“I tend to go around and help God pick out the elect.”

“I tend to go around and help God pick out the elect.”

The man Jack Miller wrote off — and what became of him

By Michael A. Graham

From a transcript of a sermon by C. John “Jack” Miller called A Message of Fire.

“I tend to be not only a Calvinist in theory, but I tend to go around and help God pick out the elect. And I do a botched job of it. It’s just awful. Usually the ones I pick out are the ones I like — the ones who listen to me and admire me. The ones who cut me down and treat me much more as I deserve, definitely non-elect.”

Then Miller tells on himself. The man he has in mind was named Charles Brown.

Brown had gone to prison in Florida in 1967 for armed robbery, and became a Black Muslim while he was there. By 1971 he was out, living in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, drinking and using. Some seminary students were out street preaching, and word came back to Miller about a man they had found — just out of prison, strong, on drugs, drunk.

Miller’s verdict: “Well: non-elect.”

Not long after, a woman in the congregation telephoned Miller. Mrs. Hathaway had seen that same man running down a street in Doylestown, out of his mind on LSD, and nobody would go near him — so she got him into a car and took him home to her family. Now she wanted to bring him to her pastor for counseling.

“My approach to counseling,” Miller says, “was how to get rid of this guy fast.” So Miller gave Brown the law, and gave it sternly. “And interestingly enough, that really helped. The more I showed him the sternness of the law, the more he loved me.”

Brown had also knocked a park ranger out cold. He had been drinking, and the ranger said something Brown took as a racial insult. The state police were looking for him over it. Miller decided Brown should go back and apologize, and drove him to the park to do it. By Brown’s account the ranger looked astonished, accepted the apology, and the police let it drop.

Charles Brown was a chef by trade — Army cooking school first, and after that the great hotels of the Catskills, where he had worked alongside some of the best chefs in the world. Out of gratitude for what had been done for him, Brown offered to come and cook dinner for Jack and Rose Marie Miller. He said he would have to bring his own knives.

Here is what went through the pastor’s mind:

“Even up north we have visions of black men and knives, you know — and they are all about this long, I’m sure, but they looked like they were this long. And here he is out in the kitchen, and I said: what have I done to my family?”

After a few months of this, Miller had had enough, and told Brown to go:

“I said, ‘Look, we’ve got enough hypocrites in the church. Don’t add one more. You’ve got this sin, this sin, this sin, this sin. Now when you break those off, then you can come around, and you become a Christian.’

I was really a preparationist with a vengeance. I pushed him as far away as I could. You know, he was non-elect — I don’t want to waste too much time.”

Charles Brown was converted anyway.

Brown telephoned Miller on a Saturday morning to tell his pastor what had happened the night before. Brown had come off work around midnight and gone out to Route 309 to hitchhike. A car stopped. Brown got in and asked the driver straight out whether he was a Christian. The driver said he was — and it turned out the driver knew Miller. So Brown poured out every sin he could think of, right there in the car. The two of them pulled over and prayed. Then the driver dropped Brown at the corner of Route 202, still a good way from home.

Brown put his thumb up again. A couple stopped for him. Brown asked them the same question, got the same answer, and the whole thing happened a second time.

What amazed Brown, telling it down the phone, was that anybody had stopped for him at all. Miller said he was amazed too — but that something else struck him harder.

“What really impresses me,” Miller told him, “is that you have a troubled conscience. You never had that before.”

Then Miller asked him outright: “Do you really want to be converted?”

“Yes I do.”

Brown came to church on Sunday, and the two of them prayed together afterward — with Miller still pushing him off even while Brown was praying. “Are you sure you’re not doing this because you’re afraid of me?” Brown only looked at him. Being afraid of people had never been Brown’s problem.

Brown came back on the Monday, and Miller still was not convinced. So Miller quizzed him. “All right, you tell me now — what is it to be saved? Can you do any good works?”

“Yes,” Brown said. “I can do a good work.”

“Aha,” said Miller. “The truth is out. He is not really converted.”

“Yes,” Brown went on. “I can believe in Jesus as my only Savior.”

Brown had learned his pastor’s routine, and was pulling his leg.

“You see how reluctant we are as Reformed people to turn the gospel into good news. We don’t have to turn it into good news. It is good news.

Be careful that you don’t make up your mind ahead of time that of all the people out there, none of them want to be saved. … That seems to me a bloody shame, that all the elect should be gathered in by the Arminians.”

What Miller’s sermon does not tell you

Miller’s sermon ends there. Charles Brown’s story does not.

In February 1973 a Bucks County paper ran a five-part series that Brown wrote himself, A Search For New Life In Bucks-Mont. He describes the household that took him in — the Hathaways, who by that summer had ten or twelve other struggling young people staying with them besides their own family — and what they understood about him:

“They knew that my problem wasn’t that I was black but that I was separated from God and spiritually dead.”

There was a morning when Brown packed his bags to leave for California, and Mrs. Hathaway stopped him:

“Charles, we would really like for you to stay. Regardless of where you go, until you get your relationship with God straight, you will always be strung out.”

“So I stayed,” Brown writes.

On November 11th he married Janet Hathaway, the family’s oldest daughter. The two of them had planned to marry at the courthouse; Miller and the Hathaways suggested a wedding at the church instead, with Brown’s own family present. His family in North Carolina could not afford the trip, so Brown drove down and brought them himself.

“Now I thank God that I did. When my mother came to the Hathaways and saw the love of God in those people, she became a Christian.”

Afterward his mother told him what his niece Ivory had said to her:

“Grandmother, you know I forgot that I was black.”

And Brown’s own count, at the close of the series:

“Since I have known the Hathaways, three of their children have become Christians, my mother has become a Christian, my brother has become a Christian and I have become a Christian.”

The paper’s closing note records that Charles Brown was then employed as a cook at Westminster Seminary.