The Legacy of Elisabeth Elliot

“Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God: whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation.”

— Hebrews 13:7, KJV

The Books

When Elisabeth Elliot died in 2015 she had been silent for more than ten years, and some of her younger admirers knew her only as a name on the spine of a book their mothers had given them. Yet her books had never gone out of print. Through Gates of Splendor and Shadow of the Almighty were still being read as classics of missionary history, in English and in translation, and publishers have continued to issue new editions of her books in the years since her death. Passion and Purity, Let Me Be a Woman, Keep a Quiet Heart and A Chance to Die were still being given to young women, passed between friends and discussed in church study groups. In the years since her death, recordings of Gateway to Joy have been made available again, and a new generation has heard the old opening words about the everlasting love and the everlasting arms.

Her family has also opened the record of her early life. In 2019 Valerie Elliot Shepard published Devotedly, drawn from the letters and journals of her parents during their long courtship and short marriage. It allowed readers to hear Jim and Elisabeth in their own words, and it showed more fully than any earlier book how much the two of them had struggled, hoped and waited.

The Biographers

For most of her life the story of Elisabeth Elliot was told chiefly by Elisabeth Elliot. Since her death that has changed. Ellen Vaughn’s authorised biography, in two volumes, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot (2020) and Being Elisabeth Elliot (2023), was written with access to her surviving journals and letters through the co-operation of her family. It is warm and admiring, but it does not hide her faults or the difficulties of her marriages. Lucy S. R. Austen’s Elisabeth Elliot: A Life (2023) is an independent biography, the fruit of long work in the sources. And the historian Kathryn T. Long’s God in the Rainforest (2019) set the events of 1956 and after in the full history of the mission to the Waorani.

Many missionaries of the generations after hers have said that her books, and the story of Jim and his companions, were among the things that first turned their thoughts towards serving Christ overseas, and many others, who never left home, have said that she taught them how to grieve. These biographies have not diminished her. If anything they have made her more credible. The woman who emerges from them is more complicated than the saint of the evangelical imagination: proud at times, often lonely, sometimes harsh, prone to discouragement, and capable of serious misjudgements. She is also, unmistakably, a woman who kept faith with Christ through a long and costly life, and who never stopped trying to tell the truth about it.

The story that made her famous has also been retold. Long and other historians have shown how much of what happened among the Waorani after 1956 depended on the Waorani themselves: on Dayuma, who carried the message back to her own people; on Mintaka and Mankamu, who came out of the forest and went back into it; and on the decisions of Waorani men and women who chose to put down the spear. Missionaries, including Elisabeth and Rachel Saint, played their part, sometimes wisely and sometimes not. The life of the Waorani people in the decades since has included real Christian faith, painful change and continuing struggles over land and the oil industry, and their own voices are now heard in its telling. Some of the men who had taken part in the killings lived to old age as Christian leaders among their own people. One of them, Mincaye, became a close friend of Nate Saint’s son Steve and travelled with him in the United States, telling his own story to audiences who had grown up on the story of 1956, and the friendship was the subject of a feature film, End of the Spear, released in 2006.

Elisabeth would not have objected to this. In a sense she began it. Her epilogue of 1996, and the long refusal behind it to let the story of Palm Beach become a legend, prepared her readers for a fuller and more honest account than the one she had first written as a grieving widow not yet thirty.

Where She Must Be Weighed

Gratitude for her life is not the same as agreement with everything she taught. Her views on men and women, marriage and submission remain contested among Christians who take Scripture seriously, and the arguments on both sides deserve a hearing. Passion and Purity has been criticised by some who grew up in the purity movement it helped to shape. Her bluntness wounded some who came to her for help. The early, triumphant telling of 1956, in which she played a large part, encouraged a style of missionary storytelling that she herself later worked to correct. These questions belong chiefly to her teaching, and they are considered in the companion volume, The Key Teachings of Elisabeth Elliot. They are named here so that no reader mistakes this book’s gratitude for an endorsement of everything she said. She would have wanted every claim tested by Scripture, and she would have been the first to point her readers past herself to Christ.

Considering the End

The verse at the head of this chapter tells Christians to remember those who have spoken to them the word of God, and to follow their faith, considering the end of their conversation, that is, the outcome of their whole manner of life. It does not tell us to copy them in everything. It tells us to look at how their lives turned out, and to follow the faith that carried them there.

Considered in that way, the life of Elisabeth Elliot is a remarkable witness. A girl from a strict and loving Philadelphia household learned Greek to translate the Bible, went alone to the forests of Ecuador, lost her work, her helper and her husband, went to live with the men who had killed him, came home with her questions unhidden, was widowed again, married a third time into a harder life than anyone saw, spoke to millions, and then, for her last ten years and more, was silent. Through all of it she held, sometimes grimly, to the conviction that God is sovereign, that he is good, and that nothing offered to him is ever wasted. The courage of 1956 made her famous. The courage of the long decades afterwards, the courage to obey, to tell the truth and to keep going, is the reason she is still worth following. One does not have to agree with everything she taught to see that, or to be grateful for it.