The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Jim Elliot
1927–1956AmericanPlymouth Brethren
Speared to death at twenty-eight on an Ecuadorian sandbar, ten years after writing that he was no fool who gives what he cannot keep.
Pictured: the era he stood in — Dietrich Bonhoeffer with his students, 1932 — Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Summary
- Lived 1927–1956, American.
- Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
- Hangs on The Martyrs and The Missionaries.
- Tradition: Plymouth Brethren / missionary.
The life
Jim Elliot was a wrestler and a Greek student at Wheaton College who decided while still a student that he would spend his life where the gospel had never been. He reached Ecuador in 1952 and married Elisabeth Howard the next year. With four other young men he began making contact with the Waorani, a people so feared by their neighbors that outsiders called them killers, lowering gifts to them from a small plane in a bucket on a line and shouting friendly phrases they had learned.
In January 1956 the five landed on a sandbar in the Curaray River. On January 8 a group of Waorani men speared all five to death. Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint, sister of the pilot, later went to live among the same people; some of the men who did the killing became believers and helped carry the message onward. Elliot was twenty-eight. He had written at twenty-two: he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
What was happening while he lived5 moments · 1930–today
- May 1934The Barmen DeclarationOne hundred thirty-nine delegates met in a church hall in Barmen, a district of Wuppertal, while the German government was busy fusing the Protestant church to the Nazi state. Their six short theses, drafted mainly by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, said the church listens to one Word, Jesus Christ as Scripture presents Him, and to no other lord, event, or leader.
- October 1945The Stuttgart Declaration of GuiltGerman church leaders, Niemöller among them, admitted before the world that they had not resisted enough, not prayed enough, not believed enough. It is one of the rare times a national church has said plainly that it failed.
- 1948–1964Richard Wurmbrand's fourteen yearsA Romanian Lutheran pastor of Jewish descent, converted at thirty, was seized off the street in February 1948 and spent fourteen years in communist prisons, about three of them alone in an underground cell where he kept his mind by preaching a sermon every night to no one. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit.
- 1949–1955China's long night beginsAfter the communist victory, foreign missionaries were pushed out within a few years and churches were pressed into a single state-supervised body. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing pastor who had refused Japanese pressure a decade earlier, refused this too, and was arrested in August 1955. He signed a confession under interrogation, could not live with it, took it back, and served roughly twenty-two more years.
- 1958The widows go backElisabeth Elliot, with her toddler daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live in the Waorani settlement, among the men who had done the killing. Years later two of those men baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Jim Elliot at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Killed at twenty-eight on a jungle sandbar by the people he came to reach - whose children now carry the message he brought.
Hangs on The Martyrs: The witnesses who paid with their lives, from the arena at Carthage to the present day, and the confessors who paid with everything short of their lives. Hangs on The Missionaries: The ones who looked at a map and could not stay home.
Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall
Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.
Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.
The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.
Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.
Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.
Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.