A House Ordered by Scripture

“And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”

— Deuteronomy 6:6-7, KJV

A Book About a Home

More than sixty years after she left it, Elisabeth Elliot wrote a book about the home in which she grew up. The Shaping of a Christian Family was published in 1992, a few years after her mother’s death, when she herself was a grandmother many times over. It is not a memoir in the ordinary sense. It is a portrait of a household, drawn from her own memories, from those of her brothers and sister, and from family letters and papers, and it was written with a purpose: to show younger Christian parents what one ordinary home, ordered by Scripture, had actually been like. Readers should remember that purpose. It is a loving book, and it chooses its material. But it is the fullest window we have into the world that made her, and nothing in the other sources contradicts its main lines.

Morning and Evening

The centre of the Howard household was family worship, and it happened twice a day, every day. In the morning, after breakfast and before anyone left for school or work, the family gathered. They sang a hymn, usually all its verses, and over the years the children learned scores of hymns by heart without ever setting out to memorise them. Their father read a passage of Scripture, and then he prayed. There were prayers again in the evening. Visitors, of whom there were many, were expected to join in, and most did.

The prayers were not vague. Philip Howard prayed for his children by name, for the work of the day, for the nation, and for missionaries all over the world, many of whom the family knew personally. The Sunday School Times put its editor in touch with Christian workers in many countries, and a steady stream of them passed through the Howard home, sat at its table, and told their stories. The Howard children grew up with the mission field not as a distant abstraction but as a matter of familiar faces, letters from far away, and answered and unanswered prayers. It is not surprising that several of them gave their lives to Christian service.

The children were also expected to learn Scripture by heart, and they did. The words of the King James Bible, and of the old hymns, sank into them early and stayed. Elisabeth Elliot’s later writing is shot through with the cadences of both, and in the hardest seasons of her life it was often a verse learned in childhood, or a line of a hymn, that came back to her when nothing else did.

Order and Obedience

The household ran on order. Meals were at fixed times, and the family ate together. The children had their tasks and were expected to do them without being reminded. Manners mattered: one sat up at table, waited to be served, did not interrupt, and wrote thank-you letters promptly. Obedience was expected the first time something was asked, and when it was not given there were consequences. Elisabeth later defended this kind of discipline firmly, and in a later age some readers found her defence of it severe. But the children of the house seem to have experienced it, on the whole, not as harshness but as security. They knew where the lines were, and they knew they were loved.

Sunday was set apart from the other days. The family went to church together, and the day was kept more quietly than the rest of the week. Here too the rule was not presented as a burden. It was simply the shape of the week, and the children grew up assuming that God had a claim on their time as well as on their hearts.

Katharine Howard was the practical engine of all this. She ran a large household on a small income, kept it clean and orderly, fed the family and its many guests, and set standards of courtesy and self-control that her children never quite escaped. She was capable and practical, and she expected a great deal. Philip Howard was gentler and quieter, a man of steady and unhurried faith, who loved the natural world and passed that love on to his children. Elisabeth was close to both of them, though in different ways, and she later wrote of both with deep gratitude and without pretending that either was perfect.

Franconia

Every summer the family went north to New Hampshire, to Gale Cottage, a house built by an earlier generation of the family in the village of Franconia, among the White Mountains. There, away from the city and the office, the children roamed the woods and fields, climbed the hills, swam in cold water, picked berries, and learned the names of trees, flowers and birds. Elisabeth loved it more than anywhere else. The mountains of New Hampshire gave her something she never lost: a delight in the physical world as God’s handiwork, and a need, all through her life, for quiet and for wild places. When she came back to the United States as a widow many years later, it was to Franconia that she went.

Six Children

It would be pleasant to report that a home like this produced six children who all walked the same path. The truth is more interesting. The Howard children were strong-minded, and they went in different directions. Philip, the eldest, became a missionary among the Slavey people of Canada’s Northwest Territories. David became a missionary in Latin America and later a leader in world missions. Thomas became a teacher of English and a writer of distinction, and in 1985 he left evangelicalism and became a Roman Catholic, a decision that grieved some of his family and that he explained with great care in his own books. Each of the six would have told the story of their childhood a little differently.

What they shared was a common inheritance: a deep familiarity with Scripture, a habit of prayer, a respect for words, and an assumption that life is lived before God and owes him obedience. Elisabeth took all of these with her. She also took with her some of the household’s reserve. The Howards were not demonstrative, and she grew up in a family where feelings were kept under control and not much discussed. That reserve would serve her well in some of the hardest moments of her life, and it would also, at times, make her seem distant to those who did not know her well.

The verse at the head of this chapter is Moses’ charge to Israel’s parents: to teach God’s words to their children when they sat in the house, walked by the way, lay down and rose up. Philip and Katharine Howard did exactly that, day after day, for more than twenty years. They could not make their children believe. But they gave them the words, and in Elisabeth’s case the words took root.