Ron Sider - Education and Career

Education and Career

Sider attended the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, and received a BA in European history. While at Waterloo, he came in contact with the apologetic work of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and set his sights on a career in academia. Upon graduating in the late 1960s with Master of Divinity and Ph.D. degrees in history from Yale University, he expected to teach early modern European history on secular university campuses, and continue his apologetic work for IVCF. In 1968, he accepted an invitation from Messiah College to teach at its newly opened Philadelphia Campus in the inner city of Philadelphia, PA. The racism, poverty, and evangelical indifference he observed at close hand made a deep impression that led him to write the book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.

What he saw as the injustice of the inner city motivated Sider to work toward developing a biblical response to social injustice. He brought together a network of similarly concerned evangelicals, which in 1973 became the Thanksgiving Workshop on Evangelical Social Concern. It was this conference that issued the "Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern." Twenty years later, a similar gathering of evangelical leaders resulted in the Chicago Declaration II: A Call for Evangelical Renewal. In 2004 he was a signatory of the "Confessing Christ in a World of Violence" document.

He signed his name to a full-page ad in the 5 December 2008 New York Times that objected to violence and intimidation against religious institutions and believers in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8. The ad stated that "violence and intimidation are always wrong, whether the victims are believers, gay people, or anyone else." A dozen other religious and human rights activists from several different faiths also signed the ad, noting that they "differ on important moral and legal questions," including Proposition 8.