Cheer Up! Come On, Let’s Die Together: It’s a Great Way to Come to Life

Cheer Up! Come On, Let’s Die Together: It’s a Great Way to Come to Life

Thirty Years Since the Death of Jack Miller

By Michael A. Graham

I. Two Deaths in Spain

On March 26, 2026, Rose Marie Miller died peacefully in her sleep at their home in Malaga, Spain. She was 101 years old. Her daughter Keren, her grandson Alex, and her granddaughter Tevah were with her. Thirty years earlier and in the same country, her husband Jack had died on April 8, 1996, in a hospital in the same city. He was sixty-seven. Rose Marie, their son Paul, and their daughters Barbara and Keren were at his bedside. His last words to them were “I love you.”

In February 1996, weeks before his death, Jack preached what would be his last conference at Die Arche church in Hamburg, Germany. Rose Marie recalled that Jack was so weak he could hardly stand, much less preach. He preached anyway. “Cheer up,” he told the congregation, “you’re much worse than you think, and you’re more loved than you ever dared hope.” And then: “If Christ could save a seminary professor, he could save anyone.” They returned through London to Malaga at the end of February to recover in the warmer climate. Within weeks, he was gone.

Rose Marie’s funeral is April 13, 2026. Jack’s funeral was April 13, 1996. The same date, thirty years apart.

Between those two funerals, Rose Marie lived the way Jack had taught — or rather, the way the gospel had taught them both. After Jack died, she told a colleague that she did not know how to carry on. She had always depended on Jack to do for her what only her Heavenly Father could do. Now she had to learn what it meant to be a beloved daughter of God and not only Jack Miller’s wife. She learned.

Most people who know Jack Miller’s name know the broad strokes. Jack was a pastor and seminary professor who experienced a dramatic spiritual renewal in 1970 and spent the rest of his life calling the church back to the gospel. Jack planted churches in Uganda, founded World Harvest Mission, and wrote books that changed lives. Tim Keller said Jack taught him how to preach grace no matter what the text. Dennis Johnson called Jack “the humblest, boldest follower of Jesus whom I have ever met.”

All of that is true, and none of it is deep enough.

Jack staked his life on the claim that the gospel has the power to change anyone who takes it to heart. For a man built on self-reliance, receiving grace by faith alone meant the dismantling of everything he trusted in place of God. The gospel was the door into the Christian life — Jack knew that from his conversion. But Jack left the gospel behind and moved on, the way most of us do. It took years of spiritual exhaustion before the Spirit of Christ humbled him back to see that the gospel is also the foundation the Christian life stands on, and the umbrella covering the believer all the way to final justification.

When Jack began to go with the gospel again, he went as a man who needed to hear it himself. The Spirit of Christ preached the gospel to Jack as Jack preached it to others. Jack wanted every person in the church to know that same gospel — not just the pastor, not just the trained evangelist — because the gospel is the power of God for salvation. How that works, and why the church has largely moved away from it, is what this essay is about.

II. What Have You Done with God?

Jack Miller had a question he asked during Sonship talks that could stop a room: “What have you ever started doing or stopped doing because you love Jesus Christ?” Jack told of people being converted on the spot through that simple question. You sat there thinking about what you had actually done, what you had actually stopped doing — and the honest answer was convicting. What most of us did not realize, sitting in those rooms, was that the question did not originate with Jack. Jack had taken it from the Dutch missiologist J. H. Bavinck. Bavinck’s version was blunter: “What have you done with God?” The question does not come from a textbook. It comes from the Bible — from a single Greek word the Holy Spirit uses to describe His own work.

The word “elenctics” comes from the Greek verb ἐλέγχω (elencho) — to convict, expose, unmask, rebuke. Jesus used the word in John 16:7–11 when He told His disciples that the Helper — the Holy Spirit — “will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.”

This can sound confusing. We are used to calling the Holy Spirit the Comforter, and convicting does not sound like comfort. But the older English “comforter” comes from the Latin com-fortis — with strength. The Comforter is the one who comes alongside with strength. Elenctics is the Spirit’s convicting work: exposing what is hidden, unmasking what we have done with God, bringing the sinner to see himself in the light of the gospel.

The crucial point — and the one the church has largely moved away from — is the person who the Spirit convicts first.

The biblical word had a long theological heritage. Francis Turretin’s seventeenth-century Institutes of Elenctic Theology made elenctics a subfield of systematic theology. Bavinck’s contribution was to take elenctics out of systematic theology and put it on the mission field. In his Introduction to the Science of Missions, Bavinck devoted fifty pages to the Spirit’s convicting work in the encounter between the gospel and the non-Christian heart. At the end of those fifty pages, Bavinck wrote a single paragraph about the preparation of the one who brings the message. Jack quoted that paragraph for the rest of his life:

It is not easy to have real fellowship with God. We can much more easily bury Him under a concept, shove Him away to an endless distance, dissolve Him in all sorts of secular realities, and make Him into a nice fairy tale of boundless beauty. Anyone who knows himself to any extent knows the finesse with which man can escape from God and wrestle free from His grasp. To be really able to convict anyone else of sin, a person must know himself, and the hidden corners of his heart, very well. There is no more humbling work in the world than to engage in elenctics (unmasking). For at each moment, the person knows that the weapons which he turns against another have wounded himself. The Holy Spirit first convicts us, and then through us, He convicts the world.

Bavinck is naming something most of us would rather not look at. The four moves he lists — burying God under a concept, shoving Him to an endless distance, dissolving Him into secular realities, making Him into a fairy tale — all do the same work. Each one gets God out of the way so that we can keep running things ourselves.

Jack’s colleague Harvie Conn taught elenctics at Westminster Seminary, following Bavinck’s missional framework. Conn’s students — most notably Tim Keller, who served as an elder at Jack’s New Life church — carried that missional elenctics to New York and, through City to City, to cities around the world. Jack shared their heart for the cities. Jack’s path out was different. Conn and Keller gave their lives to the honorable work of teaching the church how to communicate grace across cultures. Jack turned Bavinck’s missional elenctics back on the church itself — on the pastor going with the gospel, and on every Christian who goes with the gospel. The one who goes must be the first one convicted. Jack wrote: “The essence of elenctics, the bringing of sinners to shame for their playing God, depends upon ourselves having been first brought to shame.” The conviction is not a stage you finish before ministry begins. It is the ongoing condition of the one who goes.

Going with the gospel as a sinner saved by grace takes an enormous pressure off the one who goes. Jack did not have to save anyone. The Spirit saves. Jack’s part was to go honestly, with the gospel in his hands, as a man who needed it himself. Wanting the pastor to be the chief repenter in the church follows from this. Joy followed. “Cheer up — you’re much worse than you think, and you’re more loved than you ever dared hope.”

The gospel is a spoken word of good news. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. “Preach the gospel to yourself” is Jack’s phrase for the practice underneath all of this — the recognition that the believer is the first hearer of every gospel word he will speak. The same Spirit who will use that word in the next sinner he meets uses it in him now, and the faith it produces in him sends him out to others with the same good news.

What faith has received in this hearing is Christ Himself, in His fullness. Jack would point to Calvin: “In God is the fountain of life, righteousness, power, and wisdom: but this fountain is hidden and inaccessible to us. Yet in Christ the wealth of all these things is laid before us that we may seek them in Him… we need not fear that we shall lack anything if we only draw upon the fulness of Christ.” Christ is the fountain. The drinking and the going are two parts of one motion.

III. Grace for the Long Haul

Jack Miller grew up an orphan. His father died in a hunting accident when Jack was two. An abusive stepfather followed. At twelve, Jack declared himself an atheist. At fifteen, he dropped out of school and moved to San Francisco to get away from his stepfather and to make a life for himself. Jack later put his early religion plainly: “If there was one thing I had learned from my family, it was the importance of self-reliance. Until I met Christ, this had been my religion.”

In San Francisco Jack moved in with his older sister. She came to faith during this stretch, and as her new life took hold she began talking with Jack about it. Jack went with her to church. He read his Bible on the bus to and from work. After months of conversation he decided he had become a Christian and set about acting like one — old habits put down, new ones picked up, Scripture studied, conduct corrected. A pastor at the church asked him to speak one evening, and Jack stood up in front of the room and described his decision to become a Christian before he actually had become a Christian.

In March 1945, word reached Jack in San Francisco that his oldest brother had been killed spotting for artillery on a mountain ridge in Italy, two weeks before his scheduled discharge. His oldest sibling was the closest person to a father Jack had known. Jack came to the end of the road. He made his way home to Gold Beach with what he himself called a “sort of half-way conversion.” Of those next three and a half years he said: “At least a non-Christian still had some fun. Who wanted to drink the vinegar I had going down me every day?”

In December 1948, Jack was sitting at home in Gold Beach reading J. Gresham Machen’s Christian View of Man. The chapter was on divine election. Machen cited Ephesians 1, and Jack’s temper flared. Jack threw the book aside, opened his Bible to settle the matter, and found the doctrine there. “It was like gasoline touched by a lighted match,” Jack wrote. “Almost instantly I was fully awake. What was this incredible stuff?” What upset Jack most, he later said, was “the loss of my choice. It seemed somehow to rob me of the most important thing in my life.” A question rose up in Jack: “Who does God think He is anyway?” The answer came back from the page with a question of its own: “God! And who do you think you are?” Jack recalled: “The starkness of my insane answer shocked me. I thought I was ‘God.’ In another moment my whole being was filled with a painful sense of shame.”

The right to choose for himself was the only thing Jack had left from a fatherless childhood. It was the weapon he had been fighting God with. Jack’s prayer in that moment was simple: “God, forgive me. God, I had you all wrong. I will put down my weapons. I will stop fighting you. God, I don’t know why you would want me, but I am giving myself to you anyway, here.” The fatherless boy finally laid down his self-reliance, and his Father had him.

The order matters. Jack did not learn elenctics from Bavinck and then go looking for sinners to convict. The Spirit did elenctics on Jack’s own heart first, in 1948, in Gold Beach, with no Bavinck anywhere in sight and no word for what was happening. The gospel was prior. Bavinck simply gave Jack, decades later, a name and a paragraph for what the Spirit had already done to him.

Jack walked through the door. Jack married Rose Marie Carlsen in January 1950, studied under Van Til at Westminster, pastored a church plant in Stockton, and by 1966 was back at Westminster on the faculty as Lecturer in Practical Theology. By 1968 — pastor, seminary professor, scholar, husband, father of five — Jack’s brilliance was visible from any angle a Reformed observer would care about.

Over those twenty years, without ever knowing he was doing it, Jack did what Bavinck describes. Jack still believed the gospel. Jack had simply buried it under sound doctrine, careful teaching, and the ordinary busyness of ministry. The shape of the evasion had changed. It was no longer the atheism of a fifteen-year-old in San Francisco. It was the orthodoxy of a thirty-eight-year-old at Westminster. But the work the evasion was doing was the same work. It was Jack getting God out of the way enough that he could keep some control over running his own life. The self-reliance had not fully died at the doorway of Jack’s initial conversion. The self-reliance had moved indoors and learned to speak the language of Reformed theology.

Through 1968 and 1969 the demands kept multiplying — Westminster classes, speaking invitations, the Mechanicsville pastorate — and Jack’s insecurity about his own preaching rose with them. With Edmund Clowney and others, Jack formulated a L’Abri-style ministry in New Hope, modeled on Francis Schaeffer’s work in Switzerland, and recruited William Edgar — a former intern of his, by then a Westminster graduate living in Connecticut with his wife and new baby — to come back to Pennsylvania to lead it. Within six months the work was collapsing. Jack turned on his protégé. Jack accused Edgar of spending too much time at Mechanicsville and of soliciting support from its people. Jack sent another minister to investigate. When Edgar tried to express the hurt, Jack required him to attend counseling. Jack was wrong about all of it. Jack had wounded a friend. The Edgars went back to Connecticut.

The pattern of the Spirit’s work on Jack was the same pattern that had unmasked him in 1948. The Spirit applied pressure on Jack to see his own people-pleasing, his own fear of failure, his own inability to admit that the New Hope ministry was collapsing because Jack himself was collapsing. Without the Spirit’s elenctical work, Jack could not bear his own sin. No one can. Sin demands a sacrifice, and the sacrifice has to fall somewhere. The honest, helpless move was for Jack to turn to Christ in that moment for more grace. That move would have cost Jack the one thing he was not yet willing to give up: control of his own life. So Jack made the other move. Jack laid the sacrifice on Bill Edgar. Now Jack’s self-reliance, Jack’s need for control, Jack’s hunger for approval were hurting the friend and student Jack loved.

In April 1970 Jack Miller resigned in disgust. Jack was disgusted with himself, disgusted with the institutional church, and disgusted with the seminary — the kind of move many Christians make in our own day, when an institution they have served comes to feel unbearable to them. Jack’s two-year Westminster term was ending in May. The new three-year appointment was on the table. Jack would not take it. Jack told Edmund Clowney he was not coming back. Jack told Mechanicsville Chapel the same. Jack came home to Rose Marie and said, “Honey, we don’t have a job anymore.”

Rose Marie was not surprised. Jack later put words to what had broken in him: “I had grown sick to death of the church viewed as a religious cushion and me as chief cushioner. I had been a pastor for more than a decade and an instructor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia for four years. I had given it all my best shot. But as a change agent I had bombed out.” Then Jack cried for two weeks in self-pity. And then an elenctics question came to Jack in his prayer: “Why are you weeping? Do you see yourself primarily as the victim? Are you blaming others when the basic fault may be yours?” Jack answered: “I saw depths of pride in myself that shocked me. I discovered that my pride expressed itself in people-pleasing and an avoidance of rejection. The plain truth was that I was a proud church leader who did not want to get hurt by his fellow Christians. I was expecting others to have a life of repentance and faith that I didn’t have.”

The rhyme is unmistakable. In 1948 the Spirit’s counter-question was “And who do you think you are?” In 1970 it was “Why are you weeping? Are you blaming others when the basic fault may be yours?” Twenty-two years apart, the same move — a converted man being shown how deeply his self-reliance still ran. Jack did not yet have a word for what was happening to him. The word was about to come.

The breakthrough came in the summer of 1970. Jack and Rose Marie took a sabbatical to Europe. They visited Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri in Switzerland, then spent three months on the coast of Spain near Barcelona while the children enjoyed the Mediterranean. Jack immersed himself in the promises of God across Scripture — Isaiah, the Gospel of John, the Old Testament prophets. What he found in John’s Gospel shook him. The promises of living water in John 7:37–39 were in the present tense. “Come and keep coming. Drink and keep drinking. Believe and keep believing.” The promises were not relics of a past Pentecost or hopes for a future consummation. They were alive, operative, now. Jack pulled out his Greek grammar to make sure he was not overstating what he saw. He was not.

Jack would later call this the crucial turning point of his life and ministry — not that he studied the promises, but that he decided to become a Trinitarian. Jack had always been a Trinitarian in the creedal sense. What he meant was that he became a functioning Trinitarian — a man who actually depended on the Holy Spirit as a present, active power in his life. “I believed in the Sovereignty of God, the greatness of the Father, the efficacy of the atonement, the riches of grace, the Son of God,” Jack explained. “But it all short-circuited because I had left the Holy Spirit out.” The Reformed insistence on the priority of the Spirit had drifted out of his life. It was not there.

When Jack returned to Philadelphia, something began to change in him that Rose Marie could see. Jack began to pray — not the dutiful prayers of a pastor who is supposed to pray, but the desperate prayers of a man who had discovered he could not do anything apart from the Spirit. Helplessness was not a hindrance to prayer but the condition of prayer. Jack wrote: “My incapacity becomes an advantage when I relate my need to God’s promises. My emptiness is what the Lord promises to fill with living water.”

It was in this period that Bavinck’s writing gave Jack words for what the Spirit had been doing to him for twenty-two years. Jack wrote in his first unpublished manuscript, “Preparation of the Man”: “The essence of elenctics, the bringing of sinners to shame for their playing God, depends upon ourselves having been first brought to shame.” Because grace was prior, the shame opened the door to joy.

Through 1971 Mechanicsville Chapel was growing so rapidly that its elders began pushing Jack to resign from Westminster and pastor full-time. Westminster did not allow its professors to do both. With the twenty-five-mile commute straining him and Rose Marie facing major surgery in February 1972, Jack sought counsel from Francis Schaeffer and other trusted friends. The counsel came back the other way: stay at Westminster, where Jack’s impact on a generation of young leaders would be greater than from the pulpit of a single country church. In early 1972 Jack resigned from Mechanicsville Chapel. A few weeks later, Rose Marie went into surgery.

In July of that same year, Jack and Rose Marie’s eighteen-year-old daughter Barbara told her parents plainly that she was rejecting the faith she had grown up in. Jack did not argue with her. Rose Marie did; it took her a while to accept that Barbara had chosen her own road. Jack went a different direction entirely. Jack took several months to study — not Barbara, but the depth of God’s love and his own need of deeper repentance as a father. In November 1972, Jack started a small prayer meeting in the Miller living room on Wednesday evenings, specifically to pray for his prodigal daughter, and during the same weeks he began expanding an earlier informal essay on repentance into something longer. The prayer and the repentance and the writing were not three projects running in parallel. They were one piece of work. Within a month, the little prayer group had begun praying for “a different kind of ministry” aimed at reaching non-Christians and people like Barbara who had walked out on the church. The people attending began asking their Westminster professor to consider planting a new church in Jenkintown, near his home and the seminary. This is how New Life Presbyterian Church of Jenkintown — later Glenside — was born.

In January 1973 Jack taught a winter-term intensive at Westminster called “Evangelism and the Local Church” — three hours a day, five days a week, for a month. The course required students to do actual evangelism as a practicum, and Jack organized them into a team that canvassed the neighborhood around his home and the seminary. New Christians from the canvassing joined the Wednesday prayer group, and the little gathering quickly outgrew the Miller living room. Forty-eight people packed in for the first official meeting of the new church, which had to move almost immediately — first to the Abingdon Free Library, then to the Abingdon YMCA by the summer of 1974.

The same year, after several months of intensive study on the message of the cross, Jack wrote a small booklet called A New Life. The booklet was the door into the Christian life — the one Jack had stepped through in 1948 — pocket-sized now, a catechism in the gospel for ordinary people. Jack wanted every person in the new church — not just the pastor, not just trained evangelists — to be able to put the gospel into words and share it with themselves, with one another, and with those outside the church. Every-member ministry was not a slogan. It was what the Spirit was producing in a congregation whose pastor had been brought to the end of himself and had found the gospel sufficient there.

The booklet is worth pausing over in light of elenctics. A New Life opens with a question on the front cover: “Have you ever wanted a new life?” Then Fact 1: “A loving God sent His Son Jesus into the world to bring you a new and abundant life.” The proof texts are John 7:37–38 and John 10:10 — the same present-tense promises that had broken Jack on the coast of Spain in 1970.

The most common complaint people raise about A New Life is that it over-promises. Jack heard that complaint in his own day and addressed it directly in his “Overview of the New Life Booklet.” “From the point of view of the skilled communicator,” Jack wrote, “the book attempts to say too much. It also has in it a certain exuberance, an unrestrained boasting about Christ. Some would say that it overpraises what grace can do to renew hurt, broken, and wicked people. Perhaps that is so. Yes, let me acknowledge the work of grace sometimes takes years to soak into our lives. Grace definitely is for the long haul and must overcome much resistance in our lives. But isn’t much of our problem right here? We tend to resist grace by underestimating what the Lord of grace can do for us?” Then, on the next page of the booklet itself, in big bold letters, comes the hinge question of elenctics: But why… why are so many people without this new life?

And this is why A New Life mattered in the life of the new church. The booklet was not a theological treatise for Westminster students. It was a short, pocket-sized, hand-to-hand tool for the forty-eight people in the Miller living room, and for everyone who came in after them, to put the gospel into their own mouths and carry it to the people around them. None of them needed to know the word “elenctics.” None of them needed to know what Bavinck had written. They just needed to be able to put John 10:10 in front of a neighbor, a coworker, a grown child, or themselves — and then to wait in the hinge question, because the Spirit was already at work underneath.

As the church grew, Jack was invited to speak at other churches about what was happening. At one of these engagements, the host pastor pushed back on Jack’s claim that the gospel can change anyone. The host pastor had just lost a member of his congregation to a mental health crisis. “The gospel can help ordinary people,” the pastor said. “Only medical experts can help people who are psychologically damaged.” Jack heard the question as sincere.

Later that night, back at his home, Jack sat quietly over tea with Rose Marie and a Westminster student. Jack was still turning the host pastor’s question over. And as Jack sat there, the Holy Spirit took the pastor’s legitimate question and pressed it home on Jack: “Do you really believe that Christ’s gospel can change anyone who believes it — or was that just talk on your part?”

Jack prayed. Jack and Rose Marie then committed to operate on the principle that the gospel would change anyone who would take it to heart. The Millers opened their home to all who came in need of help. People moved in — Roberta, then Mary, then others. The Millers’ youngest daughter Keren recalled: “Someone showed up at dinner time, we just shifted around. We didn’t have a lot of money, we were poor, so food was a little more soup, and we would all share.”

During that time Jack also wrote “How to Talk Effectively About the Lord Jesus,” teaching material from “Evangelism and the Local Church” at Westminster. The manuscript is the teaching side of what A New Life booklet put into people’s hands as a tool. At the end of the manuscript, Jack names what makes honest speech about Christ possible at all: “Elenctics, which is bringing sinners to shame, takes place only when we have first come to be ashamed of our own sins.”

IV. The Same Way It Began

In the fall of 1970 Jack came back from the trip to Spain that had broken him open, and his resignations at Westminster were rescinded at his colleagues’ request. Jack then walked the halls of the seminary, went to each of his fellow faculty members one at a time, and repented of his pride to their faces. And as Jack confessed his own pride, Jack asked each brother a question. How do you deal with your pride — including your theological pride?

That was not an accusing question. Jack was standing there having already confessed his own pride, and only then asking his brother to look at his pride in the same light. A man who has not been ashamed of his own pride cannot ask another man about his without wounding him.

Most of the Westminster faculty did not know what to do with the question. Some were uncomfortable. Some thought Jack had lost his bearings. Cornelius Van Til, the presuppositional apologist whose long conversations with Jack about Dooyeweerd went back to 1953, answered plainly that he struggled with his pride every single day. That is the answer of a man whose theology has driven him to the cross for his own soul, and who is willing to say so out loud in a hallway when another brother asks.

The Westminster of those years carried Machen’s inheritance from Princeton, and the scholarly weight of the seminary lived in the Biblical Theology department. Norman Shepherd was the dominant Biblical Theology voice on the faculty. Into that house the seminary had also built a small, unusual practical theology department: Edmund Clowney in ecclesiology, Jay Adams in counseling, and Jack Miller in evangelism. Of the three, Jack was the one whose evangelism had already spilled out of the classroom into something that looked like revival. Jack was stirring the pot before any theological controversy had been formally announced. And theological debate has always been one of the favorite places the human heart runs when it wants to talk about Jesus without having to encounter Him.

When Shepherd began pressing questions about justification in the mid-to-late 1970s, Shepherd was seeing a real problem. American evangelicalism was full of short evangelism booklets — including Jack’s own A New Life — that seemed to walk people through the door of salvation in three or four plain facts and then leave them to their own devices. D. James Kennedy’s Evangelism Explosion was multiplying across congregations. Campus Crusade was training college students to share the gospel in under ten minutes. Shepherd saw Christians who had been ushered through the door of the Christian life without being told anything serious about what it meant to live under Christ afterward. A church full of door-only Christians is a church in trouble.

Everyone in the controversy agreed that a Christian enters the Christian life by faith alone. Shepherd’s move was to use the Biblical Theology Westminster was strongest in to articulate a three-part picture of justification: how a Christian enters, how a Christian continues, and how a Christian is finally vindicated on the last day. On the second and third, Shepherd thought the Reformation tradition had been unclear. Precise, for Shepherd, meant that continuance and final justification were by a faith inseparable from the kind of works the Spirit produces in a believer. Shepherd called these works non-meritorious, because they were wrought by the Spirit rather than earned. Shepherd believed he was preserving grace at every step and defending sanctification against door-only Christianity.

Jack’s answer started from the same honest concern and went somewhere very different. Jack believed justification by faith alone is what makes sanctification a reality. A sinner standing on Christ’s finished righteousness is the only kind of sinner who has any ground from which to grow. The unique office of faith is to receive Christ — something no work can do. The moment any work is admitted alongside faith as the instrument of continuance before God — even a Spirit-wrought, non-meritorious work — faith is no longer doing its unique office. Jack put it plainly in the 1978 essay: “we may not say that faith and non-meritorious works both function as the means or instrument of justification. If we were to maintain this view, we would take away from the unique office that faith performs in our justification. That function is to receive Christ, something works can never do, no matter how you describe them.” Shepherd’s proposed fix for the door-only problem left the door intact and quietly removed the floor.

Jack went home to his desk and began to write — privately, not for publication. Before a critical word could leave Jack’s hand, Jack would sit down and write out plainly what he positively believed, because Jack had learned from his Dutch Reformed teachers that a critique not grounded in a prior positive confession has no ground to stand on. In 1978, as the faculty conversations with Shepherd intensified, Jack wrote a long unpublished essay titled “Justification by Faith in the Twentieth Century.”

Jack wrote of faith as “the sole doorway by which I enter into the house of salvation and receive Christ and all His glorious benefits, including justification.” Of the foundation Jack wrote that “we expect each disciple to have the foundation of justification and the obedience of faith,” and then immediately insisted it is wrong to identify “the righteousness of faith” with “the obedience of faith,” because such identification “confuses imputed righteousness with imparted righteousness.” Good works “follow justification and are of no account as the basis of our acquittal.” And of the umbrella Jack wrote that “the righteousness of Christ can function as an overarching umbrella throughout the believer’s life, providing a sure basis for the daily confession of sin and daily forgiveness.” Door, foundation, and umbrella were already in Jack’s own hand in 1978, before a single word of the April 1979 presbytery essay had been drafted.

In that same year, Jack gathered Bruce Hunt — the veteran Presbyterian missionary to Korea — and Cornelius Van Til, and brought both men and a crowd of students to the New York Stock Exchange. Two world-renowned Reformed theologians and a seasoned missionary stood side by side on a Manhattan sidewalk in the middle of an American workday, saying the plain name of Jesus Christ crucified out loud in front of strangers. The private writing and the public preaching came from the same place.

On February 10, 1979, in Rust Auditorium at Westminster, Norman Shepherd stood before his colleagues and used Jack’s own A New Life booklet as an example of the door-only Christianity Shepherd believed his three-part picture of justification was meant to correct. Jack was not in the room. Jack was in Oregon visiting his mother.

The booklet Shepherd held up already contained the answer Shepherd was not hearing. Fact 5 of A New Life, set down in plain sentences for an ordinary reader in 1973, said: “This new life continues in the same way it began — in faith and prayer.” In the 1978 essay Jack had insisted on the “priority of means.” Faith alone is the open, empty hand that receives Christ. Nothing else performs that office. Jack reached for Calvin’s commentary on Galatians: “When you are engaged in discussing the question of justification, beware of allowing any mention to be made of love or of works, but resolutely adhere to the exclusive particle.” Prayer, repentance, and love were all real in the Christian life, but none of them were the instrument by which a sinner continued in justification. Faith alone was. Jack did not back away from Fact 5 when Shepherd pressed him. Jack went deeper into it.

On April 11, 1979, Jack presented an essay to the Philadelphia Presbytery of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church titled “Continuance in Justification.” The essay is not polemical. Jack entered Shepherd’s categories, borrowed Shepherd’s own vocabulary, and untangled the confusion from inside them. Jack took up the three-part picture and focused on the middle pillar — continuance — and argued that the sole condition for continuance in justification is faith alone. “My purpose, then, is to affirm that always in justification understood as remission of sins we must keep faith and works in opposition. The sole condition for continuing in justification from sins is faith alone.”

Jack was not fighting for a formula. Jack was fighting for the confused — ordinary church members who had heard conflicting things from the pulpit about whether the blood of Christ was still covering them day by day, and who had been quietly left standing on their own obedience. Jack wrote the Continuance essay to put the gospel back under their feet. “When we confess our sins in Jesus’ name by faith alone, we must know that they are truly forgiven for His dear sake alone. The conscience as the courtroom of the soul is really set at rest altogether apart from any other conditionality than faith in Christ.”

Jack told a story of a young minister whose work had gone dry. The minister came up to Jack in tears. His first two years of ministry had been unusually fruitful and then something had dried up, and he could not say why. He suggested it might be pride. Jack gently added a question: “Do you suppose that somehow you began to offer your good works and accomplishments to God as a basis for your justification?” The young pastor looked, Jack later wrote, as if he had been cut to the heart by a dagger and burst into tears. Jack left him alone for a couple of hours. When Jack came back, the young pastor was filled with a joy Jack said he had never seen in a minister before. The pastor explained, “Of course, I was already a Christian. But through my self-righteousness and pride I was leaning heavily on my own record for my relationship with God.”

At the heart of the 1978 Justification essay Jack arrived at what he called the vital power of saving faith. Jack quoted Jesus in Mark 9:23 — “All things are possible to him that believes” — not as a self-help promise but as a description of what union with Christ brings into a believer’s life. The power is not triumphant. Jack described it this way: “the ability to pray for enemies, to bless those who curse, and to bear the fruit of the Spirit in family relationships. It is the grace to see eternity dawning with holy light while life ebbs away from a cancer-ridden body on a hospital bed.” The power of saving faith is weakness held up under grace.

Neither the 1978 Justification essay nor the 1979 Continuance essay was published in Jack’s lifetime. Both documents were recovered from the archive only many years later. For most of a generation after Jack’s death, the most settled written statement Jack had ever made about justification by faith alone and its continuance — door and foundation and umbrella, in his own hand — was sitting unread.

V. The Foundation Comes Underneath the Going

While Jack was writing the 1978 Justification essay and the 1979 Continuance essay at his desk, Jack was also teaching the book of Galatians out loud in three other rooms — the carriage house behind his home, the sanctuary of New Life Presbyterian Church, and the pastors’ conferences in Kampala. The teaching in those rooms became, within a few years, the Sonship Leadership Training course that went out through World Harvest Mission to missionaries in twenty-seven countries and pastors around the United States. What Norman Shepherd pressed Jack to clarify in writing, Jack was already teaching out loud to pastors and missionaries who would carry it across an ocean.

Jack’s door into Uganda was a Ugandan refugee named Kefa Sempangi, founding pastor of Redeemed Church in Uganda and Professor of Art History at Makerere University when Idi Amin seized power in 1971. In April 1973, while visiting Amsterdam, Sempangi met Edmund Clowney, the president of Westminster, at the home of Hans Rookmaaker — Sempangi’s former supervising professor at the Free University. That fall, Amin’s regime came for Sempangi. Sempangi, his wife Penina, and their daughter Damali barely escaped with their lives through Kenya back to Amsterdam. From there Sempangi wrote to Clowney to request admission to Westminster, and the seminary accepted him for the spring 1974 semester. Jack sent William Stump, an intern and founding New Life elder, to meet the Sempangi family on campus and help them settle in.

Sempangi had come up in a Pentecostal context shaped by the East African Revival, and the five points of Calvinism were, in his own words, “a big blow” to him. What kept him at Westminster was that he was meeting at least two versions of Reformed theology on the faculty. Jack was one of them — “a Calvinist,” in Sempangi’s words, “who was also a charismatic preacher.” Sempangi named two things in Jack’s teaching that he recognized from the Revival: an emphasis on corporate prayer, and the priority of faith enabling a Christian to walk in the light of ongoing repentance.

Out of that recognition came the friendship and eventually an invitation Jack could not have arranged for himself. On August 28, 1979, Sempangi formally asked New Life to send Jack to Uganda to plant a church like New Life in Kampala. On November 28, 1979, Jack and Rose Marie flew to Nairobi with a small team. David Powlison, Phil Gross, Walt Kendall, and Bob Heppe joined them in Uganda on Christmas Eve.

In Geneva, on the long stopover home, Jack said a sentence to his wife that Rose Marie has been telling for forty years. Jack told her she was acting like an orphan. Rose Marie has written Jack’s words this way: “Rose Marie, you act like an orphan. You don’t know anything about the Spirit.” Jack — whose own father had died when Jack was two — was the one who could see it in her, because Jack had been under the same word first.

The adventure stories of Kampala in 1980 are real. Phil Gross commandeered city garbage trucks and mounted signs on the sides that said Jesus is the answer, and drove the trucks through the streets of a city that had almost no public Christian voice left. Harvie Conn, who had been Sempangi’s teacher, came and preached off the back of one of those trucks. Jack baptized new believers at Lake Victoria. The garbage trucks and the baptisms were making room for the teaching Jack was about to sit down and do.

That teaching happened at two pastors’ conferences in Kampala: one in June 1981 and a second in February 1982. Jack taught the book of Galatians. The teaching was printed on loose handouts. Alan Smith, one of the team, began to gather the handouts into something more organized. Bob Heppe said it plainly: “Sonship started in Uganda…. Alan Smith was the first one to put together Jack’s teaching. We were handing out individual pieces of paper before that … Then there was Jack’s teaching in Philadelphia that Paul put together that became Sonship.” The course Reformed pastors on four continents would later take in sixteen lessons began as loose paper first handed out to Ugandan pastors in Kampala.

Jack came home from Uganda in the spring of 1982 and began teaching Galatians all over again in the carriage house behind his home. Small groups gathered in the evenings. Jack did not teach Galatians the way Reformed pastors ordinarily teach Galatians. Reformed pastors ordinarily teach Galatians as the book on justification by faith alone. Jack taught Galatians as the book on the ministry of the Holy Spirit on the foundation of justification by faith alone. Jack’s own words are worth hearing at length:

Many people think Galatians is concerned first of all with justification by faith since it’s so prominent. Galatians is not first of all concerned about justification by faith, but about the ministry of the Holy Spirit. If you open to [Galatians 3] and begin to read, you see that Paul’s whole argument is about the power and the vitality — and the protecting of that power and vitality — of the ministry of the Spirit. He starts out [by saying], “Look, you’re leaving the cross behind. You’re losing out on justification by faith, or you’re in danger of it.” But then you learn, his big thing, his big idea is: watch out that you don’t lose out on spiritual freedom and spiritual power. You go through that great treatment of justification by faith in Galatians 3:1–14, and you notice that verse 14 climaxes on the promise, and the promise is the promise of the Spirit.

Now the logic, as you look at the book [of Galatians] goes something like this: that you find the power of the Spirit not through some mystical or strange experience but simply by taking and keeping justification by faith as your foundation. That you don’t need to run around with a tape recorder trying to hear all the great preachers in the world…. You can’t be saved by great preachers and tape recorders; you have to be saved by Jesus Christ. Now if you keep justification behind you as something kind of on the shelf — “Oh! Yes, once I really trusted in Christ and in his blood shed for me, but that’s way behind me” — once you do that, you’ve lost spiritual power. So, by the Holy Spirit’s power we are always maintaining the foundation of justification by faith.

In other words, the book [of Galatians] is not primarily about justification by faith. It is about power, [and] that the way you get the power is always staying on that foundation. Don’t think of [the Christian life] simply as there is justification by faith back there — and here is adoption, and here is sanctification, and here is glorification — so that you kind of leave justification behind. Rather, justification is the permanent foundation, and you build on it, and as you grow up [in maturity], you are always in an utterly humble state with respect to justification. You can never do anything you can trust in for your own justification. And your [spiritual] power then lies in your continuing to forsake any righteousness of your own, and always trusting in Christ’s righteousness. And that gives you the power of sanctification, so that justification and sanctification don’t lie just alongside of each other. Sanctification lies on top of justification…. You might say the spiritual power begins and continues with the continued recognition of unworthiness and powerlessness.

That paragraph is the theological heart of what became Sonship. “Spiritual power begins and continues with the continued recognition of unworthiness and powerlessness” is not a technique and not a program. It is the daily condition of a Christian. Jack was teaching out of a life that was still being unmasked by the Spirit’s convicting work, and the carriage house was where Jack stood and said it out loud with Galatians open.

The name of the course came at the end of one of those evenings. Paul Miller, Jack’s son, was gathering the teaching into course materials the way Alan Smith had gathered it in Kampala. Paul asked his father what to call it. Paul later remembered that the two of them were leaving the carriage house at the end of a study, ten feet from the door where Paul had first picked up Luther’s preface to Galatians, and Jack stopped for a moment. Jack said, “Let’s call it Sonship.” The Galatians teaching had a name.

The first official Sonship course began at New Life Presbyterian Church on February 6, 1983, with twenty-five students enrolled. The course took missionaries, pastors, students and lay leaders through sixteen lessons on what Galatians and Romans say about a Christian standing on the foundation of justification by faith and walking in the power of the Spirit from that foundation. Unsurprisingly, Jack discovered that many of those leaders had not actually gone through the doorway of salvation at all and did not have a gospel foundation on which to stand.

The reason Sonship worked in a missionary context is worth saying plainly. A missionary, generally speaking, is already going with the gospel. What a missionary did not always have was a gospel foundation that could bear the weight without collapsing into despair or self-righteousness. Sonship said: the going is real, the foundation under the going is Christ’s righteousness, the power for the going is the Spirit’s work on that foundation, and the reason you are out here at all is not your own faithfulness but the faithfulness of Christ on your behalf. A missionary on a hard field cannot long survive on self-reliance. The field takes self-reliance apart. “Spiritual power begins and continues with the continued recognition of unworthiness and powerlessness” landed hard because the missionary was already there.

The same course landed differently in some local Reformed congregations in America where the going with the gospel had quietly stopped. People who were not going anywhere sometimes took Sonship home and used it as a spiritual experience, as a cure for what was wrong with them. The gospel does heal, but the gospel is not merely a cure you take. The gospel is a spoken word that creates faith in hearers and sends the hearers out into the world with the message they have received. Jack said it to Rose Marie plainly, and Rose Marie has passed it on exactly as Jack said it: “In Jack’s mind you never give the gospel without discipling somebody with it, and without sending them out. In his mind, there was no disconnect.” Justification is foundational to sanctification. Evangelism is foundational to discipleship. Missions is foundational to renewal. When the going stops, the teaching itself begins to be asked to do work it was not shaped by God to do.

The heart attack came six months after the first Sonship course began. On June 30, 1983, in Uganda, Jack collapsed with a massive heart attack and was admitted to Saint Francis Nsambya Hospital in Kampala. Rose Marie and William Viss reached him on July 4. Dr. Arnold Gash came to bring him home. Jack was close enough to death that he began doing in the hospital room in Uganda what he had always done on street corners in Philadelphia: Jack told the nurses about Jesus. Several of the Nsambya nurses became Christians in the days Jack lay on his back in that room. Rose Marie has written of those days as the days of “the little Ugandan church in the hospital room.”

Rose Marie had written Jack a letter in April of that same year, two months before the heart attack. Jack was about to leave for another trip to Uganda without her, and Rose Marie had asked Jack to sit down and hear something she had been carrying. Rose Marie wrote, “Jack, you have two mistresses — one black and one white — and you give all your time and your attention to them, and there’s nothing left for me.” The black mistress was the church in Uganda. The white mistress was Westminster Seminary and New Life Church. Rose Marie was asking, in the plainest words she could find, to be nourished and cherished as a wife. What the Lord did was take away the black mistress. The heart attack took Uganda out of Jack’s hands for nearly a year. Jack was home — with Rose Marie, with his children, with the ministry — in a way Jack had not been in a long time.

Home also meant prayer. When Jack came home from Uganda, Jack set aside Thursday mornings, from 7:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon, and opened the house to anyone from New Life and from the mission who would come. “We prayed for the felt needs of those who came, but we tried to use the prayer meeting as a school of prayer to train believers to pray for a larger vision of the whole church.” Jack said later, “the weaker I got, the more I prayed; the more I prayed, the more I rejoiced as I witnessed the glory of God’s kingdom grow in ways far greater than I could have imagined.” During those same months on his back, Paul Miller became the primary architect of the Sonship Leadership Training course that went out to World Harvest Mission missionaries in twenty-seven countries. The weakness was the condition under which the Spirit used the course to carry what it carried.

In the middle 1980s, Sonship walked into one of the hardest places in America. The AIDS epidemic was breaking across the country. Evangelical pulpits were angry. Conservative Christians were blaming gay people for the disease. Jack visited patients dying of AIDS at their bedsides to share the gospel, and took others from New Life with him. Jack stood up with Dorrit Sterner, a doctor at Temple and a member at New Life, to speak publicly on “Understanding the AIDS Crisis.” In July 1988 Jack wrote a letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer apologizing, as an evangelical pastor, to the gay community for “the harshness and tone of superiority that has all too often issued from the evangelical community.” Jack wrote: “We have often failed to care for them as persons and as those who sometimes suffer terribly from the AIDS plague. Lack of love and caring sometimes has been our plague. Please forgive us.” And Jack named what the church was supposed to be instead: “We must become the society of the forgiven and the forgiving, not the community of the frightened.” Because Jack was still the first one under his own preaching, Jack could call the church to repentance while also going with the gospel to the dying without condemning them.

In 1996, in the last months before his death, Jack was working on a third unpublished manuscript called The Word of God in the Life of the Church. The manuscript is about how the church ought to call, select, and train the pastors who will preach the Word of God to her. In the middle of that manuscript Jack once again quoted Bavinck’s now familiar elenctics paragraph and applied it directly to pastoral formation. “What God wants,” Jack wrote, “is men who are mature enough to turn ‘the sharpest weapon’ against themselves, men who have let God’s Word search out ‘the hidden corners’ of their own hearts.” Twenty-six years after the coast of Spain, Jack was still leading and teaching and writing from the same paragraph.

VI. Cheer Up! Come On, Let’s Die Together. It’s a Great Way to Come to Life.

In 1987 Jack was diagnosed with lymphoma. Jack kept preaching, kept traveling, kept teaching Sonship. New Life kept sending. World Harvest Mission kept growing. Uganda was still on the calendar. What the diagnosis did was make the preacher’s own weakness plain to everyone who listened to him. Jack had been teaching for years that spiritual power begins and continues with the continued recognition of unworthiness and powerlessness. Now Jack was visibly unworthy and powerless in his own body, and Jack went on preaching the same gospel he had always preached.

The 1990s began with a breakdown. At a conference at Keswick in England in 1991 Jack could not get up to speak. Jack wept through the session and afterward told Rose Marie that he could not carry what was being asked of him. In 1993 Jack went to Eastern Europe — Poland, Russia, Ukraine — and preached in places where the gospel was being heard in plain Reformed English for the first time in forty years.

On May 4, 1993, alone in Malaga, Jack wrote in his journal: “In the desert of self, God was calling me to die to my self-competence (real or imagined). He wanted me to see its ugliness. So I confessed to God that apart from his grace I was a desert and left to myself I would make a total mess of my own life and ministry. That was a confession unto death. Die, Jack, die!”

Mini-strokes came in 1994. On March 6, 1995, a major stroke. The stroke did not end the preaching. A few months after the stroke, in London, Jack preached a sermon that Hunter Dockery remembered through tears ever after. Jack said, “I am a dying man preaching to dying men!” The sentence is Richard Baxter’s in the seventeenth century, and it was Jack’s in 1995 because Jack had earned it in the only way a person can earn it, which is by actually being a dying man.

On February 28, 1996, after the Die Arche conference in Hamburg, Jack flew home through London to Malaga. Rose Marie was with him. On the flight home Rose Marie cried and said, “I’m just tired of traveling.” The gospel that had been going out through Jack for forty-six years was going out through Rose Marie too, and Rose Marie’s weariness was honest and was heard.

The final three months were in Malaga. World Harvest Mission had been planning its leadership retreat and moved the whole retreat to Spain at the end of March so Jack could still be part of it. When the WHM leaders arrived, they were shocked at how weak and frail their founder had become. Jack was too sick to join most of the meetings, but when Jack wanted to be in a session, the men who had learned under Jack carried Jack up and down the stairs of the retreat house so Jack could be in the room.

A heart catheterization revealed two blocked arteries. On April 2, 1996, Jack went in for open-heart surgery at Clínica San Antonio in Málaga. The surgery did not take. By Saturday Jack’s kidneys were failing. Paul arrived from the United States on Sunday. On the drive to the airport to meet Paul, Rose Marie prayed “Thy kingdom come,” and Rose Marie meant it against her own will, because the kingdom coming meant Jack going. Jack briefly regained consciousness long enough to look at Rose Marie, Barbara, and Keren and say three final words: “I love you.” On Monday, April 8, 1996, at 9:15 in the morning, Jack died. Rose Marie and Paul and Barbara and Keren were at the bedside.

The first funeral was on Saturday, April 13, 1996. Calvary Chapel in Glenside was full — about seventeen hundred people. The graveside service was at Mechanicsville Chapel in Bucks County, in the little country cemetery where Jack had wanted to be buried. The man who had preached that a sinner’s only standing is the righteousness of Christ was laid in the ground on that standing and no other.

Rose Marie had thirty more years. The thirty years were not an appendix to Jack’s life. Rose Marie learned, at sixty-eight and at seventy-eight and at eighty-eight, to be a daughter of God and not only Jack Miller’s wife. Rose Marie kept teaching, kept writing, kept traveling, kept sitting with widows and missionary wives and husbands on hard fields. Rose Marie’s books — From Fear to Freedom, The Gospel-Centered Parent, Nothing Is Impossible with God, and the others that followed — went on teaching the same gospel Jack had been teaching, and often taught it to women who would never have picked up one of Jack’s books.

On March 26, 2026, Rose Marie died in Malaga. This essay is being published on April 8, 2026, the thirtieth anniversary of Jack’s death. Rose Marie’s funeral has been set for Saturday, April 13, 2026, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. She will be buried next to her husband at Mechanicsville Chapel — five days from now, thirty years to the day after Jack’s own funeral. Two funerals in the same small cemetery on the same April Saturday, thirty years apart.

Rose Marie tells one last story about Jack in the epilogue to his final book. A dying patient once told Jack that she was not interested in going to heaven because it would be too boring. Jack asked her, “What is the happiest moment of your life?” She said, “The best and happiest times of my life came when I was with someone I really loved.” Jack replied, “That is what makes heaven so very special. Jesus is my very best friend. And the great thing about heaven is being there forever with your best and truest friend.”

If you’d like to read the biography Cheer Up! The Life and Ministry of Jack Miller, you can buy it here from P&R Publishing.

If you’d like to read Mike’s dissertation, you can find a PDF on The Jack Miller Project.

If you’d like to know more about the A New Life booklet and the course Mike has created around it, visit anewlife.thejackmillerproject.com.