Orie O. Miller is a well-known name, but the reputation of this Mennonite lay leader, missionary, and businessman may grow, deservedly, in legend and stature with the publication of John E. Sharp’s long-awaited biography, ” (Herald Press).

Miller was a “20th century leader, and considering his extensive leadership in his day in many, many church institutions and agencies, it’s important to introduce Miller to 21st century leaders,” says ’63, steering committee chair of the (ACRS), a community of Mennonite elders and scholars who meet monthly for fellowship and intellectual engagement at ��ݮ���� (EMU).

The biography, six years in the making, was initiated and partially funded by ACRS. Other funders include the Brethren in Christ church, and two organizations that Miller helped found, and , known commonly by the acronyms of MCC and MEDA, respectively.

EMU President says he’s looking forward to reading the biography. “For many years, I have heard fascinating stories about Orie O. Miller and his legacy from those who worked directly with him,” he said. “So many Anabaptist ministries and institutions launched by Orie have improved the lives of people around the globe. I am pleased this project was sponsored by ACRS and rooted at EMU.”

At the ACRS May 11 Annual General Meeting, a handful of Miller’s contemporaries will share anecdotes and stories about this consequential man who, from his first pioneering trip as a relief worker to Russia in 1919, forever changed Mennonite education, business, relief work and peacemaking.

The meeting, which begins at 7:30 a.m. with coffee and pastries in the west dining room on the EMU campus, is open to the public.

‘Visionary and hard-nosed realist’

Former colleague Calvin Redekop, the ACRS representative to the editorial committee, says Miller’s “work and leadership are difficult to condense.”

“He was a person who represented best the challenges and opportunities of his time, an unusual combination of visionary and hard-nosed realist who expected persons to be accountable,” Redekop said. “He was one of the most disciplined persons I ever knew.”

Redekop served under Miller as administrator of a post-war alternative service program called Pax. Redekop and colleague Paul Peachey ’45 had conceived this program in August of 1950, and a mere eight months later, with Miller’s support and that of MCC, “Paxers” arrived in war-ravaged Europe to help resettle refugees.*

Born in Indiana in 1892, Miller attended Goshen College before answering the call to engage in relief work in 1919 and shortly after, helping to form MCC, for which he served in various capacities, including executive secretary, from 1921-1963.

Miller helped to engage and steer Mennonite values and ministry into a global perspective, while integrating sound business and organizational principles.

He was “an incredible catalyst” with unique organizational skills, and “passionately committed to the church with a vision for mission,” says ACRS founder , who was director of an Anabaptist-Mennonite bookstore financed by Miller and other Lancaster businessmen in the mid-1960s in Luxembourg, Belgium. “He would start a project, then find the personnel and the organizations to carry it on.”

Seeing a need often meant forming an organization to meet that need: Miller was the motivating force behind the founding of many Mennonite organizations, including Mennonite Mental Health Services, Mennonite Indemnity, Mennonite Mutual Aid, Mennonite Travel Service, and several others.

Hundreds of young men were indebted to Miller – and had their lives changed forever – because of Miller’s creation and administration of Civilian Public Service, the alternative to military service that allowed conscientious objectors to fulfill their civic responsibilities.

Miller married into the shoe manufacturing business and ran it with acumen and dedication throughout his life. Yet “to the end his life, he maintained his vision for service, never allowing his considerable wealth to determine his needs,” Gingerich said, adding that Miller could have easily afforded a Lincoln Continental, but instead drove a Ford Falcon.

Miller died in 1977 at the Landis Retirement Home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, yet another enterprise he was instrumental in founding and supporting.

Keim’s work provides inspiration

A standard feature of the ACRS Annual General Meeting is a time to discuss the group’s ongoing work and vision. At one of those times, many years ago, members noted the need for a comprehensive biography of Miller that would address the full range of his personality and involvements not covered in a previous 1969 biography by Paul Erb.

Another inspiration for the Miller project was the work of the late Albert N. Keim ’63, professor emeritus of history at EMU and an ARCS member. Keim’s biography of Harold S. Bender, a professor of theology at Goshen College and Goshen Biblical Seminary, was published in 1998.

“Harold Bender was tremendously influential on theological matters in the same way that Orie Miller was tremendously influential in shaping Mennonite influence today,” said ’64, ACRS interim director.

Miller’s accomplishments as a leader are widely recognized. EMU houses an , which promotes interdisciplinary activities and scholarship modeled after the man’s visionary integration of business, mission, development, education, justice and peace.

In addition, EMU, ACRS, Mennonite Central Committee, and Mennonite Economic Development Associates are in the early stages of planning a leadership conference at EMU in early April 2016 that will highlight Miller’s leadership within the Mennonite church, according to, vice president and dean of the .

Editor’s note: In April 2015, the Pax program was chosen as the recipient of the annual Gandhi Center Community Service Award. To read about this event, click .

In late April, Lehman, now 85, made another trip – not quite so far – from his home in Ohio to James Madison University (JMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where he and nearly 60 other “Paxers,” including organization co-founder and former leader Cal Redekop, received a from JMU’s .

Pax, a program of (MCC), was created in response to the reinstatement of the military draft in the United States after the start of the Korean War. Mennonites, Quakers, Brethren and other conscientious objectors could perform alternative service in Europe, and later in Africa and South America. Pax continued until 1975, three years after the draft ended. By the time the program closed, nearly 1,200 young Americans, and some Canadians, had served in 40 countries.

An ‘influential’ program

Nearly 300 people packed a reception hall at JMU to celebrate the organization’s legacy. Terry Beitzel, director of the Mahatma Gandhi Center, noted that Pax was receiving only the fourth award in the center’s 10-year history. The center gives a global nonviolence award, which has been presented to former President Jimmy Carter and first lady Rosalynn Carter and South African anti-apartheid leader Desmond Tutu, and also the community service award, past co-recipients of which include restorative justice pioneer , a professor at ��ݮ���� (EMU), and JMU nursing professor Vida Huber.

“Pax was chosen for the award because of its contribution to establishing alternative service programs and influencing the formation of the U.S. Peace Corps, but primarily because of the emphasis on service to others,” said Beitzel, who has taken courses and taught at EMU’s and earned a PhD in conflict analysis and resolution from George Mason University.

“Pax serves as an example of service and peacemaking for all of us today,” said JMU Provost Jerry Benson.

Redekop, now 89 and living in Harrisonburg, accepted the award on behalf of Pax and its volunteers.

“I’m only the handmaiden for Pax or handlanger – German for lackey,” he said, before calling up ‘76, who chairs the MCC U.S. board. Hershberger, a professor at EMU, spoke of the Pax legacy and how it affected her own MCC work, with husband Jim ‘82, in Central America.

‘Paxers’ still connected

Redekop and Paul Peachey ‘45 dreamed up the new organization while the two were in Europe serving in post-war relief efforts with MCC. (Both Peachey, who eventually taught at EMU, and Redekop went on to academic careers in the field of sociology. Redekop is also a former business executive who has written widely on Christian ethics in business.)

Inspired by the Latin word for peace, the Pax program began in Europe with housing projects for war refugees, including German-speaking Mennonites from Ukraine, who were caught between the German and Soviet armies. Redekop, raised in the Midwest in an immigrant community of German-speaking Mennonites from Russia, was able to communicate in the low-German dialect.

The cultural exchange between Paxers and the people they helped was rich and rewarding. Lowell E. Bender ’67, current MCC board member and the evening’s master of ceremonies, was a Pax worker in Germany, Austria and Greece from 1961-63, where he witnessed the long-term devastation caused by the war while constructing new houses for families whose homes had been destroyed years before. Bender came back to the United States after his service and enrolled at EMU.

“We were all changed by our experiences,” he said, of the Paxers.

“Many of the Pax veterans still stay in touch with the people they served,” says ‘62, whose interest in the German language and culture began with his Pax tour and eventually led to a teaching career as a German language professor (he retired from EMU in 2004). Reunions of the , the unit Glick served in, have been held nine times since 1970, including once in Salzburg, Austria.

Paul M. Harnish ’64, of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, visited a large, modern chicken processing co-op that he helped start years ago in an impoverished area of Greece. His little hatchery began with 500 chicks imported from the United States. Harnish remembers his delivery being complicated by the need to spend the night in a hotel with the chicks before he could return to the village.

Editor’s Note: The history of the Pax program is featured in two books: Urie Bender’s Soldiers of Compassion (1969) and Cal Redekop’s The Pax Story: Service in the Name of Christ (2001). A 2008 award-winning documentary Pax Service: An Alternative to War was produced by Burton Buller, Cal Redekop and Albert Keim, a former EMU history professor.

It was odd. Especially considering the makeshift campsite that Redekop and friends Richard Wagner and the late Paul Peachey had chosen was isolated atop a hill in Athens, Greece.

They had settled in the evening before and ate a modest dinner as they marveled at what Redekop said was the perfect campsite with a perfect view, the sun setting on the Parthenon.

But the police kicking up dirt clearly had another opinion.

“I was taken down to the Athens police station,” Redekop, now 86, said as he retold one of the more memorable tales from the group’s three-week journey across Europe.

“They had a person who spoke English who wondered what in the world we were doing there,” he said.

The next morning, all three underwent a 90-minute interrogation. After getting everything cleared up, they were allowed to tour the Parthenon — as long as they had a police escort.

“[He] turned out to be a nice little interpreter,” Redekop laughed. “By the time we left, we were sort of great friends.”

For family and friends, the story demonstrates the spirit of adventure that Peachey, who died at age 93 on Saturday at the , carried throughout his life.

“We would go on family vacations and we would take a tent and everywhere we went, we would find a campground,” said one of his sons, George Peachey, of Silver Spring, Md. “We went to Mexico that way and we went to Canada that way. We had a great time.”

Paul Peachey, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2001, was a former sociology professor at Catholic University. He was known for his love of having deep, often philosophical conversations, a devotion to his family and wife, his emergency relief work following World War II and as an advocate for peace.

“He led by example, very effectively,” his son, James Peachey, of Silver Spring, Md. said. “Peace was central to his way of life. He did not just quote [peace] as something you should do, he really put it into practice.”

Paul Peachey traveled widely due to his and service efforts with and Church Peace Mission. Travel was something he was not familiar with as a child growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania.

The second of 10 children, Peachey was born in a log cabin and was 5 years old when his family moved to a 135-acre Amish-Mennonite farm a mile north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Peachey was on the path to being a lifelong farmer.

But from a young age, an interest in learning, spurred along by his father, was evident. His brother, Laban Peachey, 85, recalls Paul Peachey reading everything he could get his hands on, from Pennsylvania Farmer magazine to a 600-page history of Rome.

“His father always had an interest in books and learning,” said Paul’s daughter, Janet Peachey, of Washington, D.C. “Although they were farmers, that was somehow in the background.”

Peachey received a degree from Eastern Mennonite School, now ��ݮ����, where he met his match in Ellen Shenk, whom he married in 1945.

The two traveled and lived in various countries together — Belgium, Germany, Japan — performing postwar service work. Peachey also earned a doctorate in sociology from the University of Zurich while living in Switzerland.

“He was extremely devoted to my mom,” said George Peachey.

In 2001, after helping form and living in a religious retreat center in West Virginia, the couple moved to VMRC, where they spent the remainder of their years. Ellen Peachey preceded her husband in death by three months.

“For awhile, [my dad] and my mom would take walks in the woods next to VMRC, which is one of the places they had gone in courtship,” said James Peachey. “There was this stone chimney there that I think his class had built as a gift to the university. That chimney is still there. [I thought it was] a very charming bookend. … They had started [a life] together [there] and then they ended in the same place again.”

Father George McLean (r.), general editor, presents Paul Peachey with a copy of his book "Building Peace and Civil Society: An Autobiographical Report from a Believers’ Church" (Washington, D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2007). Chapters 1-16 is a collection of essays by Peachey, 1952-2003, nearly all previously published in widely scattered sources. The remaining chapters are autobiographical and published for the first time. Photo by Ray Gingerich

Roman Catholics and Mennonites are engaging each other in discussions at many levels.

A much-reported example was the visit of a Mennonite World Conference delegation to the Vatican in October this year. An extraordinary document, "Called Together: Report of the International Dialog Between the Catholic Church and Mennonite World Conference (MWC), 1998-2003," provides a backdrop for much of the current exchange.

At EMU, the Anabaptist Center for Religion and Society (ACRS) sponsored a conference entitled "The Church – Catholic and Anabaptist." The initiative for the Nov. 29-30 event was a long-standing friendship between Dr. Paul Peachey and Father George McLean, both emeritus professors at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Peachey and McLean have collaborated in a decades-long global inter-religious dialog in Europe and Asia on issues of violence and peace.

The ACRS is an organization started by a group of retired academics to explore issues relevant to the contemporary scene. Dr. Peachey, a prominent ACRS member, suggested that a conversation between Anabaptists and Catholics on ecclesiology might benefit both parties while helping to clarify disparate ways of being in the world.

Father McLean began the proceedings by pointing out that much inter-religious dialog today is rooted in the notion that differences must be understood as conflict. McLean suggested it be cast in a new way – as "diachronic" – that is, differences change in the context of time and as a result of changing circumstances. A current example of diachronic activity, he pointed out, is "the flurry of discussion between Catholics and Anabaptists."

A dinner discussion ensued where Peachey and McLean regaled the gathering with stories of their global inter-religious encounters.

In a subsequent session Dr. Nancy Heisey related the experiences of the MWC delegation to the Vatican, which provided a wonderful real-time element to the conference.

Two major addresses focused on ecclesiology. Ray Gingerich, professor emeritus of religion of EMU, offered an Anabaptist theological perspective on the church. Professor Bill Barbieri of Catholic University offered a descriptive ecclesiological survey of contemporary church issues, especially related to questions of authority.

Perhaps the most important question was the relationship of churchly authority to issues of freedom and coercion from Catholic and Anabaptist points of view.

There is always an asymmetrical quality to Catholic/Anabaptist ecclesial interchange – Catholic verticality and Anabaptist horizontalism. Catholics have a quite precise ecclesiology; Mennonites not so much. This must leave Catholics wondering which strain of Anabaptist thinking represents the Mennonite position.

For ACRS, the encounter was wonderfully engaging and worthwhile. We hope our Catholic counterparts found it equally stimulating.

Albert N. Keim is professor emeritus of history at ��ݮ����.

For 50 minutes on Friday morning, Feb. 18, in the President’s Room of Hartzler Library, it was something of a time warp.

Three scholars, part of a seven-member group who assembled in 1952 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to critique the status and direction of the Anabaptist movement, interacted with students in a "Mennonite History and Thought" class.

Irvin B. Horst, 89; Paul Peachey, 86; and Calvin Redekop, 79, outlined their involvement in what proved to be a landmark 12-day meeting that also included John W. Miller, A. Orley Swartzendruber, David A. Shank and the late John Howard Yoder. All were living in Europe at the time, doing graduate study or post-war work with Mennonite Church agencies.

"Dr. Al Keim, professor emeritus of history at EMU and author of a major biography of the late Mennonite theologian and educator H.S. Bender, called that gathering "the most creative event in Mennonite history," Mary S. Sprunger, professor of history, told the class in introducing the speakers. "This ‘reunion’ today of three of those original group members is also an historic event."

Dr. Horst, a one-time professor of church history at EMU who later taught 18 years at a Mennonite seminary in Amsterdam, was instrumental in bringing the original group together and in providing insight into similarities and differences between American and Dutch Mennonite faith and practice.

"American Mennonites were becoming more and more acculturated, especially after World War II, just as Dutch Mennonites had generations before," Horst said.

Dr. Redekop, a sociologist and author, is the only "Concern" member not of "Old Mennonite" background. Of Russian Mennonite descent, Redekop said he was raised "a fundamentalist" and was "quite taken back" upon enrolling at Goshen (Ind.) College in 1946.

"Although at first I felt like an alien [at Goshen] my experience there made me appreciate my Anabaptist heritage, and I quickly found myself stimulated and encouraged by the interaction in that European group meeting," he told the students.

The gathering became known as the "Concern" movement, and from this initial meeting came subsequent gatherings and the issuing of a series of widely-distributed "Concern" pamphlets addressing several key issues they felt the Mennonite Church needed to squarely face.

"Even though we all had done graduate study in church-related areas, our group didn’t focus as much on theological issues as on polity – the question of power and authority in the church and are we congregationally structured or more of an authoritarian body," Dr. Redekop said.

"Our aim was to ‘critique’ the Mennonite Church, not to set it off in a new direction," Redekop stated. "We all were influenced by the thought and writings of Harold S. Bender, the most prominent Mennonite leader of the 1940s and 1950s."

"Unfortunately, Bender felt threatened by our efforts, when really what we wanted was to take his work a step farther," Peachey said. "However, a number of the younger generation of Mennonites appreciated what we were trying to do."

"Our desire was to work at reform and revival as an Anabaptist people and not to promote divisiveness and schism," Redekop said. "I think we achieved that goal."

He noted that an intentional church community, Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston, Ill., evolved from the "Concern" movement with one of the group members, John W. Miller, giving leadership.

"I wanted to introduce students to the story of these young Mennonites who were trying to find a way to make 16th century Anabaptism relevant for the church in the 1950s and ’60s," Dr. Sprunger said. "They took these issues seriously and dared to propose radical ideas about New Testament congregationalism to a hierarchical church leadership that didn’t welcome the Concern group’s critique of Mennonite denominationalism.

"Even though they wore suits and listened to lectures on Mennonite history, this was a kind of activism," she said. "Scholarly research, discussion and publishing was their way to raise issues and call the church they loved to be more faithful."

"The speakers captured an important topic that still faces the church today – distribution of power," said Paul J. Yoder, a junior history and social studies major from Harrisonburg. "I appreciated the emphasis on reform that they voiced. It’s rare to get to talk with and hear from actual figures that we’re studying in class," Yoder added.