James Siebken

Jim Siebken's Spiritual Birthday was November 3, 1960 at the age of 22. His spiritual journey has been as husband to Martie and father to Natalie, Brian and Stephanie. More recently his journey has focused on his eleven grandchildren currently ranging in age 14 to 25. He has been a teacher and lay leader in his church focusing on youth and evangelism.

Jim's professional career was as a civil engineer practicing 40 years with Kirkham Michael, a Midwestern consulting engineering firm. He served as president and CEO for 15 years before retiring in 2000 to focus on family and ministry interests.

In 2004, Jim purchased the domain BetHere.net and renamed it BeThere.net. BeThere in Heaven. His prayer, purpose and passion is for everyone to BeThere to celebrate together forever.

As he began to celebrate his and his grandchildren's spiritual birthdays, he found that greeting cards, gifts, song nor traditional celebrations were available. He could not imagine why Christians were not celebrating this very important life changing event ever year. He found that most believers did not remember the date that they were "Born Again".

Finding no books or websites on Spiritual Birthday, he decided to write a book on the subject. He found that writing a book is not easy especially for an engineer. Consulting with his nephew, Mark Mittelberg, a best-selling author, he was encouraged to continue to write and rewrite. Mark and his ministry partner, Lee Strobel, have the same spiritual birthday five years apart and they celebrate the date together every year.

Even though YOUR SPIRITUAL BIRTHDAY book is small, it took Jim several years to write. Writing and self-publishing a book has been and continues to be an unexpected adventure. Equip Press, a division of Outreach Inc., was very helpful in guiding the self-publishing process. Again his prayer, purpose and passion is for everyone to rejoice and celebrate their spiritual birthday every year forever.