Ruby's profile
Ruby Duncan was born and educated in Christchurch. Born into a fairly typical kiwi home, she has lived and worked not only in all of New Zealands main centres, but in places as diverse as England , the Philippines and Melbourne. Her life is driven by a compassion for those on the edges of our societies, being destroyed by the forces of poverty, violence and neglect.Married in 1979 to Michael, after three years in a Dunedin church they decided to head for the slums of Manila with two small children. Slums are fine to visit. Living in one for 9 years is quite another matter.
The young family lived in a tiny plywood shack like the rest of the 30,000+ in the inner city slum. It was wall to wall poverty with all the attendant social and health problems, violence, drugs, prostitution and sickness and noise. Here Ruby had two more children. One survived just two weeks. She and Michael knew the pain of nearly every slum family from the inside.
While Michael headed a team of New Zealanders committed to working in the slums Ruby lived like the rest of the mums doing all of her own work without any mod con of a NZ home, having and raising children. She helped to develop an export industry for women to sell their hand work, as well as working on community health issues and struggled with what it meant to be a follower of Jesus in a place where babies died daily from preventable conditions.
Coming back to New Zealand in 1994, several years were spent coming to understand that how even in this land of comparative paradise, families were being destroyed from the inside by violence addictions and abuse. Today Ruby is responsible for a range of ministries based in South Auckland, working together with government and community agencies to bring about a better future for the children of New Zealand. This involves a residential programme for mothers and children, a household for teenage prostitutes, budgeting, counselling and other ministries under the banner of Baptist Action, the social service arm of the Baptist church. Alongside this, is the Community Ministry arm which seeks to equip and train churches to reach out into their communities.
Ruby is in demand as a speaker and group facilitator. Her passion is to see followers of Jesus become people who can walk alongside those who are broken and in pain, by being a people who themselves face their own brokenness.
While Michael headed a team of New Zealanders committed to working in the slums Ruby lived like the rest of the mums doing all of her own work without any mod con of a NZ home, having and raising children. She helped to develop an export industry for women to sell their hand work, as well as working on community health issues and struggled with what it meant to be a follower of Jesus in a place where babies died daily from preventable conditions.
Coming back to New Zealand in 1994, several years were spent coming to understand that how even in this land of comparative paradise, families were being destroyed from the inside by violence addictions and abuse. Today Ruby is responsible for a range of ministries based in South Auckland, working together with government and community agencies to bring about a better future for the children of New Zealand. This involves a residential programme for mothers and children, a household for teenage prostitutes, budgeting, counselling and other ministries under the banner of Baptist Action, the social service arm of the Baptist church. Alongside this, is the Community Ministry arm which seeks to equip and train churches to reach out into their communities.
Ruby is in demand as a speaker and group facilitator. Her passion is to see followers of Jesus become people who can walk alongside those who are broken and in pain, by being a people who themselves face their own brokenness.
