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A glimpse into the life of Larry Miller
World Mennonite


Somebody once asked Larry Miller, “So what do you do between Assemblies?”

Miller winces at the perception of the Mennonite World Conference as an occasional folk festival. It’s an image he wants to change.

This summer, Miller marked a decade as executive secretary of MWC. He began full-time just after Assembly 12 in Winnipeg, an MWC-sponsored gathering of thousands of Mennonites from around the World. At that time, the organization was in grim financial shape because of a below-budgeted turnout. Some say Miller rescued MWC from oblivion. He deflects the compliment, but doesn’t deny there were some dark days.

He’d rather talk about the future. Along with president Mesach Krisetya (Indonesia) and vice-president Bedru Hussein (Ethiopia), he’s trying to forge a new global identity for Mennonites. “He’d like MWC to move beyond an assembly every six years or so to an actual global church,” says a colleague. “He’d like to see it become a conduit for gifts to flow between the North and South.” He also wouldn’t mind changing the name – to Mennonite World Communion, perhaps – to reflect a growing partnership among the world’s 1 million Mennonites, more than half of whom are African, Asian or Latin American.

A European for the past 25 years, Miller grew up in a business-oriented family in Goshen, Ind. “I was pretty much your typical rich kid in high school,” he says.

That changed when he got to college. Influenced by the intellectual ferment of the times, he struggled to figure out what the Anabaptist vision meant in the Vietnam era. He had feet in two worlds, living between the business culture of his family and the activist culture of college life. He experimented with new forms of service and accountability. He helped start an intentional community in Atlanta, and worked in an anti-racism program at the National Council of Churches while living with a Mennonite pastor in Harlem.

About this time, his father decided to give his children an early inheritance. Miller gave the money away. “I believed I was one of those rich young rulers who should give his wealth away and follow Jesus,” he says. Asked if he has any regrets, he says, “I couldn’t do the work I’m doing today if I had wealth. It would make it harder for me to help amplify the voice of the South if I had big bank accounts. But I confess that when we are trying to pay for our house or help our kids pay for their education, I sometimes wish I had acted a little more like the rich young ruler.”

Miller moved on to graduate theological studies in London and Paris, where he also carried out various assignments under Mennonite Board of Missions. He had met his wife Eleanor at Goshen College. She had grown up in India, the daughter of missionaries. France seemed a good place to make their home. “We wanted to create a new family culture that was between where she had grown up and where I had grown up,” says Miller.

After several years in Paris, Larry and Eleanor moved in 1982 to Strasbourg, a picturesque French city near the German border. They have three children: Anne-Marie is married and studying in Paris, Elisabeth is studying history of art at the University of Strasbourg, and Alexander is finishing high school.

Strasbourg, the seat of the European Parliament and the site of the 1984 Mennonite World Conference Assembly, also has a first division soccer team, notes Miller, an avid fan who played the game himself until a knee injury forced retirement. He gets animated describing the sport: “You’ve got 35,000 people screaming their heads off, and I wonder: Why couldn’t church be like this a little more often?”

Miller finished his Ph.D. in 1995 at the University of Strasbourg Protestant Faculty. His dissertation, written in French, is on Christianity and society in 1 Peter. “That’s the first book in the New Testament to make church and society its central issue,” he says. “It deals with issues like whether Christianity reinforced the social order or tended to transform it.”

Miller had gone through a lengthy academic process to discern the text’s message about the suffering church. When he led Bible studies on the topic in Indonesia and Africa, Mennonite leaders said, “Yeah, we know that.”

“With their firsthand experience of suffering, they readily grasped what 1 Peter is saying,” says Miller. “They told me that the book reflects their situation and helps them figure out how to respond in it.”

Miller hopes MWC can become more of an avenue for shared teaching and witness. The average North American Mennonite, however, seems to have little felt need for the rest of the world church. Miller attributes this partly to the independent culture of the North, and partly to a Mennonite ecclesiology that tends to emphasize the local church. He expects that to ease in the next generation as the church in the North continues to undergo change. Helping the process along will be continued North-South interactions through mechanisms like Mennonite World Conference.

“The fundamental thing the church in the South can provide to the church in the North is a genuine transformational experience for people in their world view and way of living,” Miller says. “Generally I think that happens best when there’s face-to-face contact.”

Working with Mennonite churches around the world has been “a source of life” for Miller. “It has been a huge privilege to work with churches in the South that have nothing and who have as many conflicts (or more) as we do and yet there’s still a vitality there.”

This article, commissioned by Meetinghouse, was written by Wally Kroeker, editor of The Marketplace.

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Last modified October 20, 2000.

© 2000 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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