On Tuesday this week a friend of mine died in America. He was a miracle of what God can do with a man to whom he gave a hammer. Millard Fuller, the millionaire entrepreneur who gave it all away to help found the Christian house-building charity Habitat for Humanity, died Tuesday 3 February 2009. He was 74.
How I met Millard is a story in itself.
Sitting in an American airport lounge glancing through the magazines, I came upon a story of an organization called Habitat For Humanity. Here was a program that built houses for homeless families. The family had to scrape together a small deposit, but then had to spend at least 500 hours working on the project before they would be accepted as a future owner.
Because such poor people cannot afford high interest rates, they were given the chance to pay off their loan at an affordable rate without any interest being charged. Money that was repaid went to help other families. Because the family had their only chance at owning their own property, they looked after it, and what was more, over 99.9% repaid without default.
I asked Wesley Mission to bring Millard Fuller to Australia. He and his wife Linda came. We established the work in this nation, then New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and many other places. I was chairman of the Board and chief fundraiser for the next ten years. Habitat for Humanity has now built hundreds of homes for the poor in those countries.
One of Habitat’s highest-profile volunteers, former President Jimmy Carter, called Fuller “one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known. He used his remarkable gifts as an entrepreneur for the benefit of millions of needy people around the world by providing them with decent housing,” Carter said in a statement. “As the founder of Habitat for Humanity and later the Fuller Center, he was an inspiration to me, other members of our family and an untold number of volunteers who worked side-by-side under his leadership.”
The son of a widower farmer in the cotton-mill town of Lanett, Alabama, Fuller earned his first profit at age 6, selling a pig. While studying law at the University of Alabama, he formed a direct-marketing company with Morris Dees — later founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center — focusing on selling cookbooks and candy to high school chapters of the Future Homemakers of America. That business would make them millionaires before they were 30.
When Fuller’s capitalist drive threatened to kill his marriage, Fuller and his wife, who wed in college, decided to sell everything and devote themselves to the Christian values they grew up with. The couple’s search for a mission led them to Koinonia, an interracial agricultural collective outside Americus in southern Georgia. It was there with Koinonia founder Clarence Jordan that the Fullers developed the concept of building no-interest housing for the poor — an idea that eventually grew into Habitat for Humanity.
Founded in 1976, Habitat’s first headquarters was a tiny gray frame house on Americus’ Church Street, which doubled as Fuller’s law office. For the first 14 years, Fuller’s salary was just $15,000; his wife worked 10 years for free.
Habitat grew from those humble beginnings to a worldwide network that has built more than 300,000 houses, providing shelter to more than 1.5 million people. Preaching the “theology of the hammer,” Fuller built an army of volunteers that included former U.S. presidents, other world leaders and Hollywood celebrities.
“The Bible says, ‘The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,’” he told the AP in 2004. “That covers just about everything. God’s money is just in the pockets of people, and we’ve got to extract it.”
Fuller’s works won him numerous accolades, including a 1996 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour. For nearly three decades, he was the public face of Habitat, traveling the world to hammer nails and press bricks from local clay alongside some of the Earth’s poorest.
Millard Fuller authored ten books, and received more than 50 honorary degrees. In 1996 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In presenting the medal, President Bill Clinton said, “Millard Fuller has done as much to make the dream of homeownership a reality in our country and throughout the world as any living person.”
Fuller was also named to the National Housing Hall of Fame and had received the World Changer Award, the World Methodist Peace Award, the Norman Vincent Peale Award, the John W. Gardner Leadership Award, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award.
On the organisation’s website was this comment : “Millard Fuller’s drive and relentless commitment to affordable housing captured people’s imagination and changed lives around the world,” said J. Ronald Terwilliger, Chair of Habitat for Humanity’s International Board of Directors. “His inspiration lives on in Habitat’s work and through its employees, volunteers, partner families and supporters. We extend our sincere condolences to the Fuller family and are keeping them in our thoughts and prayers.”
I was privileged to call him my friend. We kept in constant contact, and our last letters crossed the Pacific only a couple of months ago. I praise God for the man to whom God gave a hammer.
For more information, please go to http://www.habitat.org/how/millard_feb2009.aspx
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.
Email Gordon - gordon.moyes@parliament.nsw.gov.au
God gave him a Hammer