John E. Sharp. My Calling To Fulfill: The Orie O. Miller Story. Harrisonburg, VA/Kitchener, ON: Herald Press, 2015. Pp. 439. $29.99 (U.S.)
Orie O. Miller is described as “one of the major architects of North American Mennonite Church life in the twentieth century” (p. 7) and as one who “has seen more of the world than Marco Polo . . . opened more mission fields than David Livingston . . . [and] was as innovative in the world of church ministries as Thomas Edison was in the world of technology” (p.10). His life journey, outlined in an extremely helpful 1892-1977 “Time Line” (pp. 17-22) takes him from a farm in Indiana, to Goshen College as a student/teacher/principal, marriage in Akron Pennsylvania, on to Beirut and south Russia and then to the “ends of the earth” before he retires and dies in Lancaster County. How could this story be otherwise than fascinating and inspiring?
John Sharp is a masterful storyteller, augmenting the factual material he has exhaustively researched (the footnotes provide thick additional story lines that beg pursuing) and the extensive interviews conducted with Miller’s family and former colleagues, with historical context—family histories; World War I and World War II beginnings; Russian Mennonite suffering of the early 1920s; and Paraguayan Chaco harsh realities. These snapshots make the story come alive. He describes in some detail many of the organizations/agencies/institutions that Miller helped found or for which he provided innovative leadership (he served on more than sixty boards, commissions, and committees, as many as twenty-five at a time!) giving the most fulsome coverage of Miller’s twenty-three years (1935-58) of executive leadership concurrently to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) and Eastern Mennonite Mission’s forerunner Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities.
Sharp sets out to answer the question “Who is Orie Miller?” and sees as his primary audience those under sixty who either haven’t heard of or don’t know much about this global church statesman’s life. He deals empathetically and graciously but not uncritically with his subject, portraying some of the many facets of the man and his life-long passion pursuing his faith vocation, his “calling to fulfill.” Miller is said to have inherited his affection for the church from his father. Thus he was later crushed—“the most difficult moment in his life” (p. 69)—when he did not draw the lot to become a pastor. But he found another calling which led him to leave his wife and sixteen-month-old daughter for fifteen months to do relief work in Beirut. And just five months after his return to his family, he left again for another six months in southern Russia as one of the first three MCC workers in that place (1920). The incredibly harsh and vitriolic criticism that he faced from other Mennonite leaders (e.g., “Brother Orie is a dangerous man” (p. 158); “Orie has messed us up with communism” (p. 226), is more illustrative of the parochial understanding of mission of the time and inter-Mennonite mistrust than a reflection on his leadership. Sharp provides a scintillating comparison of Miller and Mennonite historian and church leader Harold S. Bender, the latter being the speaker/writer that the former was not (p. 328 ff).
Running concurrently with Miller’s life in church organizations was his training for and income-generating involvement in his wife’s family shoe business, for which he became sales director and company director. While he excelled in his work, he was always torn away by church agency demands, much to the perplexity of his in-laws. But it was this work that sharpened his administrative and financial skills, which gave rise to some interesting perspectives on money and philanthropy: “It’s OK to make money, but you don’t want to die a rich man” (p. 345). He didn’t.
Sharp’s strongest criticism of his subject, which is softened by a sense of sadness, is Miller’s role as a husband and father. His wife “raised the children and endured her role as the supportive wife” (p. 11). Orie himself acknowledged that he was “not much of a husband to leave you alone with the children so much . . . I am resolved to try harder than ever” (p.149). But this theme recurs throughout My Calling to Fulfill: “The absent husband and father is the shadow in Orie’s story,” Sharp writes (p. 369).
Miller is acknowledged as being ahead of his time as a church leader in many respects: facilitating inter-Mennonite and ecumenical relationships; demanding respect for and independence of the Tanzanian church, saying it should happen before the nation received independence; constantly pushing for long-term vision instead of only immediate program planning; and holding to a clear sense that mission—God’s mission, and thus the calling of the church—includes evangelism, service, peace and more. While Sharp acknowledges this last broad definition of mission, he perpetuates a false dichotomy by using terminology such as “double lenses of service and mission . . . service led naturally to mission” (p. 134), and “overseas workers and missionaries” (p. 359).
The book offers important insight into the way Brethren in Christ helped to shape Miller and were shaped by him. Sharp writes that a shared concern for non-resistance brought Mennonites and Brethren in Christ together at the beginning of World War II. Miller was impressed by Brethren in Christ leader C. N. Hostetter’s ministry in the Civilian Public Service camps. Hostetter in return gave Miller an open invitation to speak at Messiah College. A few years later (1951), Miller had the MCC Executive Committee invite Hostetter to become part of that body; two years later, Hostetter became chairperson (p. 237). At the end of the 1950s, Brethren in Christ acting general superintendent David Climenhaga in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) told how Miller’s perspectives on indigenous church and national political independence were “life changing” and helped to shape his “evolving views of apartheid” in South Africa (p. 315). Several years later Climenhaga became the first MCC Teachers Abroad Program director for Malawi (a role he held along with his prior Brethren in Christ assignment; at that time there was no MCC presence in Rhodesia). Moreover, the Brethren in Christ churches and leaders in Rhodesia offered MCC personnel, including my wife and me, an extremely valuable orientation to Africa before we left for this newly independent (1964) country.
Ora Otis Miller—he never liked his first names and routinely signed his name O. O. Miller (p. 30)—may not be known to many people under the age of sixty as Sharp suggests, but this important volume makes Miller’s immense legacy, in shaping our understanding of mission and developing the institutional bodies for its implementation, accessible to all. Miller’s pioneering work and servant leadership opened the world and the global church to thousands of people including our family. Thanks be to God.