Brussels and Germantown

“The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

— Psalm 16:6, KJV

Born Abroad

Elisabeth Howard was born on 21 December 1926 in Brussels, the capital of Belgium. She was not Belgian. Her parents, Philip Eugene Howard Jr. and Katharine Gillingham Howard, were Americans from the Philadelphia area who had gone to Belgium as missionaries soon after their marriage in 1922, and who worked for some five years with the Belgian Gospel Mission, an evangelical mission founded during the First World War. Belgium was a Roman Catholic country still recovering from the German occupation and the devastation of the western front, and the small Protestant missions there were a very small presence in it.

She was the second of their children. A brother, Philip, had been born before her. Within a few months of her birth, when she was still a baby, her parents left Belgium and returned to the United States. She therefore had no memory of the country where she was born, and she grew up wholly American. But she was born, as it were, on the mission field, to parents who had already given some years of their lives to it, and she would later come to see that fact as more than an accident of geography.

To her family and friends she was Betty, and Betty she remained to them for most of her life. The world later came to know her as Elisabeth Elliot, and it is by that name that this book will mostly call her. But it is worth remembering that the shy, tall, serious girl of the chapters that follow was Betty Howard, and that many of the letters she wrote and received before her marriage were addressed to that name.

A Family and a Paper

What took the family home was a family enterprise of an unusual kind. For half a century the Howard family and their relatives had been bound up with the Sunday School Times, a weekly paper published in Philadelphia that provided Bible lessons, articles and comment for Sunday school teachers in churches of many denominations across America. At its height it was one of the most widely read evangelical papers in the country.

Elisabeth’s great-grandfather on her father’s side of the family was Henry Clay Trumbull, a Congregational minister, Sunday school pioneer and former chaplain in the Union army during the American Civil War, who became editor of the Sunday School Times in 1875 and made it a national institution. His daughter married Philip Eugene Howard, Elisabeth’s grandfather, who wrote his father-in-law’s biography and took a leading part in the paper’s affairs. Another of Trumbull’s children, Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, succeeded him as editor, and became known as a teacher of what was called the victorious life. So when Philip Howard Jr. came home from Belgium to join the staff of the Sunday School Times, he was entering a family tradition. He served as an associate editor and, in time, became its editor.

This inheritance mattered to Elisabeth. She grew up in a family that took it for granted that the Bible was the Word of God and that its teaching should be plainly explained to ordinary people. She grew up, too, among people who wrote for a living, who cared about words and were impatient of sloppy ones, and who measured a sentence by whether it said exactly what it meant. The precise and unadorned prose for which she later became known had its roots in her father’s editorial office as much as in any school.

Germantown

The family settled in Germantown, an old neighbourhood in the north-west of Philadelphia. Germantown had been founded by German Quakers and Mennonites in the seventeenth century, and by the 1920s it was a settled, tree-lined district of stone houses, churches and schools, a short train ride from the centre of the city. It was there that most of Elisabeth’s earliest memories were formed.

The family grew. After Philip and Elisabeth came David, who would become Jim Elliot’s close friend at college and later a leader in world missions; Virginia, always called Ginny; Thomas, who would become a teacher and author; and finally James. There were six children in all, four boys and two girls. The house was full, the money was never plentiful, and the household ran on routine.

The America of Elisabeth’s childhood was the America of the Great Depression. The Sunday School Times was not a wealthy enterprise, and an editor’s salary had to stretch a long way for a family of eight. The Howards were never poor in the way that many families of those years were poor, but they lived carefully. Nothing was wasted, and thrift was treated not as a hardship to be complained of but simply as the way things were done. It was a training in contentment that went deep, and that would serve her well in a forest clearing many years later.

In 1936, when Elisabeth was nine, the family moved across the Delaware River to a larger house in Moorestown, New Jersey, a quiet town in the farmland east of Philadelphia, from which her father could still travel in to the office. Moorestown was the family home for the rest of her childhood and through her college years. It was there, eleven years later, that a young man from Oregon would come to stay for Christmas.

A Shy Child

Those who knew Elisabeth Howard as a girl remembered her as quiet, bookish and painfully shy. She grew up tall, and by her own later account she felt awkward and plain beside other girls. She did not find friendship easy. She was observant rather than talkative, and in a large and lively family she was often content to watch and listen. She read a great deal. She loved the outdoors, and especially the woods and mountains of New Hampshire, where the family spent its summers. She seems to have had a strong inner life from an early age, and a strong sense of right and wrong, which was not always comfortable for her or for those around her.

It would be wrong to read too much of the later woman back into the child. But some things were there from the beginning: a reticence that strangers sometimes mistook for coldness, a dislike of sentimentality, a habit of noticing exactly what was in front of her, and a deep if still unformed seriousness about God. All of these would be shaped, in the years that followed, by the life of the household in Germantown and Moorestown, and that household deserves a chapter of its own.

The verse at the head of this chapter is David’s thanksgiving for his inheritance. Elisabeth Elliot did not inherit wealth, and the heritage she was given came with responsibilities as well as privileges. But she knew that she had been given a goodly heritage, and that the lines had fallen to her in pleasant places. Much of what follows in this book was built on that foundation.