Ruth Siemens, a twentieth century pioneer of tentmaking* ministry, passed on to glory on December 20, 2005. Just a month earlier she had celebrated her 80th birthday with a surprise gathering of more than 80 family members, friends and former ministry colleagues.
Like the apostle Paul, Ruth traveled from country to country, moving often to a new job where she could meet local residents and invite them to after-work gatherings and Bible studies. During such times she would introduce them to her best friend and savior, Jesus Christ.
Ruth Siemens, a twentieth century pioneer of tentmaking* ministry, passed on to glory on December 20, 2005. Just a month earlier she had celebrated her 80th birthday with a surprise gathering of more than 80 family members, friends and former ministry colleagues.
Like the apostle Paul, Ruth traveled from country to country, moving often to a new job where she could meet local residents and invite them to after-work gatherings and Bible studies. During such times she would introduce them to her best friend and savior, Jesus Christ. And along the way she became a key figure in the growth of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, the coalition of indigenous student groups to which InterVarsity belongs.
While World War II was going on, she contracted tuberculosis. Not expecting to fulfill her dream of going to the mission field, she majored in Education and English at California State University-Chico, and there she became involved with InterVarsity. Through InterVarsity she learned how to lead inductive Bible studies and share her faith. She continued to share her faith and work with college students after becoming an elementary school teacher.
In 1954 she was invited to teach at an international school in Lima, Peru. In her spare time she audited classes at the local university to meet students and began a Bible study group for them. After three years she became administrator of an elementary school in Brazil and began another student Bible study in her Sao Paulo apartment.
“Every time I have moved to a different city, God has miraculously provided a place for me to live where students can meet,” she wrote in the letter she had prepared for Christmas 2005.
In 1968 IFES asked her to pioneer student work in Spain and Portugal. When she moved to Barcelona, there was no residential housing near the new university campus. She ended up with an apartment one block from the large hospital where she discovered many evangelicals were training to become doctors and nurses.
Each summer, for six years, she taught evangelism and Bible study at Schloss Mittersill, a 1,000-year old castle in Austria. That led to more training opportunities in France, Switzerland, and then in communist Poland. In 1975 she returned to the U.S. and worked with InterVarsity Missions to promote tentmaking opportunities. In 1976 she began her own organization, Global Opportunities, to recruit, counsel, train and then provide job referrals for aspiring missionary tentmakers.
In Barcelona she teamed up with Rebecca Manley. Becky is a former InterVarsity staff member, the author of Out of the Saltshaker, and now involved in Saltshaker Ministries. Many of the stories shared in Out of the Saltshaker occurred in Ruth’s Barcelona apartment. Later they wrote the book on Evangelism together.
Becky wrote a letter to Ruth for her 80th birthday that included these words:
I came to Spain as a college student and a young convert to Christ. … You detected that I’d never led a person to Christ before and told me how. But it was far more than skills that I gained. In observing you I saw what a walk of faith looked like up-close. Everything you thought, felt, delighted in, or regretted was viewed in relationship to the Living God. Your relationship to Christ was one of such delight and awe that it was impossible to understand you unless one knew the God that you worshipped. And that, I believe, is your ultimate epitaph. Your life has been a clarion call to everybody you ever encountered that we must give our lives unreservedly to Christ – for it is only in radical surrender to Him that we find our true joy and freedom.
Ruth Siemen spoke at Urbana 79
*More articles about tentmaking ministry by Ruth Siemens are online at:
http://www.tentmakernet.com/articles/myturn.htm
http://www.tentmakernet.com/articles/workplacev.htm
http://www.globalopps.org/Associates/papers/universityministry.htm
http://www.globalopps.org/papers/whydid.htm
