Miller, George (16 Feb. 1774-5 Apr. 1816), preacher, was born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, the son of Jacob Miller, a miller and millwright, and Elizabeth (maiden name unknown). His parents were German Lutherans. Soon after George's birth, the family moved to Alsace Township, Berks County. Jacob Miller died when George was eleven. Within months, the boy suffered a serious illness, probably rheumatic fever, that confined him for nearly two years. Though his education was limited, he received a Bible while a teenager and read it through in eighteen months, which especially pleased his mother. In his sixteenth year he attended catechetical instructions at Trinity Lutheran Church in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he was confirmed in 1789, though he lacked a sense of salvation at the time. For a time he desired a "change of heart," but his growing disinclination toward any vital experience of religion soon suppressed any continued awakenings of his conscience.
At age nineteen Miller went to live with his brother John Miller and soon became a master millwright. In 1798 he purchased land and built a gristmill in Brunswick Township, Schuylkill County. Two years later he married Magdalena Brobst.
Miller began again to read the Bible and to discourse with some people who were persecuted for their "experiential" religion. Through the preaching of Jacob Albright, Methodist exhorter, he came to realize that true religion required more than virtuous conduct and that religious conversion entailed a renewal of heart. Although resolute and penitent for some three years, Miller felt no assurance of acceptance by God.
In 1800 Albright began to organize his German converts into small groups, or classes, that would become known for a while as "Albright's People." On 3 June 1802, shortly after Albright preached in the Miller home, Miller felt an assurance of salvation by faith while at work in his mill. As he said later in his autobiography, "A stream of his love flowed into my soul, and I was certain that God was surely my friend and I his accepted child." Many evangelical groups in Albright's circle subsequently adopted Miller's phrasing, "God is my friend," to show a conscious link to divine favor.
Though at first he was too timid to claim his experience in public, Miller vowed to serve God entirely. His brother Solomon Miller and Solomon's wife (Magdalena's sister) soon were converted under the preaching of Albright and John Walter. Albright appointed George Miller as a class leader, although Miller's own wife did not fully accept his new religious stance. Neither did the many people who began persecuting Miller. Neighbors tried to ruin his mill, customers left their bills unpaid, and creditors pressed for payment. His father-in-law also actively opposed Miller's new profession of faith and its consequences.
In 1803 Miller attended and served as secretary of a small council that decided to ordain Albright as an elder, a move suggesting that Albright's People were becoming a distinct denomination. After selling his land and setting up a new mill in Albany, Miller resolved "to forsake all for Jesus and the Gospel." He rented his house and in April 1805 became an itinerant preacher under Albright and Walter in Lancaster, Dauphin, and Berks counties. He began revivals in several places, including Jonestown and the Northumberland circuit, and set up new class meetings in many homes, such as that of Michael Becker in Muhlbach.
For four years Miller was a circuit-riding preacher through nineteen counties in eastern Pennsylvania. In May 1806 Albright named him as one of three itinerant preachers in full connection with Albright and Walter. In November 1807 the first regular "annual conference" was held at Becker's home. Albright was elected a bishop, and Miller was elected an elder (the first after Albright) of the 200-member group that now called itself the "Newly Formed Methodist Conference," indicative of Albright's Methodist background and inclinations. Albright was asked to put together a book of discipline for the organization, but he died in May 1808 before completing the task.
Later in 1808 some friends asked Miller to assume work on the discipline. On Christmas, after a portentous dream, Miller awakened with chest pains, became more ill as the day progressed, and finally decided to go home. He never fully regained his health, and he never again traveled extensively in the connection but "located" instead on his farm. Under these circumstances, he completed the book of discipline, Glaubenslehre und allgemeine Regeln christlicher Kirchen-Zucht und Ordnung der sogenannten Albrechts-Leute, which the conference published in 1809. He based this work largely on material translated by Ignatius Roemer from The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church (1792; rev. ed., 1808). Miller's book included rules of organization, articles of religion, and selections from the writings of John Wesley and John Fletcher.
Miller chaired several successive annual conferences of the leaders of Albright's People from 1809 (meeting in his home) to 1813. Three years after election as an elder, he was ordained at the 1810 session. That conference also adopted a set of procedures and rules, which Miller had compiled to facilitate the business of the conference. The 1812 conference asked Miller to draw up an episcopal plan of government for the group, which numbered nearly a thousand members. During that period he also wrote and published the first biography of Albright and a devotional book, Thatiges Christenthum (1814), which was published in English as Practical Christianity in 1871.
Miller spent the last four years of his life on a new farm in Dry Valley, Union County. He preached locally as much as possible but suffered prolonged bouts of illness, which kept him from the annual conference in 1815. In July of that year he began writing his autobiography, which he finished in four months. Early in 1816 he was confined to bed, where he remained for the last three months of his life, with chest pains then thought to be consumption but now thought to be heart disease resulting from his childhood rheumatic fever. He died in New Berlin, Pennsylvania.
In the year of Miller's death, Albright's people called a general conference, at which they renamed their new denomination the Evangelical Association. Miller must be counted as one of the pillars of the group. In 1946 it became a part of the Evangelical United Brethren church, which merged in 1968 with the Methodist church to form the United Methodist church. With only a meager education, Miller was the first author in the original Evangelical fellowship. His writing has been described as "severely plain" but "truly practical." He was a powerful preacher, who, it was said, could "shine and thunder," and his preaching emphasized sanctification (the possibility of the believer being sanctified, or made holy, by the work of the Holy Spirit). He was one of the denomination's primary organizers, its most effective evangelist after Albright, and having lived what he preached, one of its best-remembered saints.
Miller's autobiography, first published in Leben, erfahrung und amtsfuhrung zweyer evangelischer prediger, Jacob Albrecht und George Miller (1834), was translated in Reuben Yeakel, ed., Jacob Albright and his Co-Laborers (1883). Miller's brief biography of Albright, Kurze Beschriebung der workenden Gnade Gottes bey dem erleuchteten evangelischen Prediger Jacob Albrecht (1811), was translated by George E. Epp, Jacob Albright, the First Biography of the Founder of the Evangelical Association (1959). Major attention is given to Miller in Yeakel, History of the Evangelical Association, vol. 1 (1894), and J. Bruce Behney and Paul H. Eller, The History of the Evangelical United Brethren Church (1979).
Richard P. Heitzenrater
Richard P. Heitzenrater. "Miller, George"; _http://www.anb.org/articles/08/08-01010.html_ (http://www.anb.org/articles/08/08-01010.html); American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Date: Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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