Evangelical Christian directs StandWithUs in San Diego

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – Sara Miller, 33, director of the San Diego chapter of StandWithUs, is a descendant of a long line of evangelical Christian ministers associated with the Assemblies of God denomination.  A great-grandfather was one of the denomination’s original missionaries to India; her grandfather preached in Iran during the Shah’s regime; her grandmother composed one of the praise songs found in a denomination hymnal, and her father, Jonathan Schoonmaker, occupied pulpits in Hawaii, Missouri, and Maine.

As a high school and college student, Miller participated in youth missions to such countries as the Ukraine, Nigeria, Australia, and South Africa. Today, along with her husband Mark Miller, she is an active member of the Skyline Church in Rancho San Diego.

StandWithUs is a growing, dynamic, grassroots, pro-Israel organization, that, on campuses throughout North America and other parts of the world, fights an ideological battle with anti-Israel demonstrators who call for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against the Jewish State.

“One of my dreams has been to help create a lasting bridge between the Christian and Jewish communities,” Miller told this interviewer.  “I know that there is a plethora of organizations that already do that, but I see myself as the hands as well as the feet on the ground, essentially getting myself completely immersed in Jewish culture while staying true to myself and my own beliefs. I am what you see: I am a passionate Christian who cares about the Jews and cares about Israel.”

As a fundamentalist Christian working in an organization whose membership and leadership is predominantly Jewish, Miller must adroitly navigate some potential controversies.  For example, some church leaders that she would like to recruit to Israel’s cause take issue with Israel’s liberal values—such as its embrace of gay rights.  On the other hand, some Jews are wary of Christian evangelicals’ desire to convert Jews to their religion.

“As a professional with StandWithUs,” Miller says, “I don’t practice my faith in my job.  I can say that I am a Christian and I can act like a Christian, but it is not even an option to try to convert someone, or share (her faith) with them, unless they ask me a [sincere] question…”

While this means separating her job from some of her personal beliefs, Miller says, “I have been able to compartmentalize pretty well.  The nice thing is that StandWithUs employs Christians; it is considered a positive thing. We represent diversity.  We’re bringing in evangelicals who are very interested in Israel and the Jewish people, so, that means added support for Israel.  For me, I feel very accepted and welcomed as a Christian StandWithUs staff member. I’m an unabashed Christian, proud of my faith, but I have no desire to make anyone uncomfortable and I understand that there is a clear boundary there.”

Miller started with StandWithUs on October 8, 2015, in a higher position than the one for which she originally had been hired.  While obtaining a master’s degree in Islamic Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she interviewed via Skype for a job as an event planner in the San Diego StandWithUs office.  However, the previous director, Nicole Bernstein, had resigned, so Roz Rothstein, the Los Angeles-based CEO of the organization, asked Miller to step up to the position of associate director.  Miller, then still known as Sara Schoonmaker, became the only paid professional in the San Diego office.  She had a steep learning curve.

“The first year was all brand new, challenging, and scary.  It was like swimming in shark-infested waters,” Miller recalled in our interview. “I still consider myself very ignorant of Jewish culture because I spent only a year in Israel and wasn’t even studying Jewish culture.  I was studying Islamic Studies – so, how does that make me an expert?  So, there was this incredible pressure to learn as much as possible as fast as possible.”

She set about studying the history of Israel, all the while trying “to learn the San Diego Jewish community, where everyone falls in the spectrum, and who is who.  I had never heard of BDS before I started with StandWithUs.  I literally had no background, but I think Roz saw that I was really a hard worker, and that I would put my heart and soul into it.  I think she appreciated the fact that I was a Christian and that I came with a different perspective. Basically, I fit into my shoes after a while.  I became more comfortable and got promoted to director about two years ago.”

Although she didn’t have a paid staff, Miller had some knowledgeable, well-placed Jewish community members who were her combination advisors and support system.  Among others, these included Nina Brodsky, Jenny Josephson, and Mitch Danzig, the latter an attorney who currently is the chapter president.

There were grassroots activities and chapter-building activities that kept Miller quite busy in her first year.  The very first week that she was on the job, anti-Israel activists announced plans to demonstrate outside Target and call for a boycott of SodaStream, an Israeli product which allows users to carbonate and flavor their water, thereby making sodas at home.  At the time, the company had its factory in Ma’ale Adumim, a community beyond Israel’s 1967 borders.  The campaign against the factory resulted in the company deciding to move to a location within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.  This, in turn, resulted in hundreds of Palestinians losing their jobs, being unable to commute to the new factory.

Not long afterwards, the Sufi Mediterranean Restaurant on Balboa Avenue was the venue for a dinner at which an anti-Israel film and a variety of anti-Israel speakers were featured.  “We stood outside and handed out pamphlets to respond to their charge that Israel and the IDF were child killers.  The booklet directly answers those accusations. It talks about how Hamas and the Palestinian government use children as human shields and as workers in tunnels that collapse.  It talks about how Hamas [in Gaza] withholds needed infrastructure, with no educational materials, and hospitals going unfunded because everything is diverted for war purposes.”

Miller also helped to organize, in the span of a week, a rally in Balboa Park protesting Iran’s nuclear program, and cautioning against the proposed nuclear pact with Iran from which, just this week, President Trump formally withdrew the United States.  “I think that event connected a lot of people in the community together,” Miller said.  “I know that we brought Pastor Jim Garlow (of Skyline Church) to speak, Mitch Danzig spoke, and [columnist] Caroline Glick spoke, and since then there have been a lot of alliances.  I feel good about that.”

Meanwhile, Miller also was building the StandWithUs organization.  A Herzl Club, named for Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, was founded for donors of $5,000 annually or higher.  Herzl Club members are invited to four functions a year, typically a catered dinner at a private residence or hall, at which a prominent speaker is featured.  An upcoming Herzl Club meeting on May 31 will bring Capt. Elgen M. Long, who helped fly Jews from Yemen to Israel in a secret airlift operation in March 1949. For donors of amounts between $2,500 and $5,000, there is a Guardians of Israel Club which will have similar activities, only twice a year.  Lunch-and-learn get-togethers with speakers are scheduled twice a year, typically at the Mintz and Levin Law Offices, where Danzig is a member.
“We also have a StandWithUs Campus Crash Course for graduating high school students going into college, and their parents, grandparents, and any other adult who is invested in that child’s life,” Miller said.  We basically do three to four hours of really important topical studies like “know your legal rights on campus,” which Mitch Danzig teaches, or an introduction to the Israel clubs on campus.  We also have some fun stuff like Krav Maga (an Israeli martial art) to keep the kids entertained.  It is a time for us to meet with the students, to give them an overview of what they can expect at college, and to know that StandWithUs is a huge resource. … It is a great launching pad for them if they ant to be outspoken advocates for Israel on their campuses.  They have this entire organization backing them.”

The national StandWithUs organization helps select Emerson Fellows to become lead advocates for Israel on various college campuses.  In San Diego, there are Emerson Fellows at both San Diego State University and UC San Diego.  There also are a few high school interns in the county, having been chosen for the upcoming academic year at Torrey Pines, Canyon Crest, and Southern California Yeshiva (SCY) high schools.

Within the last several weeks, Miller has been joined at the San Diego office by another professional, Yael Steinberg, a Jewish community member who has taken the position of associate director.  Like Miller, Steinberg obtained a Master’s Degree at the Rothberg International School at Hebrew University.  Her major was Non-Profit Management.

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Miller was born on the island of Maui after her father accepted a pastoral position with the King’s Cathedral, founded by the Rev. James Morocco.  Eventually, he was asked to establish an extension church on the island of Lanai, which today is 98 percent owned by Oracle founder Larry Ellison.   At that time the Schoonmaker family consisted of Sara and her sister Rebecca; two daughters born to their father’s previous marriage, Julie and Jenny, and one daughter born to their mother Kathleen’s previous marriage, Rachel.  The combined family boasted five daughters in all.  While Sara’s father had grown up in a missionary family, her mother’s family was secular.  An entrepreneur, Kathleen purchased an air freight company at the age of 19, and added a figure salon to her holdings at age 22.  She became a religious Christian after her marriage to Pastor Schoonmaker.

Although Lanai is a tourist’s paradise, with two large Four Seasons Hotels on either end of it, it proved a challenge for young Sara, who along with her sister Rebecca, suffered bullying as she walked to the island’s only school.  One day children sitting on an embankment threw stones down at them, while taunting them as haoles, which though often taken as a synonym for “white mainlander” is also an insult in the Hawaiian language that means a person who has “no breath, no life,” Miller said.

Her father was able to rent a local theatre in which he fashioned a one-room church school called Ka’ahumanu Hou, into which Sara happily was enrolled.  “He was a natural teacher, and this was in addition to his pastoral duties,” Miller said. “That first year we had between 20 and 30 students, which was pretty good for the first year. … The education was tremendous; they had a lot of geography, and my father was a bit of a linguist, so he taught the kids proper grammar.  My mom loved to get the kids together to sing and we would have a worship service in the morning.  They gave us harmonicas to play, so we learned that.  It was a very special time; all the kids improved academically, and it was a very positive experience.”

From Lanai, the family moved to Springfield, Missouri, where Sara’s grandparents, Pastor Paul and Harriet (Williams) Schoonmaker, had retired, and where, after Paul’s death, his widow married Sydney Bryant.  Sara’s family didn’t stay there very long because a brother-in-law of Sara’s father appealed to him in 1997 to serve as a co-pastor at a church in York, Maine. “I was just going into seventh grade; and public school was a rude awakening. It was a very secular, liberal school, and I had a difficult time adjusting there, but I eventually made friends.”
Up to then, she reflected, “I really had been sheltered, brought up in a very conservative environment. To go from that, where you are protected, and to be completely thrown into that environment, I didn’t know anything about pop culture which the kids were talking about. I didn’t have any of the same experiences that they did, and I was dressed as a tomboy, whereas the girls in seventh grade were into hair and makeup.”

Nevertheless, Sara was an all-around athlete, playing tennis, basketball, soccer, and track, and also played the saxophone, joined a band, and served on the student council.  She made friends.

When she was 15, she participated in her first overseas mission.  It took her to Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine, where the Christian cadre set up and managed basketball camps for the youth, and preached the Gospel.  After that segment of the trip, the youth mission traveled to Amsterdam, Holland, where they visited the Anne Frank House.  “I remember just being in awe there,” Sara recalled.  “I remember seeing some of the letters on the wall there, and how impactful that was.”  She has returned to the site twice.

The mission inculcated Sara with a love for travel.  The next mission she went on was to Lagos, Nigeria.
“We went to different churches where they had the most gracious welcoming for us,” she recalled.  “We would take a canoe and go down the Niger River and visit these tiny, little, remote villages on the riverbank that were just covered in trash.  Half the villagers didn’t have any clothes on.  They would be so warm and gracious and excited that American missionaries were coming to spend time with them.  I remember distinctly going into one straw-thatched building.  It was missing its walls, but it had a roof over it. There was a whole parade of people coming in and they put in front of us a few bushels of plantains and some live catfish as an offering.  We were just a bunch of kids; it was exciting to be honored by such a warm and hungry people.”

The young missionaries stayed in the homes of local hosts, ate breakfast with them, then went off to various assignments, such as to the local hospital where “We would visit people and ask them, ‘Is there anything we can pray for you for?’  Some people would say no, and others would say, ‘Sure, you can pray for my leg,’ or ‘You can pray for my daughter’ and then there would be a few persons who would just gather around that person to pray. There would be a translator there.  I would stand at the foot of the bed, and if they had a blanket on, I might touch that, just so that there was contact, and say, ‘Lord, thank You so much for so-and-so; thank You for giving us the opportunity to pray for him/ her.  God, You know this person’s heart. You know his situation. You know that only You can provide healing, and we ask that You intervene, that You touch this person and that You heal him…. We thank you, in Jesus’s name.”

Miller told me that she personally believes in healing: “I have seen people heal right in front of me.  I think that it ministers to people in more ways than just being prayed for. I think when they see young people in faith, that is an encouraging aspect of prayer.”

On another occasion, Miller said she encountered real “evil” while participating in a prayer service in a church, which had undependable electricity.  “When the lights would go off, the whole room would fill with screams – a lot of screams came from the local ‘witch doctors’ who had come into the building to curse the missionaries while we were there.  I will never forget that moment when we were in the church building.  We were all praying and there was great faith in the room, and the lights went off and there was this horrible screaming and cursing from these witch doctors.  Then the lights went back on, and it was silent again.  I remember the power, the fear, and it felt like a direct confrontation with the supernatural.  I definitely experienced what I considered to be demonic forces there, and seeing eyes with completely glazed over pupils, things that really frightened me.  I think my faith was really developed after those encounters, knowing that there is a God and there really is evil; there really is healing; and that there really are forces fighting that.”

From Nigeria, the youth mission traveled onto England.  In London, they “visited a series of churches, ministering to the people, which meant that we would pray for them to get healed, or for God to give them a better life.”

Miller enrolled at Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri, where she majored in International Studies.  “I knew that I loved missions, loved traveling, and really had found politics interesting. So, I thought I might become some sort of minister, or government worker, or maybe join the Peace Corps, but do something that was service based.”

Between her sophomore and junior year, she took a year off from formal studies to go to Australia as part of a group called Youth With A Mission – or Y-WAM—which was another Christian evangelical group.  For three months, her group sat in a classroom in the Rooty Hill suburb of Sydney, to learn “about the character of God; who is God?;  What are His attributes?; What are His characteristics?;  How can we know Him better?”

Later in the program, the group traveled from Australia to Durban, South Africa, to do street ministry.  “We were basically on Skid Row; we were dealing a lot with drug lords, prostitutes, lepers.  We would pray for people. We would hold worship services in the street.  We would visit drug houses.  We would dress up in very modest, long skirts at night, and we would visit the brothels and try to talk to the girls.  It was very dangerous. I remember we were walking one evening, and there was this poor, pitiful woman covered in sores, just lying in the dirt, and she literally had cockroaches crawling on her body.  Her pimp was around the corner, just watching us.  The lady we were with had a local ministry, and so she knew the language, and she asked if we could pray for her. I remember being terrified, and absolutely overwhelmed by her loss of dignity and the terrible suffering she had experienced.”

In other encounters, the young missionary learned that children who were hungry often would sniff glue as a way to curb their appetites, not aware that this could have lasting negative impacts on their health. “We would ask them if they would trade glue for a meal and bread, and they would say ‘yes,’ right away, and then the second they were done eating, they would try to get the glue back.  There would be mobs that would try to attack us, but we had bodyguards.”

She returned to college after that gap year, and was able to serve for a period as an intern in the Washington D.C. office of Republican U.S. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.  As an intern, she learned “the ins and outs of how a day in the Senate works; I went to a hearing and saw Barack Obama (then a U.S. Senator from Illinois) sitting on a panel there.  They taught us how to answer the phones, record constituent remarks, sort mail, attend hearings.  I think I was mesmerized by the process. I fell in love with Washington D.C., the vibe of the city, and how driven everyone was to make a difference.  I would say the experience enhanced my desire to be involved.”

She was graduated from Evangel University in 2007, and traveled back to Maui, where her sister Rebecca was living. One summer, “I contracted a real severe case of staph infection, which put me in the hospital for a week.  I was close to death.”

What had happened was that she had been surfing, and “I had gotten a bite on my chin from a jellyfish, and I was kind of messing with it, and it turned out to be the entry point [for the infection] because there had been some sewage spills in Hawaii that entered the waters.  This was the penicillin-resistant type of staph and then I had the flesh-eating staph in my arm.”  Doctors called Sara’s mother to prepare her for the worst, and said if Sara didn’t die, she still might go blind.

“Thank God, we had prayer chains all over the country where people were praying for the girl in Maui, and I was very fortunate, I pulled through.  I remember getting incredible notes and hearing that entire churches were taking a moment in their services to pray for me.  I felt humbled and almost ashamed that I was the girl who was taking up people’s time in church.  I believe in the power of prayer; I believe that it can significantly contribute to recovery. The story is pretty amazing: my sister and I stayed up all night at the hospital, and she squeezed the infection out of my face, preventing the surgery that they were going to do.”

After her recovery, she married Dan Kulp, who had played football at Evangel, and from whom she later was divorced.  They lived in Missouri, where she worked at various odd jobs, including as an executive assistant for a start-up company, and at a hair salon.  Then they moved to Hawaii, where she worked at a Marriott Hotel at the front desk, as a sales manager, and also managed a Starbucks.  She signed up with a group from King’s Cathedral to visit Israel, her first trip there, and “I was like a kid in the candy shop, so excited to be in Israel.  “I think the thing that stood out was going to the pool at Bethesda, just inside the Lion’s Gate, and I remember we had a worship/ prayer service there and I was completely overwhelmed and emotional because I could picture Jesus being there, and the story coming to life.”

In Christian Scripture, Jesus healed a paralyzed man who could not reach the Bethesda Pool, which was thought to have healing properties.

“Another moment was walking on the Via Dolorosa where Jesus carried the Cross, and visiting the Garden of Gethsemane,” where Jesus prayed with his disciples the night before his crucifixion.  “I absolutely fell in love and told the pastor I was going to come back one day, but I had no idea how.  I forced the pastor’s wife to take a detour with me, because I desperately wanted to check out Hebrew University.  I had no idea, I had an inclination.  I thought it would be the most magical thing in the world to go to school there in the heart of Jerusalem and to experience it myself.  So, we broke off the tour, and made a pit top at the café right there on campus.  I completely fell in love.”

After her divorce, Sara decided to apply for a one-year program at Hebrew University.  While the divorce was proceeding, she had met in church Mark Miller, who would become her second husband.

“During the divorce, I was in church one Sunday with my family, sitting in the back, grumping, and being miserable about my situation, and I looked up and saw two guys walking in,” Sara remembered. “It was Mark and his father; they sat in the second row, and when you go to a church like that, you instantly know when someone new is there. So, anyway, I just observed him the entire service.  i was completely astonished; it was love at first sight.  I never say that, nor did I believe it, but it absolutely happened.  I watched him as he interacted with his dad, watched him being very interactive and expressive during the worship service, and I watched him give an offering during the tithe-and-offering, and I was just instantly very curious.  He turned around a couple of times, and we caught each other’s gaze, and it turned out, at the end of the service, he came back.  He recognized my brother-in-law (a sister’s husband), who had been his camp counselor. … Rebecca knew that my heart was just jumping out of my chest, and she said,  ‘I will just invite him over for dinner.’  It turns out he was in town for a family emergency, only his second day on the island, so the fact that we connected like that was pretty remarkable.  The next ten days were a complete whirlwind; they invited him over; we talked for hours… I was literally on Cloud Nine.”

Cautious about getting into a serious relationship so soon after the divorce, she told Mark that she planned to go to Israel for a year, and that a separation would test whether their attraction was meant to mature into something more.  Except for a brief visit to Jerusalem, Mark waited back at home.  When Sara completed her degree, she moved to San Diego, where Mark, who is four years younger than she, was completing his studies at Point Loma Nazarene College.  She took her own apartment, and they waited an additional year and a half before they were married.

Mark has a degree in business and communications, and often puts that knowledge to use as a StandWithUs volunteer.  For example, recently when an anti-Israel group held a demonstration in support of Gaza protests at the Israeli border, he and Sara monitored the demonstration, which was advertised as a precursor of a nationwide protest.  Sara said only a small number of people turned out, and that she relayed that information to StandWithUs headquarters, which wanted to understand what other cities around the nation might have in store for them.

I asked Sara about her goals for StandWithUs, and her personal goals.  She said she would like to increase the number of Herzl Club and Guardian of Israel members, expand the Lunch and Learn program, and create more Emerson Fellowships at local colleges (such as Point Loma Nazarene, for example) and internships at high schools.  She also would like to raise more money to enable the hiring of two more staff.  The more staff, the more initiatives StandWithUs can take in San Diego County.

On a personal level, she said, “I have baby fever” and would like to start a family with Mark sometime in the near future. She also would like to brush up on her Arabic, learn to speak Hebrew, or at least to read and write it, to travel, and perhaps return on a program to Israel.

She added that she was thankful that her personal and career goals are complementary, and that she anticipates remaining for a long time with StandWithUs, an organization that she credits with contributing to her personal growth and increased understanding.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be conacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com