COMMENTARY: Something Worth Living and Dying For

c. 2003 Religion News Service (Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.) (UNDATED) In January 1956, five young American missionaries […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.)

(UNDATED) In January 1956, five young American missionaries _ Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Pete Fleming, Nate Saint, and Roger Youderian _ were speared to death as they attempted to bring the Christian gospel to the hitherto unreached Auca Indians in the jungles of Ecuador.


Chronicled in grim detail in Life magazine, the story sent shock waves around the world. “To the world at large this was a sad waste of five young lives,” wrote Jim Elliot’s wife, Elizabeth.

And so it appeared. Five dead men _ all of them husbands, four of them fathers _ left behind a small army of widows and orphans to mourn their loss in the wilds of the Amazon jungle.

Yet an amazing thing occurred. All but one of the widows resolved to continue the missionary work that drew them to Ecuador in the first place.

As Cornell Capa, the photojournalist who broke the story in Life notes in the forward to Elizabeth Elliot’s memoir, “The Savage My Kinsman,” Marj Saint and Marilou McCully, with three children each, moved to Quito to work in missionary headquarters; Elliot and Barbara Youderian stayed in the jungle with their small families, working among the Quichua and Jivaro Indians.

Olive Fleming, who had been on the mission field for only two months prior to her husband’s death, returned to the United States and eventually remarried. In 1989, she visited the site where her first husband, Peter, had been martyred more than 30 years before. She subsequently wrote a book, “Unfolding Destinies,” which brings the story of the Aucas up to date.

For Elizabeth Elliot, the nearly three years of work following the death of her husband merely laid the foundation for her two-year sojourn among the Aucas themselves. Together with her 3-year-old daughter, Valerie, and Nate Saint’s sister, Rachel, Elliot was invited by the tribe that killed her husband to live and work among them.

Thus did they fulfill the true meaning of Jesus’ commands to “turn the other cheek” and “love your enemies.”


Nearly 50 years later, the selfless legacies of the martyrs and their families stand in stark contrast to the “name it and claim it” theology propagated by many churches in the United States today. The airwaves often seem dominated by media “ministries” whose focus is more on promoting and achieving prosperity than on serving those Jesus referred to as “the least of these my brethren” (Matt. 25:40). Such confusing messages often leave one wondering whose kingdom is being built, the pastor’s or God’s?

Still, the courageous examples provided by missionary heroes past and present are both heartwarming and challenging. In an age where people are crying out for something real, such examples bear witness to something worth living and dying for.

DEA END ATCHISON

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