October 2003

Mission Heroes

Elizabeth Elliot

When Elisabeth Elliot was four years old, Betty Stam, a missionary to China, enjoyed the hospitality of her parents’ home. Four years later at the tender age of eight, little Elisabeth learned that Betty and her husband, John, had been beheaded by communist fighters in China. This brush with loss and suffering so early in life helped to prepare her to face the murder of her husband, Jim, in the jungles of Ecuador later in her own life.

Elisabeth Elliot, née Howard, was born in 1926 to missionary parents in Belgium, and grew up in Pennsylvania. Her parents worked hard to instill all their children with a desire to live a life dedicated to God, steeped in prayer and Bible study. This parental guidance gave Elisabeth a strong character of discipline, obedience, and love for her Creator, and prepared her for the rigors of life in missions.

Elisabeth left home in 1944 to attend Wheaton College in Illinois, where she discerned and accepted the call to be a missionary during her senior year. Having studied Greek and Latin, she felt God preparing her to translate the Bible into unwritten languages in order to bring the Gospel to unreached peoples. During her senior year she also met and fell in love with Jim Elliot, a junior at Wheaton and her future husband. Their courtship lasted for five and a half years, and is reflected upon in her book Passion and Purity. In it, she describes her and Jim’s efforts to submit everything in their lives to Christ, including a passionate love and the struggle between the desire for marriage and the possible calling to single life on the mission field.

Elisabeth spent those five years at the University of Oklahoma and in Bible College in Alberta, Canada, studying linguistics. Upon completing her studies, she applied to and was accepted by Christian Missions in Many Lands, a non-denominational sending organization. She thought God was calling her to Africa or the South Pacific, while Jim felt strongly called to South America. Neither wished to be deterred from their dedication to follow Christ to the mission field, so they refrained from making a commitment to marriage. However, God eventually lead both of them to serve in Ecuador, and they left the United States separately in 1952. Jim began work among the Quichua tribe, while Elisabeth served across the Andes mountains with the Colorado Indian tribe. While there, she completed the first translation of the New Testament into their unwritten language. Her experiences during that year with the Colorado are documented in her book These Strange Ashes. In early 1953, Jim and Elisabeth joyfully discerned God’s desire for them to marry. They became officially engaged in January and married in Quito, Ecuador in October.

During their joint work with the Quichua Indians, Jim gathered with four other men to devise a plan to reach the mysterious and hostile Auca tribe. The five men landed a plane on a remote jungle river bank in early 1956, where they were attacked and killed by a band of Auca warriors. Elisabeth and the other widows waited six days between the last radio contact with the team and when their deaths were confirmed. Jim and Elisabeth had been married just over 2 years, and their daughter, Valerie, was 10 months old. (See September’s missionary biography of Jim Elliot at http://www.thetask.org/thETASK/
Heroes/Sep03/default.asp)

Elisabeth remained in Ecuador after Jim’s death, continuing the work they had begun with the Quichua. That year was a difficult one, but God faithfully brought good out of Elisabeth’s painful experience. She met and housed two Auca women who had escaped from their jungle lives, learning their language and sharing the Good News with them. This allowed her, with 2 year-old Valerie and missionary Rachel Saint, sister to one of the other martyrs and a gifted linguist, to peacefully enter an Auca village. The three of them spent two years living with the tribe, as God enabled them to make amazing breakthroughs in evangelism, Scripture translation and reconciliation with the outside world. During their stay, many of the Auca became believers, including one of the men who had attacked the missionaries, who eventually became the village pastor. Elisabeth later wrote about Jim’s death and her own work with the Auca in two books, Through Gates of Splendor and The Savage, My Kinsman.

Elisabeth worked again briefly with the Quichua before returning to the United States in 1963. Since that time she has written and contributed to more than 50 books, has been an influential speaker, and has spent 13 years hosting a daily radio program, “Gateway to Joy.” (http://www.backtothebible.org/gateway/) She married Addison Leitch, professor of theology at Gordon Conwell Seminary, in 1969, and lost him to cancer four years later. She is currently married to Lars Gren, who works with her in her ministry. Her writing and teachings have offered immeasurable guidance and hope to Christians around the world in questions of suffering, loss, singleness, courtship and family relationships.

In 1999 she spoke to a group of students and faculty at Yale University about her experiences. The Yale Daily News reported one student’s response: “I was most impressed by how she clung to the Bible through her losses, how it became so real to her in a way that it isn't for me. It made me wonder if God could do that in my life.”