George Muller for Kids: The Man Who Fed 10,000 Orphans by Prayer

Three hundred children sat down to breakfast, and there was no breakfast. The tables at the Ashley Down orphan house were set, the bowls and mugs in their places, and the kitchen was empty. George Müller stood at the head of the room, thanked God for the food they were about to receive, and waited. A knock. The local baker, who said he had not been able to sleep, stood at the door with fresh bread, sure somehow that the children would need it. Minutes later a second knock: the milk cart had broken down right outside the orphanage, and the milkman asked whether the children could use the milk before it spoiled.

The story is famous because it happened, and because it kept happening, in a hundred quieter ways, for more than sixty years. Müller fed, clothed, and schooled over ten thousand orphans in Bristol, England, and he never once asked a human being for a penny.

Did Müller’s orphans really support missionaries in China?

This is the question people search for, so here is the direct answer: yes. The orphan houses were only half of Müller’s work. Through his Scriptural Knowledge Institution, Müller also gave away Bibles by the ton, funded day schools, and sent support to hundreds of missionaries around the world. For years he was one of the most faithful supporters of Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission, at times helping sustain dozens of its missionaries, all from funds that arrived through prayer alone. The man who never asked anyone for money became one of the great missionary funders of his century. Orphans in Bristol, by way of one praying man, helped carry the gospel to inland China.

That is worth letting children sit with. The boy with no parents and the family in China who had never heard of Jesus were connected, through one man’s open hands.

The wild boy who became the praying man

Tell children the beginning, because the beginning is shocking. George Müller was a thief. As a boy in Prussia he stole from his own father, lied with a straight face, and landed in jail at sixteen. He went to university to study religion while living a life that mocked everything he was supposedly preparing to preach.

Then one evening in 1825 he tagged along to a small prayer meeting in a house, watched a man kneel down to pray, and could not shake what he saw. The change did not come through an argument. It came through a room full of people who actually believed God was listening. Müller walked out different, and the rest of his life makes no sense apart from that room.

He moved to England, married, and settled in Bristol, where the streets after a cholera epidemic were full of orphans. In 1836 he opened his first orphan house with a double purpose he stated plainly: to care for children, and to show a doubting world that God still answers prayer. The orphan houses were a demonstration. Every meal was an argument for the faithfulness of God, served hot.

Sixty years of asking no one

How does a man build five great houses on Ashley Down, care for as many as two thousand children at a time, and never ask for money? Müller kept meticulous books, and they have been examined ever since: millions of pounds, in today’s terms many millions more, arriving unsolicited across six decades, often on the day of need and sometimes at the hour. He recorded tens of thousands of specific answers to prayer in his journals, dated, like a scientist logging results.

When he was seventy, most men would have rested. Müller went on a series of preaching tours instead, traveling over 200,000 miles through more than forty countries in seventeen years, telling the story of what God had done. He died in 1898, at ninety-two, the morning he was due to lead prayers at the orphan house. The Bristol streets filled for his funeral. The city knew what it had lost: not a rich man, for he had given nearly everything away, but proof.

Jesus taught that our Father knows what we need before we ask him. Müller staked ten thousand childhoods on that sentence and won.

Read it aloud: the five-minute version

Once there was a boy named George who was a liar and a thief, so good at fooling people that he even fooled his teachers. But one night he watched a man kneel down and talk to God like God was really there, and George could not stop thinking about it. He gave his whole life to Jesus, and God gave George a strange, wonderful idea: take care of children who had no mothers or fathers, and never ask anyone for money. Just pray. People said it would never work. George opened the orphan house anyway. Some mornings the food arrived weeks early, and some mornings it arrived while the children sat at empty tables saying grace, like the day the baker knocked, and then the milk cart broke down right outside the door with more milk than the milkman could save. For sixty years, George prayed and the children ate. Ten thousand of them grew up in his houses. And here is the secret part of the story: George did not only feed orphans. With the money God sent, he also helped send missionaries all the way to China, so that children on the other side of the world could hear about Jesus too. George wrote down every answered prayer in his journals, thousands and thousands of them, so that nobody could say it was luck. If you ever wonder whether God hears you, remember the empty tables at Ashley Down, and the knock at the door.

Talk about it

• Müller wanted to prove to a doubting world that God answers prayer. Did he succeed? How do you know?
• He wrote down every answered prayer. What would change if our family kept a notebook like that?
• The orphans in Bristol helped reach families in China. How can people who have little still give much?

Pray together

Father, you fed ten thousand children through one man who asked only you. Forgive us for asking everyone but you. Teach this family to pray first, to write down what you do, and to hold money with open hands, so that what passes through us reaches children we will never meet. Amen.

Müller’s money crossed the world to peoples who had never heard the gospel. Families do the same thing today in smaller boats: a Wonder Letter subscription sends half its profits to workers among unreached people groups, while your children learn to pray for them by name.

The tables still get set before the food arrives. That is what faith looks like.