Ron Sider and his Witness for Justice

                                                                                      Ron Sider

Evangelical theologian Ron Sider died recently and I want to share some personal thoughts with you about him. 

 I was born into the United Church of Canada and followed the predictable route of attending Sunday School and being prepared for Confirmation with a big gang of Baby Boomer kids. I participated in a United Church summer camp as well, but at the age of 16 my parents sent me to a another camp which was founded by a wise and devout Evangelical friend. It was a life-changing experience for me because my parents were moving toward separation and divorce and I found great comfort in the encouragement that God loved me, personally, and that Christ was alive and could be present in my life.

I spent the next few summers at this camp as a youth counsellor and swimming instructor. I met Ruth there and the proof that summer romances rarely last is that we are still a couple 48 years later. 

My experience of evangelical faith was quite positive at the beginning and I was influenced by some fine Christian adults. As time progressed I became increasingly unsettled by the "just believe",  outlook of some, as though being a faithful Christian required an anti-intellectual and anti-science commitment. And the near obsession with a personal relationship with Jesus seemed far too inward even though I read the prophets and gospels where there was a strong emphasis on looking outward with compassion for "the least of these." During the past 50 years the evangelicalism of my youth has become virtually unrecognizable, often a thinly veiled white supremacy cult. It's bizarre but many white evangelicals in the United States and Canada hate the word justice. 

One of the Evangelical writers I admired as I explored my faith was Ron Sider whose book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger remained on my shelves until the Great Down-Sizing of retirement. Written in the 1970s, it was a key text of what has been described as the Born-Again Left, those who upheld personal salvation and a social gospel. 

Here is an excerpt from a tribute in Christianity Today magazine, a long-time voice of evangelicalism: 

For nearly 50 years, Sider called evangelicals to care about the poor and see poverty as a moral issue. He argued for an expanded understanding of sin to include social structures that perpetuate inequality and injustice, and urged Christians to see how their salvation should compel them to care for their neighbors. 

“Salvation is a lot more than just a new right relationship with God through forgiveness of sins. It’s a new, transformed lifestyle that you can see visible in the body of believers,” he said. “Sin is a biblical category. Given a careful reading of the world and the Bible and our giving patterns, how can we come to any other conclusion than to say that we are flatly disobeying what the God of the Bible says about the way he wants his people to care for the poor?”

I'm grateful for Ron Sider's life and witness. God be with his family.