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Father Joshua Miller will be the speaker at the Pipestone Area Schools Veterans Day program on Tuesday, Nov. 11 at 9 a.m. He is a captain and chaplain in the Army and the pastor at St. Leo Catholic Church in Pipestone. Source: www.stscl.org
Pipestone Area Schools (PAS) will hold its annual Veterans Day program on Tuesday, Nov. 11 at 9 a.m. in the middle and high school gymnasium. This year’s speaker will be Father Joshua Miller.
Miller is a captain and chaplain in the Army and the pastor at St. Leo Catholic Church in Pipestone and St. Catherine Catholic Church in Luverne. During the Veterans Day program, he plans to speak about his life experiences, including where he comes from, his family, his military service and experiences in the military that led him to become a chaplain.
His interest in the military was sparked by the service of his father, Gregory Miller, who was also in the Army. Shortly after Miller was born, his father decided to leave the military and his parents bought a farm near Waseca. Miller heard his father’s stories about his military experience and decided while in high school that he wanted to join the military.
“I wanted to give back to my country and kind of follow my father’s footsteps in some ways,” he said.
Miller attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York and graduated in 2012. He became a field artillery officer and spent time in Alaska, Japan and South Korea.
“My dream, in the back of my head, was go to West Point, graduate and then go to the Middle East and fight bad guys in the name of patriotism and democracy and all the stuff that America stands for,” Miller said. “When I got to my first unit, a lot of things changed.”
He was put in charge of soldiers who had been deployed to the Middle East. Miller said they’d become more conditioned to be in the Middle East than they were to being at home.
“They had a lot of wounds, both physical and psychological, and spiritual, a lot of post-traumatic stress, a lot of personal issues that are a fruit or a result of their experiences,” Miller said. “As their boss I had been trained for one thing and now I found myself in a completely different scenario.”
He found himself in conversations with the soldiers about the personal issues they were facing and how they were affecting their lives.
“Over the course of these conversations, I began to recognize the difference between somebody who just needs their boss giving them some direct counsel saying, ‘Hey, you need to show up to work on time or you’re going to get fired’ versus these guys just needed somebody to talk to and help them process what they had been through, help them be at home and be at peace with their children and their families without having panic attacks and paranoia and this type of stuff,” Miller said.
Eventually, he recognized a desire in his own heart to serve the soldiers in a different way.
“I never intended to join the military to be a chaplain,” Miller said. “I intended to be a combat officer and lead troops, but the Lord had a different plan for me. Once I started listening to that, life took a few different turns that I never could have anticipated.”
His decision to become a chaplain led him to seminary to become a priest and he was ordained in 2024. He’s in a program called the Archdiocese for the Military Services (AMS) Co-Sponsored Seminarian Program that is designed to get Catholic priest chaplains into the military.
“The way it works is that every priest who serves in the military is on loan from another diocese or religious order,” Miller said. “My home diocese is Winona-Rochester.”
The AMS paid for half of his seminary education, and in return, he will serve five years of active duty as a chaplain. But first, he must have three years of experience as a civilian pastor. He served one year in Owatonna and started serving a two-year term as pastor of St. Leo and St. Catherine on July 1.