Ron Sider

Ron Sider
Ron Sider speaking at Christ at the Checkpoint conference in Bethlehem, the Palestinian Territories, in March 2012.
Born	(1939-09-17) 17 September 1939 (age 77) Stevensville, Ontario, Canada
Education	Ph.D., Yale University
Occupation	Theologian, activist

Ronald James Sider (born 17 September 1939) is a Canadian-born American theologian and social activist. He is often identified by others with the Christian left even if he personally disclaims any political inclination. He is the founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, a think-tank which seeks to develop biblical solutions to social and economic problems. He is a founding board member of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. He is also the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Holistic Ministry and Public Policy at Palmer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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.