Remembering Jack

An “enthusiast” with a singular focus packed the church | Andrée Seu

Handout

This is a little strange for me. I am about to write about a man who planted our church in the early '70s, and whose preaching I sat under till his death in 1996, but whom I never really knew. His books have lain around the house like throw pillows, and when I suddenly wanted to read one I couldn't find one. Impatient, I ordered Outgrowing the Ingrown Church on Amazon.

Jack Miller had been my professor at seminary too, in '77, and I thought I hadn't got my money's worth. I had a definite idea in those days of what my money's worth was, and it wasn't talk about relationship with Jesus, which we all already knew. I wanted paradigms and Greek words and gee-whiz hermeneutics.

There were plenty of books on church growth when Jack wrote his, but some of them, I think now, were like smearing lipstick on a corpse. Jack gently suggested that the problem was not program-related but faith-related. "In some cases, congregations and their leaders have even come to suspect zeal for witness as evidence of fanaticism—or at least a sign of immaturity." This is getting down and dirty, into the not so polite questions of what a church is supposed to look like.