Introduction: The Story Everyone Knows, and the Woman Who Kept Correcting It

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

— John 8:32, KJV

The Story Everyone Knows

In January 1956 five young American missionaries were killed by Waorani warriors on a sandbar of the Curaray River in the rainforest of eastern Ecuador. Their names were Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian and Nate Saint. They had spent months preparing to make friendly contact with a people who were feared by their neighbours for killing outsiders, and who had been known to the outside world by a Quichua word, “Auca”, meaning something like savage. The men called their plan Operation Auca. The people themselves use the name Waorani, which this book uses throughout. For several days the contact seemed to be going well. Then, on Sunday 8 January, the men were speared to death.

The story went round the world. Life magazine ran a long photo essay with pictures by Cornell Capa. Newspapers and radio stations carried it. Christian magazines and pulpits across America told and retold it, and within a few years the deaths had become, for a whole generation of evangelicals, the defining missionary story of the century. Thousands of young people dedicated their lives to missionary service because of it. The five men became heroes, and their widows became symbols of faithful grief.

At the centre of the telling stood one of the widows, Elisabeth Elliot. It was she who wrote the book, Through Gates of Splendor, published in 1957, which fixed the story in the minds of millions. It was she who edited her husband’s journals and wrote his life in Shadow of the Almighty the following year. And it was she who, with her small daughter and Nate Saint’s sister Rachel, went to live among the Waorani in 1958. To many readers the sequel seemed to complete the story perfectly: the killers were converted, the widow forgave, the gospel came to the forest, and the sacrifice was vindicated.

The Woman Who Kept Correcting It

The remarkable thing is that the woman who did more than anyone to tell that story spent much of the rest of her life gently, and sometimes not so gently, declining to let it be simplified. She did not deny that God had worked. She believed to the end that he had. But she would not pretend that she could trace all his purposes, and she grew uneasy with versions of the story in which every death had a visible payoff and every loose end was tied.

Her time among the Waorani taught her that people do not divide neatly into the converted and the unconverted, that missionaries carry their own culture and their own sins into the forest with them, and that relations between fellow workers can be as hard as anything in the jungle. Her novel No Graven Image, published in 1966, told of a missionary linguist whose good intentions end in disaster, and many readers who had loved Through Gates of Splendor were dismayed. She wrote of her early losses in These Strange Ashes without pretending to understand them. And when Through Gates of Splendor was reissued in 1996, she added an epilogue that acknowledged, plainly, that events among the Waorani had not unfolded in the simple way that admirers liked to imagine.

That candour is one of the reasons for this book. It would be easy to write a life of Elisabeth Elliot that was really a tribute to a legend. It would also be untrue to her. She spent decades telling Christians that God is to be trusted precisely because he is God, not because he explains himself, and that faith which depends on happy endings is not yet faith. A biography that smoothed away the hard places in her own story would contradict the very thing she spent her life saying.

The Sources

There are, broadly, four kinds of source for her life. The first is her own books. Besides those already named, the most important for the story told here are The Savage My Kinsman (1961), her photographic account of life among the Waorani; These Strange Ashes (1975), about her first year in Ecuador; Passion and Purity (1984), about her long courtship with Jim; The Shaping of a Christian Family (1992), about the home in which she grew up; and many shorter pieces in her newsletter and elsewhere. These are invaluable, but they were written for particular purposes, often many years after the events, by a writer who chose carefully what to tell.

The second is Jim Elliot’s own journals and letters. She drew on them for Shadow of the Almighty and later edited a fuller selection as The Journals of Jim Elliot (1978). In 2019 their daughter, Valerie Elliot Shepard, published a large selection of her parents’ letters to each other in Devotedly, which lets readers see the courtship and early marriage in their own words.

The third, and the most important development since her death, is the authorised biography by Ellen Vaughn, written with full access to Elisabeth Elliot’s private journals and letters: Becoming Elisabeth Elliot (2020), which takes the story to the end of her years in Ecuador, and Being Elisabeth Elliot (2023), which covers the rest of her life. Vaughn’s volumes add a great deal that Elisabeth Elliot never published, including her private struggles, her doubts and her difficult relationships, and this book is indebted to them throughout.

The fourth is the work of others who were there or who have studied the events closely: the widows’ own memories, Russell Hitt’s life of Nate Saint, Olive Fleming Liefeld’s account of the years before and after 1956, and the historian Kathryn Long’s careful study of the Waorani mission, God in the Rainforest (2019). These do not always agree with one another, or with Elisabeth Elliot’s own account.

How This Book Handles Disagreement

Where these sources differ on a date, a name or the order of events, this book either follows the weight of the evidence and says so, or simply notes that accounts differ. Where they differ in judgement, as they do about Rachel Saint, about the methods of the Waorani mission, and about Elisabeth Elliot’s own decisions, it tries to set out the main views fairly without pretending to settle what cannot be settled. It does not invent conversations or scenes, and it does not claim to know what anyone was thinking unless they said so.

It also tries to remember that the story does not belong only to the missionaries. The Waorani had their own history, their own fears and their own reasons for what they did, and in later years some of them told their side of events to those who would listen. Their accounts, gathered by missionaries and historians, have changed the way the story of 1956 is understood. Where they bear on Elisabeth Elliot’s life, this book takes them into account.

The verse at the head of this introduction is the word of Jesus to those who believed on him. It was a word she took seriously. She believed that the truth, including the truth about one’s own story, is not a threat to faith but its friend. The pages that follow try to tell her story in that spirit.