Personal Life
Fuller was born in Lanett, Alabama, on January 3, 1935, to Render and Estin Cook Fuller. Render was employed by Lanett Bleachery and Dye Works and Estin was a homemaker. Estin died in 1938 at age 27 and Render was remarried in 1941 to Eunice Stephens. Render became self-employed with a small grocery store, ice cream shop and cattle farming. Fuller had two half-brothers by stepmother Eunice, Nick and Doyle. Nick died in 2006.
Fuller majored in economics at Auburn University (’57) and received a law degree from the University of Alabama (’60). He married Linda Caldwell of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1959. A successful businessman and lawyer, Fuller became a self-made millionaire by age 29. In 1968, after giving up their wealth to refocus their lives on Christian service, Fuller and his wife, Linda, moved with their children to an interracial farming community in southwest Georgia. Koinonia Farm, founded by Clarence Jordan in 1942, became home to the Fuller family for five years until they moved to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) as missionaries in 1973 with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
Upon returning to the United States, the Fullers began a Christian ministry at Koinonia Farm building simple, decent houses for low-income families in their community using volunteer labor and donations, and requiring repayment only of the cost of the materials used. No interest was charged, as it is with traditional mortgages, and no profit was made. These same principles guided the Fullers in expanding this ministry, called Partnership Housing, into a larger scale ministry known as Habitat for Humanity International. That vision was expanded in 2005 in the founding of a new non-profit housing organization, The Fuller Center for Housing.
Read more about this topic: Millard Fuller
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)
“In my dreams is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people: three in one and one in three. It is a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: three in one and one in three. It is a temple in which the priest is the worshiper and the worshiper the worshipped: three in one and one in three. It is a godhead in which all life is human and all humanity divine: three in one and one in three.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)