Elizabeth Elliot (1926-2015) was a major figure in 20th-century American evangelical thought. A graceful writer, her extensive contributions have stood the test of time, revealing a scrupulously honest and obedient Christ follower with a gift of seeing what most others don’t. Her very public story of agonizing grief followed by Christlike forgiveness attracted Christians and skeptics alike. Her Life Magazine article recounting her time living with the Ecuadorian tribe that had killed her missionary husband was read by an astonishing 76% of U.S. adults. Lucy Austen has written a comprehensive Elliot biography (Elisabeth Elliot – A Life; Crossway; 2023) that captures much of what was distinctive about her and why her thoughts on theology and Christian living remain relevant and often quoted.
Educated and trained at Wheaton College, Elisabeth had been preparing for a life as a Christian missionary since her teens. Betty Howard had grown up in an environment that emphasized personal holiness and missionary work. That culture, at home and school, had prioritized an individual’s obedience to God’s private leading. As a young woman, she very much wanted to hear God’s call on her life and to be obedient. At Wheaton, obedience for her meant studying linguistics for the purpose of language work for unreached people groups. She would arrive in Ecuador to minister to the jungle tribes there in 1952 as a single woman (a situation that was highly discouraged by evangelical missions groups at the time).
One way to look at her five years in Ecuador is through the lens of a series of crises. Time and again, her world was rocked by tragedies that shook her faith. As she had grown up in a Christian culture that emphasized obedience to a faithful, merciful God, it was natural, perhaps, to absorb a theology in which God blesses those who are faithful to Him. Or at least limits the bad things that can happen. After one such jarring incident, where a young newly converted woman died in childbirth, along with her child, Elliot wrote, “In my heart I could not escape the thought that it was God who had failed. He knew how much was at stake…There was no explaining any of it. I looked into the abyss…there was nothing there but darkness and silence.”
In Ecuador, she married fellow missionary Jim Elliot, with whom she’d had an up-and-down romance since Wheaton. The couple shared a vision for reaching the secluded Waorani tribe. There were reports of violence among the tribe, so attempted contacts had been nearly nonexistent over the years. However, the Elliots and a few others were convinced that God was calling them to befriend the Waorani and share the Gospel with them. After several encouraging brief encounters, Jim and four other missionary men were killed shortly after their small plane landed near their village. Elisabeth, by now a mother of a toddler, faced a nightmare of sudden loss and a potential crisis of faith.
But there would be no loss of faith for Betty Elliot. The suffering and uncertainty about the future were very real, but God became more real. Her central thought became: How can I not let my grief stand in the way of God’s refining process. She told her family, “Pray that He will teach me all that He wanted me to learn through this.” As the story of the men’s deaths became told, there were indications of people turning toward Christ as a result. Jim had not directly succeeded in his attempt to tell an unreached people about Jesus, but there signs that others might hear the Christian story because of his death. It helped give Elizabeth a sense of meaning in her suffering.
The tragedy also led to the conviction that God was calling her to be a writer. An offer came to write the men’s story for the world, to turn their journals into a book. Here was an opportunity to share the men’s convictions for God’s kingdom in their own words. Through Gates of Splendor was published in 195x, only ten months after the deaths. The book’s prevailing theme was obedience. “Once sure of God’s leading,” Jim and the others were not deterred from obedience by distractions—the opinions of others, talents that might lead in a direct direction, family obligations, previous plans or commitments, even their own fear.
The book would make her an internationally known figure, both in evangelical and secular circles.
At a crossroads, wanting above all to follow where God was leading, Elisabeth decided to stay in Ecuador and continue pursuing Jim’s vision to reach the Waorani. This meant continuing her linguistic work on their language but also continuing contacts. Eventually, she and Valerie would come to live with the tribe. Elisabeth was learning to live with and love the very people who had murdered Jim. She had decided to accept their invitation to live with them “to try to show them that Love which made the men do what they did, and which made Jesus do what He did.”
Her approach with the Waorani differed from the conventional thinking of the time. Often American thinking connected missionary work with American cultural values, e.g. as a vehicle for spreading democracy. Elliot was ahead of her time (as on other issues) in instead emphasizing contextualizing the gospel. As she put it: It was not her job to create understanding of her own point of view but to do her best to understand enough of her host culture that the people she was living with could understand Jesus.
A third crisis was coming, and it would be transformative for her theology.
Part of the motivation for living with the Waorani was the desire to learn and translate the Bible into their language more quickly. It was slow and difficult work. However, a member of the Brethren assembly, Don Macario, became an invaluable help. He was fluent in Spanish and a similar language to what the Waorani spoke. They were making much more rapid progress working together. Then Macario was murdered. What was God doing?, Elliot wondered. She was lost for a time.
She wrote, “We had been called, had we not? …I thought of all the sermons I had cringed under about the coldness of the churches and their disobedience to Christ’s commission, ‘Go ye.’…How was I to reconcile His permitting such a thing with my own understanding of the missionary task?…I came to nothing, to emptiness.”
These crises had begun to strip away her sentimental sense that “God will bless those who obey Him and work things out in beautiful, demonstrable ways for those who have given themselves to do His work.”
Her one work of fiction, No Graven Image, parallels her experience living with Waorani. The main character, a missionary, loses her indispensable assistant in a tragedy that may have been caused unwittingly by the missionary herself. The novel’s ending captures the change in mindset that Elliot underwent due to her time in Ecuador:
“Now in the clear light of day I see that God, if he was merely my accomplice, he had betrayed me. If, on the other hand he was God, he had freed me.”
After five years in Ecuador, she left with Valerie to live in the U.S. She believed God was calling her to a life of writing. She became a prolific author who spoke truthfully and unflinchingly about God and us, always with compassion for human weakness. Among her best-known works are A Path Through Suffering, On Asking God Why, Secure in the Everlasting Arms, These Strange Ashes, and The Path of Loneliness. A characteristic trait of her writing is a lack of sentimentality, of looking at the often harshness of this life, but from the perspective that we serve a beautiful, if mysterious, God.
Characteristic themes from her writing and life include:
-Communicating deep trust in God’s sovereignty and goodness even during the most painful and perplexing circumstances.
-Modeling a discipline of basing one’s actions and beliefs about God and his will for one’s life on an honest and humble approach to Scripture. She knew that one’s feelings cannot be trusted. If God is communicating to us through Scripture, we must submit ourselves to its authority. Nothing else, especially our own hearts, is trustworthy.
-We need to be patient with one another, as Christ has been so patient with us. Patience did not come easily to her. She was challenged by several difficult relationships with family and colleagues. She learned to ask, “Lord, is there something in me that could change to help this relationship?” She knew that we are all flawed, and that we don’t see all that is going on with a person, all that they may be battling. Christ is patient with us; therefore, we need to be patient with each other.
Increasingly, her writing focused on practical Christian living. For years, she had a regular column in a Christian magazine, covering a wide range of topics, including suffering, obedience, self-discipline, marriage, parenting, aging, prayer, thanksgiving, service, structuring devotional time, and discerning God’s will. She always received a heavy stream of mail asking for guidance. She had always taken seriously the responsibility to give advice carefully, whether in her published work or in private correspondence. Her primary message on all subjects boiled down to the truth that the first concern of every Christian is to know and love God, and that this should be the organizing principle of one’s life.
Elisabeth Elliot experienced her share of suffering. She was a widow twice over. Her dreams of great fruit from a life of missions never obviously materialized. She was confronted with painful, confusing relationship conflicts in some of the people closest to her. Eventually, she would face a slow descent into dementia. But she faced all her suffering with childlike faith and rest in God’s promises. At one point, she gave a series of talks under the heading, Suffering is Never for Nothing. She explained: “God is God. God is a three-personed God. He loves us. We are not adrift in chaos. To me, that is the most fortifying, the most stabilizing, the most peace-giving thing that I know anything about in the universe. Every time things have seemingly fallen apart in my life, I have gone back to those things that do not change. Nothing in the universe can ever change those facts.”
Her patience with difficult people was extraordinary. Time and again, her ministry to the Waoranis seemed to be needlessly complicated by her main colleague’s unexplained hostility to her. Sometimes, the ministry was not just complicated but halted or even set back by what appeared to be simple pettiness. Elisabeth lamented the lost opportunities. It was utterly perplexing. Still, Elliot approached the situation with humility and grace, always asking, “Lord, is there something in me that could change to help this relationship?” Relationship conflicts consistently prompted her to examine her heart honestly.
Decades later, in the case of the colleague in Ecuador, she was told by a mission authority that, “No, there was nothing she could have done differently.” It was not her fault. This fallen world includes very difficult people, even among missionaries.
Perhaps we can sum up Elisabeth Elliot’s approach to life with her consistent worldview that things are always more than they seem. God is always up to something. Suffering is never for nothing. He’s always refining us if we’ll let him, even if circumstances defy our reason. She suffered greatly and lamented her losses. But she held fast to the conviction that God is good and is working for our good, even if we’re confounded by the way He’s going about it. A favorite illustration of hers demonstrates the point.
While visiting a farm in northern Wales, she witnessed the practice of sheep dipping. The shepherd would wrangle the sheep into an unpleasant submergence into a special bath to kill parasites. The sheep apparently thought their shepherd was drowning them when, actually, he was protecting them from potentially deadly parasites.
“An explanation would be too lofty for them to understand, and the shepherd they had grown to trust required only their submission,” she said.
Elisabeth came to know that God’s rough handling of his children has a purpose, one that we’re unlikely to discern in this life. She faithfully spent her life trusting and obeying God, often in experiences that felt like she was drowning. Her eloquent writing on trusting God in suffering, on developing a deep desire to trust and glorify our beautiful God, will continue to edify and encourage Christians across the world.