Memories of a mentor | Rebecca Manley Pippert

In our age of celebrity mania, we need heroes more than ever. How grateful I am to God for having given me a true hero.

Ruth Siemens came bursting into my life when I was a recently converted college student studying in Madrid, Spain, in the 1970s.

Ruth was already a veteran missionary who had pioneered campus ministry in Peru and Brazil with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. Now living in Spain she was pioneering student work at universities in both Spain and Portugal. A whirlwind of zest and enthusiasm, her passion for God was contagious.

Impact on my life

Yet as a young college student, I couldn’t have fathomed the impact she would have on my life when I accepted her invitation to transfer to the University of Barcelona and share her apartment. Many of the stories in the early chapters of my book Out of the Salt Shaker took place in Ruth’s apartment!

I recently flew to California to attend a party given by her family to celebrate Ruth’s 80th birthday. Her health was failing and I wanted to honour her incredible ministry. I brought with me letters from people on three continents expressing their deep gratitude for Ruth’s ministry in their lives.

To our surprise and sorrow, just five weeks after her party, Ruth suffered a stroke and died on December 20. I spoke to her in her hospital bed just 24 hours before she went to be with the Lord.

How I thank God that we were able to honour her while she was alive to hear it!

Naturally with the passing of someone so special in my life, I have been reflecting on the life lessons I have learned from my mentor:

1. God doesn’t require perfection to be able to use us

Rarely at memorial services do we hear any mention of the person’s idiosyncrasies or weaknesses, especially when it’s someone whom God has greatly used. While Ruth’s tributes were glowing there was also a delightful honesty. One comment especially made her laugh: ‘Ruth was gifted with more than average persistence and prayerfulness. Her wide-eyed femininity gave no hint of her iron determination, unrelenting persistence, with perhaps just a touch of a stubborn streak!’

Why was that important to hear? Because what God requires of us isn’t perfection but a teachable spirit. Our usefulness in ministry lies is acknowledging our inadequacy; because it’s only when we see that we aren’t enough, that we turn to the One who is enough! From Ruth I learned perhaps the single most important insight with regard to the Kingdom of God: that it is the dismantling of our own power and trusting instead in God’s power that makes us truly effective.

2. God multiplies our efforts

When Ruth arrived in Spain in the late 60s, the evangelical church had suffered greatly under Franco’s regime. But persecution had only made the Spanish church stronger and more spiritually vital. However there was little knowledge back then of how to establish a national campus witness. Ruth, along with David Burt and Stuart Parks, was instrumental in the formation of Spain’s first evangelical student movement. When she returned to the US in 1975 she left behind several small but strong student groups that she had helped start.

There are now Christian fellowship groups on nearly every major university campus throughout the country! To think that the seeds of Spain’s vibrant campus ministry today began in part with Bible Studies that Ruth led right in our apartment!

Never underestimate what God will do through our service to Christ. Jesus took the meager resources of five loaves and two fish and he fed 5,000 people. God delights in taking our limited resources and expanding his kingdom through our acts of obedience!

3. To be effective for Christ — pay attention to the eternal!

In 1954, when Ruth began a student ministry at the University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru, she sensed the Christian students’ timidity about witnessing. So she asked them to bring their non-Christian friends to her apartment where she led Seeker Bible studies that focused on the Person of Jesus. Those who came were struck by the friendly atmosphere and by the discovery that the Bible was a comprehensible book. Seekers were drawn to Jesus and many students were converted. That, coupled with Ruth’s discovery of two very innovative and gifted student leaders who would go on to become Christian leaders on the world stage — Samuel Escobar and Pedro Arana — caused the newly-formed Christian fellowship group to grow.

Only time prevents me from sharing her tremendous 11 years of student ministry in Brazil. But 15 years later, upon visiting Portugal and being told by the Christian students, ‘Ruth, no sceptic college student would ever come to a Bible study on the person of Jesus’, she responded, ‘Just let me try it three times. If it doesn’t work then I’ll never mention it again.’ She then took six frightened Christian students to a noisy student cafeteria at noon and began a discussion on a gospel narrative. Soon a circle of curious students gathered around them, and then another circle around that! When Ruth announced she would lead a similar study at noon the next day, students clamoured for it to be offered at different hours. She ended up leading a dozen Seeker Bible studies the next day and some students even cut class to come! During the series that followed several students met the Lord and the faith of the Christian students was strengthened mightily.

Does Ruth’s strategy work for today’s postmoderns? More than ever! In my own evangelism training ministry, people are not only learning an incarnational approach to sharing faith, but we’ve seen Seeker Bible studies begun in America, Europe and Asia. And to think it all started from a single Seeker Bible study in Barcelona at Ruth’s prodding!

Why was Ruth’s ministry so fruitful? Because she engaged in the eternal! There is much talk today about our need to be cutting edge. Simone Weil, the French philosopher, wrote perceptively: ‘To be always relevant, you have to say things which are eternal.’ Ruth had absolute confidence that true spiritual power lay in utilising God’s supernatural resources.

Does that mean our witness is removed from the perils and struggles that engulf humanity? Absolutely not! The love of Christ demands our ministry to every aspect of broken humanity including the care for our battered planet. But as important as it is to mediate the love of Christ — it is not enough. We must be armed with all of God’s supernatural resources: declaring God’s truth and exposing seekers to his living and written Word; depending on and being filled with God’s Spirit through prayer. It is important to be relevant, but what I learned by watching Ruth is that only the eternal is eternally relevant.

4. God is faithful

After 25 years of fruitful student ministry Ruth went on to become one of the leading thinkers and mobilisers of the worldwide tentmaking movement. Why did she invest 25 more years in yet another ministry? ‘Because’, she told me at her party, ‘God is committed to worldwide evangelism and the end times cannot come until the church has completed her mission. So if God never, ever gives up, then how can we?’

Her response belies Ruth’s greatest lesson to me: that God is faithful. That it is the Lord who guards and keeps us. It is upon God’s fidelity and on nothing else that our life and future hang. The question is never whether God will be faithful to us: but will we be faithful to his faithfulness?

Not long ago a popular show was being broadcast on American television: top news people were questioning a politician. He was an exceptionally good guest that night. His answers were characteristically tough, feisty, and candid. As the programme came to a close, one interviewer said, ‘Senator, we always ask this in the last 30 seconds, realising it’s not nearly as significant as the other things we’ve discussed, but who has been the greatest influence in your life? Who has been one of your heroes?’ There was dead silence. The Senator was fighting back his emotions. His voice was breaking.

Finally he said, ‘It’s a man the world has probably never heard of. He wasn’t famous, or rich, or powerful in the world’s sense. But he pointed me in the right direction. He saw something in me as a young man, he believed in me and cared for me. Above all else, he modeled for me all the things I’ve ever aspired to be. He was truly a great man.’

That night I realised that the Senator and I had a great deal in common. The thought of my hero also makes me weep.

Rebecca Pippert, who credits IFES for her early spiritual nurture, is recognised internationally as a prominent speaker and authority in the area of evangelism, founder of Salt Shaker Ministries.