-based seminary is not without Sieberhagen’s influence either – the institution’s founder, Nirintsoa Mamitiana (’18, ’22), was Sieberhagen’s doctoral student.

It is not hard to understand why Sieberhagen was recognized by his faculty colleagues. And, yet, he describes the recognition as “humbling” and an experience that he “doesn’t want to dishonor the Lord by feeling at all prideful about it.”

“It was quite emotional for me to think that the Lord would honor me in that way,” Sieberhagen concludes. “I love what I do. … I love the teaching.”

Ashley Allen (’03, ’09) is managing editor of Southwestern News.

*Name changed for security reasons.