"Jim Elliot had a death wish."
So said one of my grad school professors, rather passionately, who made it no secret that he did not agree with the manner or methods of the five missionaries who were martyred in Ecuador in 1956.
I was aware of the story in the vague way many Christians are, and certainly in the way anyone connected to the missions world would be. Jim Elliot and the others were arguably the most famous missionaries of the 20th century and it was impressive how many people, Christian and otherwise, had heard of them in some capacity in the decades following their martyrdom.
As for me, I had read End of the Spear by Steve Saint, the son of one of the martyred men, and had been deeply inspired. I felt that the critical remark made by my professor was a bit unwarranted, if not bordering on sacrilege. This was especially true since the opinion was voiced at my grad school, Wheaton College, where Jim Elliot and two of his co-martyrs had graduated from and where a memorial plaque in their honor graced the lobby at the school's chapel. Those men were alumni gold.
I lodged my professor's opinion as just that: an opinion, albeit a particularly strong one and probably a notably unpopular one within the world of missions.
That was 15 years ago and I hadn't given the matter much thought since then. In the last few months, however, I have come to not only understand but even somewhat agree with my professor's assessment of this famous story.
For those unfamiliar with the tale, let me give a brief overview.
In January 1956, five American missionary men were martyred in Ecuador after attempting to make peaceful contact with a remote jungle tribe in the Amazon rainforest. Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, and Pete Fleming had agreed to work together on "Operation Auca" with the purpose of preaching the Gospel to the "Aucas"—a tribe made famous by its extreme violence of spearing people to death. Not only would the tribe brutally attack and kill outsiders, but they also regularly killed each other, to the point that at the time of "Operation Auca" they were slowly but surely killing themselves out of existence.
(Note: the term "Auca" is a Quichua word that means "savage" and was eventually phased out because of its derogatory nature. The tribe are officially known as the Waorani, meaning "The People" in their own language.)
The missionaries had secretly learned some Waorani words and phrases, then embarked on a few months of flying over their villages and dropping gifts from a plane. Nate Saint, a pilot with Mission Aviation Fellowship, oversaw this process. The men made initial contact with the Waorani in this way and everything seemed to be going well, to the extent that the Waorani gave gifts to the missionaries in return.
Then, in early January 1956, the men decided it was time to make an attempt at meeting members of the tribe in person. They planned meticulously. They found a small beachhead that would serve as a landing site for the plane, then flew in supplies to build a treehouse where they could stay overnight in the jungle. One day a few Waorani came out to meet them and the interaction went well. The missionaries were elated and looked forward to more contact, even hoping they'd be invited to come to a village and meet more people of the tribe.
Instead, on January 8, when all five missionaries were together on the beach, a group of Waorani rushed out of their hiding places and viciously speared all the men to death. Their deaths were discovered in the days that followed once their wives reached out for help when they no longer heard anything from the men on the radio. A search party was put together and eventually all five bodies were found, riddled with spears.
The story of their martyrdom became a news headline all around the world, including a cover story by Life magazine. And to this day the story of the five martyrs in Ecuador continues to capture attention.
Earlier this year I was brought back to this story because I taught a Missionary Biography unit for my 8th graders and wanted to cover it. The unit was an effort to teach our missionary kids about missionaries from the past—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and it felt quintessential for them to learn about Jim Elliot and the others.
We dived in deep. We first read Through Gates of Splendor by Elisabeth Elliot, the widow of Jim Elliot who wrote the book as a first-hand account of what had happened. I had never read it myself and was eager to learn more of the story from this primary source. While the book sometimes felt more like a bullet-point list of all the details and less like a narrative, we certainly learned a lot. Elliot provided backstory for each of the men and their wives—how they met and married and followed the call to missions—and provided a play-by-play of events leading up to that fateful day in 1956. The book also included several photos that anchored the story in a real time and place. I had no idea the men had taken so many photos and videos of "Operation Auca" but there's a plethora of evidence of what took place, both before and after their martyrdom.
Reading Through Gates of Splendor certainly increased my knowledge of this famous story, but it also increased my wariness of the heroic aura surrounding these missionaries—because they are indeed touted as missionary heroes: men who literally gave their lives for the sake of the Gospel without reservation.
While no one can question their motivation and commitment to preaching the Good News to people who had never heard it before, learning more of the story has made me question the methods and means—indeed, the wisdom—with which they carried out their mission.
I read the book and remembered what my professor had said. His commentary made sense for the first time.
As a missionary myself for the past ten years, and looking at the story through the lens of living cross-culturally for the sake of the Gospel, I find myself raising three major concerns about Jim Elliot and the others:
1) There was a fairly clear undertone of the "white savior complex" in their words and actions.
2) They prioritized the mission over the health of their families.
3) Their zeal led them to be impatient with the process, rushing to fulfill God's call in their own time.
These critiques are said with a clear awareness that these missionaries were products of their time (as we all are). In their generation, as well as many before them, the clarion call for white people from the West to go and reach the lost in the majority world was loud and strong, and those who answered the call were lauded and applauded. Remnants of this mission culture still exist today, although it is thankfully being discussed openly and addressed head-on by many. In fact, one of the greatest joys of my time at Wheaton was being in a classroom with people from all over the world with plans to go all over the world for the Gospel. From everywhere to everywhere. My grad program embodied this beautiful, biblical model and I am so thankful the world of Christian missions has come so far from the time when the "white savior complex" was at its peak.
Another way these missionaries were products of their time was in the way they prioritized their service to God above all else. I do not mean their relationship with God, which should always be prioritized, but specifically their service to God, meaning the deeds and actions of their missionary calling. The mission came first and foremost, regardless of the damage it did to the family. Missionaries and pastors and others in ministry have done this over and over (and some still do). The concern was not with focusing on the mission (which is right and appropriate), but with focusing on the mission at the cost of the needs of the family. The issue was a lack of recognition that caring for the family is its own service to God which must take precedence at times.
This has been an issue for ages. Pioneer missionary William Carey literally left England without his wife because he felt God had called him to India regardless of whether his wife joined him or not. C.T. Studd chose to live apart from his wife for a grand total of almost sixteen years while he served as a missionary in Africa and she remained in England due to health reasons, managing their family and administrative side of her husband's ministry. The list goes on.
It is a severe miscalculation of a missionary call when ministry trumps family. It is possible—and preferable—when ministry and family go hand in hand. But that notion is relatively new. Member Health departments didn't exist in mission organizations in 1956 or for quite a while thereafter. Self-care did not overlap with ministry roles in the Venn diagram of missions. It was expected for missionaries to go all-out, living totally and undeniably devoted lives for the Gospel. If their family suffered along the way, oh well! That was the image of the model missionary, worthy of the pedestal they'd been placed on.
I saw this come through in Elisabeth Elliot's book, Through Gates of Splendor, particularly after the men died and their wives responded with a seeming lack of grief. It is clear they were grieved, but they were expressly thankful their husbands died in the Lord's will doing God's work. They specifically demonstrated and communicated to their children that it wasn't a time to grieve because what had happened was God's will.
For example, in a letter "to the mission family" Barb Youderian wrote, "The Lord has closed our hearts to grief and hysteria, and filled in with His perfect peace." Shortly after citing this, Elisabeth Elliot recorded, "The quiet trust of the mothers helped the children to know that this was not a tragedy."
At that point, I nearly threw the book across the room.
But that was the culture of the era they lived in. I recalled Eric Liddell (of Chariots of Fire fame) whose parents were missionaries in China and who sent him and his brother to boarding school back in England (at the ages of 6 and 8, respectively) and then only saw each other every seven years during furlough (which we learned from watching a documentary for class). I simply cannot imagine. Yet sending young children off to boarding school, even outside your country of service, was not only common but often expected of missionary parents at that time. So many missionary kids throughout history have grown up without the influence or discipleship of their parents because the parents prioritized the mission over the needs of the family. And I would argue that is also what happened with these five missionaries who died in Ecuador in 1956.
They were zealous for the mission, overly zealous in my estimation, which led to them prioritize achievement and success over patient wisdom and discernment. Jim Elliot was the primary pacesetter of the zeal. I have realized, after reading the book, that I wouldn't have liked him much—he was too strong-headed and brash. Elisabeth Elliot did justice to the five personalities working together on "Operation Auca," noting that her husband was the one who couldn't wait to get started and was pushing for the project to move along while Nate Saint, for example, was more level-headed and methodical and wanted to think through all the details with care. But the momentum of the group landed on a fast pace and, I would argue, pushed them into charging forward prematurely.
The men wanted to make contact with the Waorani before the heavy rains made the river swell and obscure the beachhead they'd chosen as a landing site for the plane. That meant time was of the essence. After only a few months of making gift drops from the plane as they flew over Waorani villages, they decided it was time to move forward with the next phase of the plan: to make contact with the people. Even though those people were known to kill anyone they came in contact with, these five men thought they'd earned enough of their trust in a few short months to plow ahead before the rainy season made logistics complicated.
So they did. And only five days later, all of them were speared to death.
The rest of the story is told in End of the Spear by Steve Saint, who spent significant time with the Waorani during his childhood. It really is a remarkable story of God's sovereignty and grace. Over time, a number of people in the tribe chose to trust in Jesus as Lord and Savior due to the ongoing efforts to reach them with the Gospel by Elisabeth Elliot and, primarily, Rachel Saint (sister of Nate Saint who lived the rest of her life among the Waorani). Some of the "God-followers" included the very men and women who slaughtered the five missionaries on the beach that day. God's redemption is on full display in this story!
As an adult, Steve Saint took his family to live in the jungle again, to live alongside the Waorani in a new chapter of the tribe's history. During that time, he finally learned what took place on that fateful day his dad and the others died. The story had never been discussed between them before, but four decades after the fact it all came to light. It's a story worth reading and I highly recommend picking up End of the Spear. It provided wonderful, thought-provoking conversations with my 8th grade class.
While the full story is inspiring, I still wrestle with the choices the five men made in Ecuador in 1956. Steve Saint, on the other hand, unequivocally attests that everything that happened was the will of God, taking place according to His plan. After hearing all the details of the story from the primary source, and also after spending a lifetime in thought and prayer about it, Steve Saint has concluded that this was not a mistake or mishap that God graciously redeemed. The deaths of the men were planned by God as part of His work to draw the Waorani to Himself.
I will not argue with the son of a slain missionary who has devoted his entire life to this story. I will only say that, after studying this story in greater depth, I can now understand my professor's frustration with Jim Elliot and the others.
My disappointment upon discovering some of the realities of this story was assuaged a bit by Elisabeth Elliot's second epilogue to Through Gates of Splendor. Her first epilogue was written two years after the martyrdom, only one month after she and Rachel Saint had gone to live among the Waorani. It held a similar tone as the entirety of the book—one of awe in what God had done, yes, but also of preternatural fervor and overconfidence.
The second epilogue, written in 1996 (forty years after her husband died), held a different tone. It still held remarkable awe in what God had done, but it also revealed a grayer understanding of what had happened that fateful day. Elliot also acknowledged her grief about why God would allow such a thing to happen: "For us widows the question as to why the men who had trusted God to be both shield and defender should be allowed to be speared to death was not one that could be smoothly or finally answered in 1956, nor yet silenced in 1996."
The second epilogue was much more human than the first, quieter and humbler with more perspective and wisdom under her belt. It stood in awe of the sovereignty of God, period.
And that's how I'm choosing to view this famous missionary story now. God was clearly sovereign in it, and whether He orchestrated the events or redeemed them for His purposes is perhaps beside the point.
Does God sometimes ordain tragic and sorrowful events to bring about His will? Of course He does. We need only to look at Jesus Christ to know that.
Does God sometimes redeem humanity's flaws to fulfill His purposes? Of course He does. We need only to look at all of human history to know that.
I think that Jim Elliot and the others made some foolish choices in their efforts to reach the Waorani, but I also know that every Christ-follower makes some foolish choices in our attempts to follow the Lord.
Thankfully, God is not hamstrung by our follies and weaknesses. He can, and does, redeem things despite them. He does this all the time because He's in the business of redemption.
But God is also in the business of using our weaknesses from the very beginning. He knows we are plagued with them and He regularly utilizes them for His divine purposes. He's been doing this since Joseph's pride got him into trouble with his brothers which landed him in Egypt, and since Peter's shameful denial of Jesus and subsequent forgiveness prepared him to be the Rock of the Church.
For a fantastic, modern example of this, read this article by my friend (and fellow Wheaton grad!) Roberta. Her stories beautifully testify to God using our weaknesses to accomplish His good work.
There's no doubt that Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, and Pete Fleming were operating out of their weaknesses during "Operation Auca." The question remains as to whether God directed their less-than-wise decisions to bring about His plan, or whether He redeemed their human actions. I don't know the answer, but I don't think it's for us to know. What is clear is that God's plan prevailed to bring the name of Jesus to the Waorani, and He worked through flawed missionaries to do it.
I am also a flawed missionary. I know well that the only way God can work through me is to work through my flawed self. But I pray that He will guide me in wisdom along the way, hopefully transforming my flaws into instruments of grace rather than leaving them as barriers to love.
I am humbled and deeply thankful that God's sovereignty prevails in and through all things!
No comments:
Post a Comment