Dr. Jean Eledge presents Ruth Lindsey with the Distinguished Alumnus Award for the Department of Language and Literature at its Homecoming department breakfast.
photo by Nathan Bivens
Lee University’s Language and Literature Department honored Ruth Crawford Lindsey as its 2014 Distinguished Alumnus at a department breakfast during Homecoming festivities.
"Ruth Lindsey’s life and example call us all to a deeper commitment to Christ and to serving others,” said Dr. Jean Eledge, chair of the Department of Language and Literature. “We are honored to have her as one of our alumni and pleased to have an opportunity to recognize her.”
Ms. Lindsey graduated from Lee College in 1960 with a bachelor’s degree in Biblical Studies and embarked on a mission trip to Brazil the same year with three other women, where they evangelized and taught in the Bible school they helped to found.
Before beginning the Bible school, the women had already begun an elementary school to teach local children to read and write. While at the Bible school, Ms. Lindsey helped to develop curriculum and taught nearly every course the school offered. Due to a lack of Christian books in Portuguese, she and the other teachers produced their own “textbooks.”
Though she wasn’t named an appointed missionary until sometime after her arrival, Ms. Lindsey remained in Brazil with Bill and Rhoda Watson, missionaries in Goiania, Brazil, until December of 1973.
Ms. Lindsey was recently quoted in Evangel magazine as saying, “I spent 13 happy years in Brazil. I marvel that God called me—a timid, bashful teenage cotton-picker—to be a missionary. I marvel even more that He anointed me and used me to lead some souls to Christ.”
Upon her return to the United States in 1974, Ms. Lindsey earned a second degree from Lee, a bachelor’s in English. She also received a master’s in English from Arkansas State University in 1975 before joining the Lee faculty later that same year. Ms. Lindsey continued to teach at Lee until 2002.
She married her husband Jack Lindsey in 1979 and cared for him for 14 years after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease only five years into their marriage.
In the spring of 2001, Ms. Lindsey returned to Brazil to find that the school she’d helped to establish had grown into the Evangelical Seminary of the Church of God, and many of the children she’d taught were now teachers in the seminary and leaders in the church. After her retirement in 2004, Ms. Lindsey returned to Brazil again and taught in the seminary for six months.
Ms. Lindsey attends North Cleveland Church of God, where she was recently recognized for 29 years of service on the mission board.