Lars, and Magnolia

“God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.”

— Psalm 68:6, KJV

A Widow in Hamilton

After Addison’s death Elisabeth stayed in Hamilton. She had a house, a church, friends at the seminary and a living to earn, and she went on earning it in the way she knew. She wrote, she spoke, and in 1974 she was appointed an adjunct professor at Gordon-Conwell, a post she held for about two years. Later, in 1981, she spent a year as writer-in-residence at Gordon College in nearby Wenham.

One of the lodgers in her house in those years was Lars Gren. He was ten years younger than Elisabeth, born in September 1936, and he had worked as a salesman before deciding, in middle life, to go to seminary and train as a hospital chaplain. Over the following years a friendship grew between them, and the friendship became something more. In December 1977, four years after Addison’s death, they were married. Elisabeth was turning fifty-one, and it was her third marriage. She went on writing and speaking as Elisabeth Elliot, the name under which her readers knew her.

Let Me Be a Woman

In the same years Valerie grew up and married. Her husband, Walter Shepard, was to become a Presbyterian minister, and in time they had eight children, so that the woman who had once been a young widow with a single baby in the Ecuadorian jungle became the grandmother of a large family. Around the time of Valerie’s marriage Elisabeth wrote her a series of letters about what it meant to be a woman, a wife and a Christian. They were published in 1976 as Let Me Be a Woman. In 1981 she followed it with The Mark of a Man, a companion book addressed to men.

These books, and the many talks she gave on the same themes in the decades that followed, made her one of the best-known evangelical voices on men and women. She taught that the difference between the sexes is a gift of God and not an accident of culture, that a Christian woman should receive her womanhood gladly rather than resent it, and that in marriage a wife is called to submit to her husband’s headship as the church submits to Christ. Admirers and critics alike noticed that she herself had done things few women of her generation had done: she had gone alone to the forest, reduced an unwritten language to writing and lived among a people whom most outsiders feared. She saw no contradiction. In her view a single woman was free to serve God in ways a wife might not be, and submission in marriage was a particular calling within a particular relationship, not a judgement on the worth or abilities of women in general. She wrote against the feminist movement of the 1970s as she understood it, and she believed it had taught women to despise the very callings in which many of them could most fully serve God.

Many readers found in her teaching a clarity and a dignity they had looked for in vain elsewhere. Women who were wives and mothers, often quietly and without recognition, heard from her that their work was a calling and not a consolation prize. Others, including many evangelicals who believed that Scripture teaches the full equality of men and women in the home and the church, criticised her sharply. They argued that she read the Bible through the conventions of mid-century American life, that her own career as a pioneer missionary, linguist, author and public speaker sat awkwardly with what she told other women, and that teaching on submission given without enough qualification could be used to keep women in marriages that were harming them. The debate continues among Christians who love the Bible on both sides of it. This book is the story of her life, not an assessment of her teaching; the companion volume, The Key Teachings of Elisabeth Elliot, weighs her views under Scripture. It is enough to say here that she held them sincerely, that she believed she was obeying God in teaching them, and that she did not retreat from them when she was criticised.

Magnolia

In time Elisabeth and Lars made their home in Magnolia, a village on the rocky coast of Cape Ann, part of the city of Gloucester, a few miles from Hamilton. The house stood close to the sea. It was from there that she wrote most of her later books and went out to most of her later engagements.

Lars took charge of the business side of her ministry. He managed her diary, made the arrangements for her travels, handled much of her publishing and oversaw the sale of her books, and for many years he travelled with her almost everywhere she went. Her public work grew enormously during their marriage, and it is unlikely that it would have taken the shape it did without his energy and organisation.

A Harder Marriage Than It Looked

The marriage was, however, harder than most of her readers knew. The fullest account of it is in Ellen Vaughn’s authorised biography, whose second volume, Being Elisabeth Elliot, appeared in 2023, and what follows rests on that published account. Vaughn had much less to go on for these years than for the earlier ones, because, as she reports, Lars destroyed most of Elisabeth’s journals from the years of their marriage, a decision she says he came to regret. Drawing on the memories of family and close friends, Vaughn describes a husband given to outbursts of temper, who in time came to control much of Elisabeth’s daily life, including her diary and how often she saw her friends. Elisabeth herself did not speak of these things in public, and she remained married to him for the rest of her life.

A biography written for readers who loved her has to be honest here, as she would have wanted it to be, and it also has to be fair. This account depends on a source written after her death, from the testimony of those close to her, and Lars’s own perspective is largely missing from it. This book does not go beyond what Vaughn reports, and it does not presume to judge a marriage from the outside. It is also true, as a later chapter will show, that when her mind failed it was Lars who insisted on caring for her at home, and who did so for many years. Both things belong to the record, and neither cancels the other.

The verse at the head of this chapter says that God sets the solitary in families. Elisabeth Elliot had been solitary for much of her adult life. In these years God gave her a son-in-law, a household of grandchildren and a third husband, and the family he gave her was, like most families, both a mercy and a cross.