Fifty-three years ago today, evangelical missionaries Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming, and Roger Youderian died in Ecuador at the hands of a group of Auca indians. They were certainly not the first evangelical missionaries to die – after the Boxer Rebellion, for example, thick volumes were published, full of the names and stories of perished evangelicals – but these five missionaries gained a rather unique place in the evangelical pantheon. Much of this, perhaps, was due to Cornell Capa’s excellent photo spread in Life Magazine, which is available on Google. In the decades following their deaths, Jim Elliot’s widow, Elisabeth, became a major evangelical writer in her own right, and returned – along with Nate Saint’s sister – to evangelize among the Auca.
Many of the Auca converter to evangelical Christianity, and, for the remainder of the 20th century, would be trotted out dutifully at the World Congress on Evangelism (see this picture as well) and other such events. The early 21st century saw a resurgence of popular interest in the five missionaries – particularly Jim Elliot and Nate Saint. Wheaton College named a group of apartments after Elliott and Saint, and two movies were released – a documentary, Beyond the Gates of Splendor, and a fictionalized account, End of the Spear.
Perhaps the most fascinating piece of film that I’ve found, though, is this documentary, titled From Stone Age to Space Age; it speaks, among other things, to a lot of the questions I have about the way evangelicals relate to technology.
For further reading on this topic, I’d recommend Kathryn T. Long’s “Cameras ‘Never Lie’”: The Role of Photography in Telling the Story of American Evangelical Missions, in Church History, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Dec., 2003), pp. 820-851.
