Alice and David “Dave” Miller see and share blessings all around them.  Both retired about 22 years ago, after working more than four decades in teaching and the insurance industry respectively, in and around South Bend, Indiana.

Alice and Dave have been active in Lutheran and Episcopal settings in many capacities for as long as they can remember. Alice surveyed for new church start locations in Indiana, Michigan, and the Carolinas as a college student in an ELCA predecessor, the United Lutheran Church in America (ULCA). Meanwhile, Dave shared his fiscal management experience in Episcopal circles.

“I see blessings everywhere. I had two parents who loved the Lord, loved each other, and loved my sister Georganna, and me,” said Alice. “And I could go on with examples of how I met David to how I got through college to how I taught for more than 40 years!”

The two then found themselves participating in and then leading spiritual retreats like Via de Cristo. “We got to see people have life-changing experiences,” reminisces Alice.

“I remember as a new bride in a new town seeing Georganna come home from a spiritual retreat radiating God’s love,” Alice said. “Dave and I wanted what she had.”

Alice and Dave have responded to God’s blessings by generously sharing from an inheritance and their estate. Through faithful planning, they are benefiting an ecumenical variety of ministries that have touched them and their extended family through the years.

In addition to several charities, the couple has given to Lutheran campus ministry and started a scholarship at Purdue University, established an endowment at St. Peter’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, Camden, IN in Georganna’s name, given to the United Methodist congregation near Royal Center, IN to honor Alice’s aunt and uncle, and contributed to the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint James in South Bend.

Now discerning the need for more pastors, and opportunities to support seminarians and missionaries, as well as to start new congregations, Alice and Dave have planned continued giving after death to advance the mission and ministry of the Indiana-Kentucky Synod. “I want to do it all, and we keep trying!” Alice said.

Like Alice and Dave, you can make a lasting impact on your favorite missions and ministries even after death. For free assistance in creating a plan for your own legacy giving, please contact the author of this story:

By Pastor Karl Biermann

Regional Gift Planner for the ELCA Foundation

in Indiana, Kentucky, and Southern Ohio

[email protected] / 330-612-4174.