Mission Exploits of Friedensau Graduates in Hard Times: Konrad and Erna Mueller

  • Mission Exploits of Friedensau Graduates in Hard Times: Konrad and Erna Mueller

    The mission accounts of many Friedensau trained missionaries were not as easy as others. Many went through harrowing experiences in order to impact their world. Such was the case of the Muellers. 

    Konrad Mueller, who was born in Schalgen, near Detlmond in Germany on May 3, 1919, enrolled at Friedensau Mission School in 1936. In the spring of 1939 his studies got interrupted by the World War II as he was conscripted into the military. However, the war could not prevent him from marrying his Friedensau schoolmate, Erna Fredrika Hermann, on November 4, 1942. Erna Mueller had trained as a nurse. 

    Mueller was fatally wounded by a bullet that passed through his lung as he served as a medic during the battle of Stalingrad. “After his nine-month recovery he was sent back to the battlefront in Bessarabia in the summer of 1944. There he fell into Russian captivity, being imprisoned in deplorable and life-threatening conditions in Astrakhan, from which he was released in May 1949.” The war scars only rekindled his mission drive which was ignited at Friedensau. 

    After years of further education in the United States of America, Mueller was ordained into the gospel work on October 16, 1957 in Washington D.C., and three days later the Muellers and their two little daughters set out for West Africa. There they served at the East Nigerian Training College as Teacher-pastor and nurse respectively. In 1964, after serving as principal of the college, Mueller and his family moved to the newly established Adventist College of West Africa in western Nigeria. There he served as a Bible teacher and head of the theology department, while his wife worked as a school nurse. Mueller’s role during the Nigerian civil war of 1967 – 1970 was a gap-bridging one; he was able to work as a relief and humanitarian agent to the war-torn east of Nigeria. Moving through the military checkpoints, he did not count his life too valuable to minister to the needy. The Muellers moved to Liberia in 1972, where he served as president of the Liberian Mission till they were called to Newbold College in England. 

    The two schools in the eastern and western parts of Nigeria where the Muellers served in their incipient years have become Clifford and Babcock universities. And the German bread he introduced in the later has become a national brand. Also the little school clinic Erna served in the west has become a large tertiary medical school. Even in his old age in 1994, Mueller went back as a missionary to Astrakhan, where he had been a prisoner of war fifty years before, more 120 people were converted and a church was begun. He visited there seven times before he died in 2012. Erna had died six years earlier. 

    The Muellers exemplified a dogged missionary spirit in tough and life-threatening times. 


    1 For a more detailed account of this missionary family, see John Okpechi, “Mueller, Konrad F. (1919–2012), and Erna F. Mueller (1919–2006),” in Encyclopaedia of Seventh-day Adventists, an online resource. https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/article?id=CHA0&highlight=konrad|F.|Mueller