Rose Marie is like most of us: riding Ubers, standing in lines, hopping flights, struggling not to spend too much time on her phone (“It’s a dangerous thing to put the phone next to your Bible,” she says). But she is also not like most of us because she is 100 years old. And life at the century mark, as she will be glad to tell you, is a struggle. A struggle to walk, to use the stairs, to not fall, and to sleep without pain.
What sustains her? Her love for God and people that is expressed in staying on mission into her second century. As she has grown older, her love for sharing the gospel of grace she has experienced has grown too.
Rose Marie Miller is a beloved figure at Serge and a significant influence on Reformed missions in the last half-century. Over forty years ago, she founded World Harvest Mission (now Serge) alongside her husband, Dr. Jack Miller, but here’s the catch — Rose Marie is still currently serving on a team in Europe with regular trips to South Asia and the United States thrown in.
Even at 100 years old, and as Serge’s co-founder, Rose Marie has followed the call, among hundreds of others before and after her, and chosen to go. Here she is, just one worker for the Kingdom, continuing to pass the baton on to many workers.
God has been weaving a vision into Rose Marie’s life from the beginning, and He’s not finished yet.
Have you ever wanted a new life?
The child of German immigrants, Rose Marie Carlsen spent her early life on the West Coast of the United States. After high school, she applied to nursing school, but a desire to learn about the Bible eventually pushed her to Biola University. Tenuous family circumstances threatened to undo Rose Marie throughout those early years, resulting in a constant wrestle with a God who seemed distant from her struggles.
She married Jack Miller after they met in San Francisco in 1949, and it was during this period that the work God was doing in Rose Marie’s heart began to surface, often painfully. At the same time, God was interworking a calling into the lives of her and her husband in distinct ways.
Rose Marie committed to mothering their five children. Jack began seminary studies. But it was through their joint efforts in a living room outside Philadelphia that a church was born. The people who gathered in their home included Ugandan refugees, drug addicts, and members of motorcycle gangs. The Millers planted the New Life Presbyterian churches from this soil, but still Rose Marie struggled. She felt she had nothing to offer.
Little pamphlets Jack and Rose Marie handed out in those early years boldly asked on the front: Have You Ever Wanted A New Life? The Sonship Curriculum – and eventually Serge – “would develop from this cohesive vision of missions and renewal,” writes Jack Miller’s biographer, Michael A. Graham.
In Switzerland, over cracked communion bread, Rose Marie was confronted with her heart as it truly was. She’d been law-abiding. She’d been disciplined. But she’d been living as an abandoned child, not as a daughter of God. She saw her weakness, and the power of grace overwhelmed, changed, and renewed her (we recommend reading Rose Marie’s From Fear to Freedom for more on her personal journey).
Throughout the late 70s and 80s, Rose Marie and Jack traveled around the world to Ireland, Russia, Poland, the United Kingdom, and many trips to Uganda in the wreckage of Idi Amin’s brutal regime, working gospel threads into the frayed edges of people’s lives.
Renewal, in both of their lives, naturally led them into mission. Serge (then World Harvest Mission) was born in 1983.
A greater taste of grace
In 1996, Jack died in Spain. He was writing a book on evangelism and almost finished right before he died (A Faith Worth Sharing). Rose Marie felt like Jack’s death was “the bulldozer God used to take my house – the life I had built around Jack – down to its foundations.” And it was Jack’s death that ultimately was the catalyst for Rose Marie going to London long-term as a single missionary.
“The nations are there,” she says, when speaking of her neighborhood in London, a city that is home to nearly 300 ethnic groups.
Over the years, she had formed relationships with many South Asians during her time spent in Uganda. And London, with all its incredible diversity of people, was the city Jack had long spoken of as being an incredible mission opportunity for the church. This was the city where one of Rose Marie’s daughters and her husband (Keren and Bob H.) were already hard at work church-planting. This was the city where, in 1994, she and Jack had marched through its streets with 80,000 Christians singing Shine, Jesus, Shine, many of them new believers just kicking a drug habit, or former prostitutes, or former criminals, praising God and praying for the city.
“I live and work among men and women whose language, culture, traditions, food, and way of life are foreign to me,” she writes in her book Nothing Is Impossible with God. “I have learned how to build friendships, but I still need to lean heavily on God.”
She puts it this way: “There is a kind of death involved in being a missionary. When I came to England to live and work, I truly did not know what I was doing. Lots of times, I still don’t know.”
Talk to Rose Marie today and she’ll be quick to echo Paul’s words to the Corinthians, to remind us of the ways God works (2 Cor. 12:9). Moments of weakness and neediness are limned with threads of grace. Living and working cross-culturally, she is often keenly aware of just how needy and weak she is. “Sometimes it’s hard to admit this. But when I do, my heart is content with Christ, His power rests on me — and when I depend on his power, I get a greater taste of grace.”
He’s given us a mission
In January 2024, the year she became a centenarian, Rose Marie flew back overseas from the United States. On the plane, Rose Marie, the oldest-serving missionary on the field for Serge, sat alongside Tommy, the newest missionary on her team appointed for the very first time.
By her birthday in December, Rose Marie arrived home to a house filled with flowers and cards from as far afield as Nepal and Australia, hundreds of people expressing their thankfulness to the Lord for her over the years.
What does being 100 and still on the mission field look like? Using every moment – in a Lyft, over chai, in a queue, on a flight home – to share the gospel we have experienced in Christ Jesus.
“I keep thinking when I go through the slump-times of my life that maybe God is saying it’s time to pack up” Rose Marie admits on Serge’s recent podcast. “But He never says that. So I have to be careful of presumption. I cannot say to God ‘I can’t do this,’ because he’s given us the Spirit, He’s given us the blood of Jesus, He’s given us a mission. The growth of the Christian life is a mystery and it has to be — like 1 Peter said — we are called to the sanctifying work of the Spirit for obedience (1 Peter 1:2). So how am I going to obey?”
Explore More on Rose Marie & The History of Serge:
- Nothing Is Impossible With God, Rose Marie Miller
- From Fear to Freedom, Rose Marie Miller
- Grace at the Fray Podcast | A Hundred Years of Grace
- Grace at the Fray Podcast | What Kingdom-Centered Prayer Looks Like
- Rose Marie on Serving God’s Kingdom (Video)
- Serge | History Timeline
- The Jack Miller Project | 100 Years of Grace and Courage, Dr. Michael A. Graham
Are You Ready to Go?
We invite you to discover how God can use you, your unique gifts—even your brokenness—as a vessel to pour out His grace to others in cross-cultural ministry.
