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Ronald J. Sider would rather not be known as a one-book author—over the last two decades he has written over a dozen books (Genuine Christianity being his latest). But he is most remembered for his first book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. Its haunting title alone transformed the way many North American Christians—mainline, Catholic, and evangelical—viewed their worldly possessions and the plight of the poor.

Over the last two decades, the book has moved through several editions and has been translated into half a dozen languages, and this month it is being reissued in a twentieth-anniversary edition that contains some significant revisions. "The times have changed, and so have I," says Sider. Here the Yale-educated Ph.D., who prefers to describe himself as a simple Mennonite farmer, explains how he has changed and where he still stands firm. Sider is president of Evangelicals for Social Action and professor of theology and culture at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Why did you write Rich Christians?
I wanted to juxtapose the reality of world hunger and the massive amount of biblical material on God's special concern for the poor with what Christians were doing, weren't doing, and could do.

You succeeded in making a lot of us feel guilty!
I had no interest in trying to psychologically manipulate people into some kind of false guilt. That's wrong. But 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? While 85 percent of Americans claim to be Christians, we give only 2.5 percent of our income to churches. We are involved in objective sin.

Who is a rich Christian?
When I speak of rich Christians in an age of hunger, I include myself. And I struggle with that. I mean, 1.3 billion people in the world today live on a dollar a day. So anybody with our incomes is incredibly rich. I struggle with whether I should buy this new fishing rod or have a second used car. But after prayer and careful thought, I do choose to have some things.

Like sending your children to Christian colleges.
Not only to Christian colleges but also to Christian high schools.

How did you justify that when children were starving in India?
My wife and I chose to be harder on ourselves than on the kids. We also think each person is called to become all that God wants that person to be—and education is a crucial part of that. One thing I don't really know how to resolve is our relative obligation to a growing circle of people. I don't think my obligations to poor neighbors in India are identical to my obligations to my family. That's an area of Christian ethics we need to work on.

Why are people poor?
Some people are poor because they're lazy or because of wrong choices, like drugs and alcohol. Some are poor because of natural disasters or because they lack basic technology or hold world-views that don't encourage the right kind of approach to the natural order—Hinduism's "untouchables" are a classic example. In addition, significant numbers are poor because of unjust structures and great imbalances of power. When Michael Jordan earns as much promoting Nike shoes as 18,000 Indonesian workers together make in a year, you've got a fundamental problem of justice.

Some have criticized you for viewing wealth as a pie, where my big slice leaves you with a smaller slice.
I have never believed economics to be a zero-sum game—that if somebody else is going to have more, then somebody has to have less. I admit, though, that I didn't know a great deal of economics when I wrote the first edition of Rich Christians. In the meantime, I've learned considerably more, and I've changed some things as a result of that. For example, in the new, twentieth-anniversary edition, I say more explicitly that when the choice is democratic capitalism or communism, I favor the democratic political order and market economies.

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April 28 1997, Vol. 41, No. 5