“But don’t forget—it is His church—He is building her. Our responsibility is to seek to see His building and our place as Body members and in that find the fullness and eternal living assured.”
When Cal Redekop met twenty young American farm boys at the harbor
in Antwerp, the Netherlands, on April 6, 1951, it was the beginning of yet
another MCC mission of international goodwill. With a “vast amount of
vigor, vitality, and energy,” these twenty—and 1,160 others who followed
them—enacted “a remarkably idealistic, naïve, flexible, experimental, and
ingenious jerry-built dream” called Pax. There was little romance, though,
in the ditches they dug, the rubble they shoveled, the cement they mixed,
and the concrete blocks that they laid up. With shovels, picks, hammers,
and good intentions, they were waging
From Medicine to Old Testament Studies
After graduating from Goshen College, John W. Miller and his wife,
Louise (Heatwole), were intending to study medicine. Both planned careers
as medical missionaries “somewhere in the world.” Both had been
accepted—she to study nursing at University of Pennsylvania Hospital,
and John in a Philadelphia medical school. In 1948, at the end of a summer
pre-med internship in New York City, Harold Bender and Uncle
Ernest Miller, Goshen College president, came calling.
Goshen Biblical Seminary
The board of the seminary for which John was trained to teach was
sketching plans for new facilities. The founding of the General Conference
Mennonite Biblical Seminary (MBS) in 1946 had motivated Harold
Bender to propose an MC version, to be called Goshen Biblical Seminary.
The Mennonite Board of Education had deferred earlier building plans
to give preference to more pressing needs on the Goshen campus. Now,
in 1948, the board was ready to give the seminary project priority. A
new committee, the Joint Church Building Committee was formed. As a
member of this committee, Orie requested from Nelson Kauffman, MBE
president, all minutes and actions of the earlier committee as background
to the current committee’s work. In November 1950, the joint committee
proposed a “gable-type structure” that would meet the needs of both
College Mennonite Church and the new seminary. It was to include a
chapel, offices, seminary classrooms, and Sunday school classrooms.
Building Plans and Conversations about GBS-MBS Cooperation
The presidential transition and other building projects slowed the planning
for seminary facilities. In addition, there was a major new development.
In 1954, the GC-supported Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Chicago
initiated conversations with Goshen Biblical Seminary about cooperation.
Those talks were promising enough to cause MBS in 1958 to relocate to
a new campus on the south side of Elkhart, Indiana—with the dream of
inter-Mennonite cooperation.
The GBS building plans faltered when their primary promoter, Dean
Harold Bender, proposed enlarging the building. This alteration increased
the cost, making Orie and Elta’s gift a smaller percentage of the whole.
Goshen’s new president, Paul Mininger, ordered Bender to reduce the
cost to $97,000, causing him to grumble that it was once again “Orie
Miller’s building.”
The Amsterdam Seven
While Orie was managing the presidential transition at Goshen with its
resultant controversies, overseeing reconstruction in postwar Europe, and
expanding the work of Eastern Mennonite Missions in Africa, a crisis of a
different nature was unfolding in Europe.
John Miller reported to his parents an “extremely interesting” conference
of American Mennonites in Amsterdam, April 14–25, 1952.
The two-week conference had been carefully scripted by Irvin Horst in
the Netherlands. Activities included lectures by four leading Dutch and
German church leaders and papers by seven MCC workers: Irvin Horst,
John W. Miller, Paul Peachey, Calvin Redekop, David A. Shank, Orley
Swartzentruber, and John Howard Yoder.
Orie’s Response
A long period of silence followed the grueling session. As Redekop
recalled, Orie finally said, “Well, if that’s the way these men think, then
I am going to go home and resign.” The executive secretary “cried and
cried.” Orie’s tears shocked the young critics. “We felt terrible!” Redekop
remembered. After a minute or two, Orie regained his composure and
led a vigorous and collegial discussion. Orie concluded their conversation
with the grace of an elder statesman: “Thank you boys. We will take this
into advisement.”
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