George Müller was born in Kroppenstedt, Prussia, in 1805, the son of a tax collector who gave him a liberal allowance and little moral supervision. By his own account he was a habitual liar and thief well into young adulthood, and he was in a hotel room that a friend had paid for without his knowledge when he first attended a small prayer meeting and encountered a Christianity that struck him as genuine. He was twenty years old. Within a few years he had abandoned plans for a comfortable ministerial career in Germany and sailed for England, eventually settling in Bristol, where he would remain for most of his long life.
Müller arrived in a Britain convulsed by industrialization and its attendant poverty, where children orphaned by disease and economic ruin filled workhouses governed by the Poor Law of 1834. He responded not with a petition to Parliament but with a deliberate experiment: he would open homes for orphans and make no financial appeal to any human being, trusting God alone to supply every need through unsolicited gifts. The first home opened in 1836 with a handful of children; by the time the Ashley Down orphanage complex was complete, it housed more than two thousand. Müller kept meticulous records, publishing annual reports that documented tens of thousands of pounds received and disbursed without a single debt carried forward.
His theological contribution was less doctrinal than practical. He wished to demonstrate, for the encouragement of ordinary believers, that God could be trusted to answer specific, believing prayer in material and measurable ways. His published journals, gathered under the title *A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller*, became a devotional classic read across denominational lines and translated into several languages.
Müller died in 1898 at ninety-two, having spent his final decades traveling the world as an itinerant preacher. The orphanages he founded continued operating long after him, and his life remains one of the most carefully documented arguments for the sufficiency of prayer in the history of Protestant Christianity.