“Our fathers gave both Harold Bender and me a home and church life advantage.”
On a wintry night in about 1912, Daniel D. Miller drove his horse and
carriage from his home on Cloverdale Farm near Middlebury, Indiana, to
Goshen College some fifteen miles away. Daniel, or D. D., was bundled up
against the snow, still falling after a midwestern blizzard the day before.
A trim man at five feet six inches and 125 pounds, he was also intense,
determined, and on a mission. D. D. was a widely traveled evangelist,
bishop of numerous Amish Mennonite (AM) congregations, and an officer
on various Mennonite Church boards. But tonight he was worried about
his oldest son, Orie. . . .
As Orie watched his father leave the campus and disappear into the
wintry night, he was suddenly moved by his father’s extraordinary effort
and concern. Even so, “I still felt that he needed the help more than I
did,” Orie remembered nearly fifty years later.3 Orie’s son John W. Miller
believes this book was formative for Orie, “open[ing] him to the world of
the Bible in a pragmatic sense,” rather than an ideological sense, which is
how fundamentalists viewed the Bible.”
Despite their occasional differences, Orie and his father maintained a
close relationship until D. D.’s death in 1955. They both, each in his generation,
had a profound effect on the church they loved.
Two Amish Families
Orie’s parents, Daniel D. (1864–1955) and Nettie (Jeanette) Hostetler
(1870–1938) Miller, were fifth- and sixth-generation descendants, respectively,
of Swiss Amish immigrants. Their ancestors were among the five
hundred Amish who emigrated between 1707 and 1774 from Switzerland,
France, and Germany. Both families settled in the Northkill Amish
community of Berks County, Pennsylvania, the earliest Amish settlement
in the New World.
A Clarion Call to Activism
In the spirit of the times, Mennonites and Amish Mennonites held a
large gathering in northern Indiana in 1892, the year Orie was born. This
was the first of three annual Sunday school conferences where leaders
rallied a new generation to “aggressive” and “progressive” programs
of mission, charity, and service. To facilitate such ministries, MC and
AM leaders enlarged the work of the Mennonite Evangelizing Board
(1892); founded Elkhart Institute (1895), forerunner of Goshen College;
and formed a binational denominational body, the Mennonite General
Conference (1897).
The Shaping of a Firstborn
Orie (Ora) Otis was born on July 7, 1892, three years after D. D. and
Nettie were married. Orie’s name was chosen to honor D. D.’s friend,
colleague, and former schoolteacher D. J. Johns, who was also the bishop
who ordained D. D. as deacon, minister, and later as bishop. In the five
years before Orie was born, D. J.’s wife, Nancy (Yoder) Johns, bore two
sons, one named Ora,15 and the other Otis,16 and the Millers called their
firstborn after these two. It was a name Orie never liked—typically, he
signed letters as “O. O. Miller.” Having begun the alliterative naming pattern,
matching his own, D. D. (or was it Nettie?) continued the form, perhaps
with a chuckle, in naming the rest of his sons: E. E. (Ernest Edgar),
T. T. (Trueman Titus), W. W. (William Wilbur), and S. S. (Samuel Silas).
The six daughters happily escaped the pattern and were named more conventionally:
Ida Mae, Clara Olivia, Kathryn Pearl, Bertha Elizabeth, Alice
Grace, and Mabel Ann.
Orie absorbed D. D.’s affection for the church. His father’s service and
the exposure to significant church leaders and activities prepared Orie for
a “momentous” event during the Christmas holidays of 1905. The preaching
of Daniel Kauffman at Forks church moved him to stand to signal his
readiness to identify with Christ and the church. Kauffman (1865–1944)
was then at an early stage of his long ministry as the most influential MC
leader of D. D. Miller’s generation; Orie was thirteen and the first of his
peers to respond to Kauffman’s invitation. In a nearby stream on April
1, 1906, Bishop D. J. Johns baptized Orie, along with a large group of
peers. This moment of conversion and the baptism that followed marked
the beginning of Orie’s lifelong loyalty to the church and his unusually
productive service to both the church and the world.31 Though Orie later
referred to this as his conversion, it was not so much a crisis experience as
it was marking a transition from childhood faith to owned faith, a lifelong
identification with the church and a commitment to serve Christ.
Student and Teacher
Orie finished high school in 1910. That fall he was back in the classroom—
as a part-time college student and as a teacher of country schools.
He taught for one year in a school north of Middlebury and a second year
at the Nihart School in York Township, between Middlebury and Goshen.
Both were one-room schools with eight grades, requiring the teacher
to prepare for twenty-six to thirty class periods per week. The Nihart
School souvenir card for 1911–12 lists thirty students, with such names as
Berkey, Artley, Nussbaum, Lockridge, and Nihart. On the cover is a photo
of Orie, hair neatly combed to the right in a small wave, his oval face and
narrow lips resembling his mother’s. Dressed in a double-breasted wool
suit and narrow necktie, he appears to be a no-nonsense teacher.
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