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Marcin Ruar spent thirty years of his life on the move, shuttling to and fro across Europe, from Poland on the east to England in the west and most everywhere in between. He appears to have acted as a sort of ambassador at large for the Brethren.

Born in Denmark, he first visited Poland when he was a college student in Nuremberg, and was attracted to the Brethren. He later found a way to live in Poland by becoming the private tutor to a German-speaking Polish noble family, the von Sachs.

After many scholastic wanderings at their expense, in the course of which he studied at Cambridge (where he refused a professorship!), Leiden and Frankfurt, he was appointed rector of the Brethren's college at Rakow when he was thirty-two. He only held the post for three years.

More wanderings followed. A born optimist, he unsuccessfully tried to convince the Catholics, Calvinists and Lutherans to stop their persecutions; he signally failed to convince several other denominations that the Brethren in Christ

had the Truth and therefore they should change their beliefs and join them; and his writings on the millennium did not endear him to orthodox Christendom. He was put under a ban of the Polish parliament. To keep out of the Bishop of Kujawy's clutches he had to live the last twenty years of his life in near seclusion looking after a sizeable German speaking ecclesia in Straszyn, protected by a local Lord Koniecpolski. He died there just short of his biblical span.