Eliza Davis George and the Elizabeth Native Interior Mission
“FAITH” MISSIONARIES:
DEPENDING ON GOD ALONE
During the years that the Student Volunteer Movement was recruiting young intellectuals from the universities and colleges, the “faith” missionary movement was building momentum. Like the SVM and the Women’s Missionary Movement, the missionaries it represented came from many mission societies and denominations (or independent churches). It had its origins in 1865 with the founding of the China Inland Mission by Hudson Taylor, who directly or indirectly influenced the founding of over forty new mission boards. With the founding of such missions as the Christian and Missionary Alliance (1887), the Evangelical Alliance Mission (1890), the Central American Mission (1890), the Sudan Interior Mission (1893), and the Africa Inland Mission (1895), independent “faith” missions became a significant feature of world evangelism, whose “glorious achievements,” according to J. Herbert Kane, are “stranger than fiction and more marvelous than miracles.” While most of the infant faith missions struggled for survival, others, such as TEAM, founded by Fredrik Franson as the Scandinavian Alliance Mission, grew with amazing speed. Within eighteen months it had commissioned some one hundred missionaries to China, Japan, India, and Africa.
From the very beginning, faith missions have been associated with conservative evangelicalism, and the majority of the recruits have been either without higher education or graduates of Bible institutes or Christian colleges such as Nyack Missionary College, Moody Bible Institute, and Wheaton College. Moody Bible Institute particularly stands out as a training ground for faith missionaries, having graduated thousands of young adults who have served with hundreds of mission agencies around the world.
The term faith mission has often been associated with those missions whose financial policy guarantees no set income for its missionaries, and some such missions carry the policy to the point of refusing to solicit funds or even make known the needs of the missionaries, thus professing to rely entirely on God for financial needs. But the concept of living entirely by faith went far beyond the matter of finances. The missions were born out of faith, often at great risk and resulting in a high mortality rate among the early faith missionary pioneers.
Risking their lives to bring the gospel to those who had never heard was not taken lightly. The faith missionaries were motivated by a vivid picture of hell. For them, the purpose of missions was to save lost souls from the eternal torment of hellfire and brimstone. “May we who know Christ,” implored Jim Elliot, “hear the cry of the damned as they hurtle headlong into the Christless night without ever a chance…. May we shed tears of repentance for those we have failed to bring out of darkness.”1
While faith missionaries were not oblivious to the physical and social needs of the people to whom they ministered, evangelism was paramount, always with a focus on cutting-edge concepts and technology. “Most of the innovations in twentieth-century missions have been introduced by the faith missions,” according to Kane, “including radio, aviation, Bible correspondence courses, gospel recordings, tapes, cassettes, saturation evangelism, and theological education by extension.”2 A prime example of this was Harry Strachan’s founding of the Latin America Mission (LAM) in 1921 for the unique purpose of mass campaign evangelism. Using the latest techniques in advertising and communications, he, along with his wife, Susan, and other missionary personnel conducted entertaining programs in theaters and public halls throughout South and Central America, attracting huge crowds. The gospel was presented, and converts were left in the care of local mission societies and churches. “There is hardly a mission of any size in Latin America,” writes Kane, “which does not count among its members converts won in the campaigns conducted through the years by the LAM.”3
This emphasis on evangelism sharply increased the spread of Christianity, and the faith missions grew to meet the challenge. By the late twentieth century, faith missions were among the largest mission societies in the world. Though diverse in their geographical locations and their evangelistic methods, they developed loose organizational ties through the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, founded in 1917 to promote the growth of faith missions.
A. B. Simpson and the Christian and Missionary Alliance
Though not a missionary himself, A. B. Simpson had an enormous influence on missions, particularly in his impact on the founding of faith mission societies in America. The founders of both the Sudan Interior Mission and the Africa Inland Mission were deeply influenced by him and studied at his missionary training school; and evangelical denominations, especially those within the holiness movement, were launched into missionary activity largely through his missionary zeal. Beginning in 1883, he orchestrated interdenominational conventions held in cities throughout the United States and Canada, featuring missionaries from various denominations and mission societies. These conventions led to the formation of Simpson’s own international mission society, the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
Albert Benjamin Simpson’s interest in missions began early in life. He was born on Prince Edward Island in 1843 and was baptized by John Geddie, the first Canadian missionary to the South Seas. The “missionary atmosphere” in his home had a lasting impact on him, and as a youth he was deeply affected by a biography of John Williams, martyred on the island of Erromango. At Knox College in Toronto missions continued to interest him, but after his graduation his reputation for preaching elicited a call to serve as pastor of the large and fashionable Knox Church in Hamilton, Ontario.
After eight years of ministry in Canada, Simpson accepted a call to Chestnut Street Church in Louisville, Kentucky, which offered him an impressive yearly salary of five thousand dollars. Yet he was not comfortable with the dignified respectability that pervaded the congregation, nor with his own tendency to cater to the wealthy and ignore the poor. Then a spiritual crisis caused him to realize how “barren and withered” his ministry had become and that his “true ministry had scarcely begun.” After a “lonely and sorrowful night … not knowing but it would be death,” his “heart’s first full consecration was made.”After that the Chestnut Street Church became a center for evangelism in Louisville.4
During his Louisville pastorate, Simpson traveled to Chicago to visit friends, and during this time he had a powerful visionary experience:
I was awakened one night from sleep, trembling with a strange and solemn sense of God’s overshadowing power, and on my soul was burning the remembrance of a strange dream through which I had that moment come. It seemed to me that I was sitting in a vast auditorium, and millions of people were there sitting around me. All the Christians in the world seemed to be there, and on the platform was a great multitude of faces and forms. They seemed to be mostly Chinese. They were not speaking, but in mute anguish were wringing their hands, and their faces wore an expression that I can never forget. I had not been thinking or speaking of the Chinese or the heathen world, but as I awoke with that vision on my mind, I did tremble with the Holy Spirit, and I threw myself on my knees, and every fibre of my being answered, “Yes, Lord, I will go.”5
Following that vision, he “tried for months to find an open door, but the way was closed.” The greatest obstacle confronting him was his wife Margaret. She agreed to leave her beloved Canada to go to Louisville, but not to China! With six children, she had no interest in forsaking the comfortable lifestyle the Chestnut Street Church afforded them: “I was not then ready for such a sacrifice. I wrote him that it was all right—he might go to China himself—I would remain home and support and care for the children. I knew that would settle him for a while.”6
Simpson was not a Livingstone, and he simply could not abandon his wife and six children, but he soon became convinced that God was calling him “to labor for the world and the perishing heathen just the same as if [he] were permitted to go among them.”7
But Louisville was not the place to launch his enterprise for world evangelism, so in 1879 he accepted a call from Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church in NewYork City. After two years, however, he resigned, realizing that the church did not champion his vision for evangelism. Without any steady income, he launched his new ministry. It was an impulsive decision that stunned not only the church and his associates, but also his wife, Margaret. A. W. Tozer poignantly described her feelings:
The wife of a prophet has no easy road to travel. She cannot always see her husband’s vision, yet as his wife she must go along with him wherever his vision takes him. She is compelled therefore to walk by faith a good deal of the time—and her husband’s faith at that. Mrs. Simpson tried hard to understand, but if she sometimes lost patience with her devoted but impractical husband she is not for that cause to be too much censured. From affluence and high social position she is called suddenly to poverty and near-ostracism. She must feed her large family somehow—and not one cent coming in. The salary has stopped, and the parsonage must be vacated…. Mr. Simpson had heard the Voice ordering him out, and he went without fear. His wife had heard nothing, but she was compelled to go anyway. That she was a bit unsympathetic at times has been held against her by many. That she managed to keep within far sight of her absent-minded high soaring husband should be set down to her everlasting honor. It is no easy job being wife to such a man as A. B. Simpson was.8
With an advertisement in the newspaper, Simpson launched his new movement. His first meeting was held on a Sunday afternoon and was open to the public, except for his former parishioners, whom he had specifically instructed not to attend. He did not want to be accused of splitting the church. That meeting was well attended, but only seven remained after the service to dedicate themselves wholly to his new ministry. These seven, however, along with Simpson, formed a nucleus, and through their zealous evangelism the crowds soon overflowed the rented hall in which the services were being held. For the next eight years the group moved from place to place until a permanent building, the Gospel Tabernacle, was erected.
Simpson’s ultimate aim was to organize a body of believers committed to world evangelism, but he was not satisfied with confining the movement to his NewYork City followers. To broaden the appeal, he launched a missionary magazine, The Gospel in All Lands, and organized conventions in North American cities. In 1887 he founded two organizations that would merge in 1897 to form the Christian and Missionary Alliance. In the meantime, he established a missionary training school that would later become Nyack Missionary College.
Simpson pleaded for missionaries with a sense of urgency—not just to save souls from hell but to hasten the return of Christ. His key text was Matthew 24:14: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” The Christian and Missionary Alliance quickly spread out all over the world, and within five years it had nearly one hundred and fifty missionaries in fifteen countries.
A. B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
Yet there was severe testing during the earliest years. The first to go abroad as missionaries were five young men who sailed to the Congo in 1884, three years before the mission was officially organized. Within a few months after their arrival, the leader of the party had died. In both the Congo and the Sudan, the early attempts at evangelism were costly in lives. “Those deadly climates,” writes A. E. Thompson, “exacted such an awful toll of lives that for years the missionary graves in both fields outnumbered the living missionaries.”9 In China the Boxer uprising of 1900 claimed the lives of thirty-five Alliance missionaries and children.
But the work went forward, and by the time of Simpson’s death in 1919, the mission was securely grounded on every continent. By 1919 his missionary training school was also well established at its permanent location in Nyack, New York, and his legacy in the area of Christian education extended far beyond the corridors of one institution. His missionary training concept launched the Bible institute movement that spread out across North America and became the primary recruiting grounds for independent faith mission societies in the decades that followed.
When Simpson contemplated the world, he envisioned millions of people dying without hope of eternal life—a burden that was summed up in one of his plaintive hymns:
A hundred thousand souls a day
Are passing one by one away,In Christless guilt and gloom.
Without one ray of hope or light,With future dark as endless night,
They’re passing to their doom.
He often felt as though he alone was carrying this burden, and there were times when he buckled under the weight. Soon after he moved to New York, he plunged “into a Slough of Despond so deep that … work was impossible.” “I wandered about,” he later recalled, “deeply depressed. All things in life looked dark and withered.” He recovered, but he was always susceptible to periods of despair. For a time prior to his death, “he went under a spiritual cloud,” according to A. W. Tozer, and “felt that the face of the Lord was hidden from him.”10
To many friends and associates his bouts of despair were puzzling. How could a spiritual giant like Simpson experience such profound depression? Tozer’s analysis is insightful: “It is characteristic of the God-intoxicated, the dreamers and mystics of the Kingdom, that their flight-range is greater than that of other men. Their ability to sweep upward to unbelievable heights of spiritual transport is equaled only by their sad power to descend, to sit in dazed dejection by the River Chebar or to startle the night watches with their lonely grief.”11 Such highs and lows were a part of Simpson’s earthly pilgrimage, and if he seemingly lost his sense of direction on his descents into the valleys, it was while he was flying high that he caught and carried out his global vision of evangelism.
Fredrik Franson’s mission outreach in many ways paralleled that of A. B. Simpson, a man with whom he was closely associated. Born in Sweden in 1852, he is remembered primarily for his role in founding The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM). As a youth, he emigrated with his family to Nebraska, and as a young man, like many of the mission leaders of the late nineteenth century, he was deeply influenced by D. L. Moody and Hudson Taylor. His concern for world missions did not develop until he was in his thirties, when he traveled through Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He had one goal: “To be able to do something on a larger scale to help the masses of people who are rushing into perdition.”12
In 1890 Franson initiated his “11-day evangelist course” in Chicago for the purpose of training itinerant missionaries to serve in China with the China Inland Mission. But the following year he formed his own mission committee, which was the beginning of TEAM. The mission grew rapidly. In the spring of 1892 he reported: “The Alliance Mission [not to be confused with Simpson’s International Missionary Alliance] now has 59 missionaries in China proper, 14 in Japan, 10 on the way to Tibet, and 8 on the way to Africa, a total of 91.”13
Perhaps more than any other mission strategist of his day, Franson was consumed with numbers. He calculated that one million Christians could evangelize the whole world of 1.4 billion people if each one reached fourteen hundred people. His hopes for the evangelization of the world intersected with those of Hudson Taylor, who called for one thousand missionaries for China who could evangelize the whole of China if each of these missionaries reached fifty families a day for one thousand days.
On a more practical level, Franson, like Taylor and Simpson, called for women missionaries to be very actively involved in worldwide mission outreach. In an era when many were insisting that there were severe biblical restrictions on the ministry of women, he insisted otherwise:
There is no prohibition in the Bible against women’s public work, and we face the circumstance that the devil, fortunately for him, has been able to exclude nearly two-thirds of the number of Christians from participation in the Lord’s service through evangelization. The loss for God’s cause is so great that it can hardly be described…. There are, so to speak, many people in the water about to drown. A few men are trying to save them, and that is considered well and good. But look, over there a few women have untied a boat also to be of help in the rescue, and immediately a few men cry out; standing there idly looking on and therefore having plenty of time to cry out: “No, no, women must not help, rather let the people drown.” What stupidity!14
During Franson’s lifetime and following his death in 1908, TEAM continued to expand both in numbers of missionaries and in numbers of countries being served. But Franson’s call for a primary role for women in all aspects of mission outreach was being heeded less and less as the twentieth century progressed.
Rowland Bingham and the Sudan Interior Mission
The visions of Simpson and Franson were to send missionaries all over the world. Other mission leaders of the era, following the example of Hudson Taylor, concentrated their efforts on more specific geographical areas. Like the Student Volunteers, many of the forerunners were deemed religious extremists and exhibitionists who needlessly risked their own lives and those of others. It was what they perceived to be the call of God that propelled them onward.
This evangelistic zeal of a few inexperienced men was what led to the opening of a vast region of the interior of Africa. What was then known as the Sudan appeared to be nothing short of a hopeless cause. Failure, death, and despair marked the beginnings of the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM). The Sudan was a vast, forbidding region south of the Sahara that has since been divided into a number of separate nations. Yet through the persistence of Rowland Bingham, SIM International became a dynamic mission venture in Africa, and today it is one of the largest faith mission societies, now reaching far beyond that continent.
The story of SIM began with Walter Gowans, a young Canadian of Scottish descent. He became convinced that the Sudan, with its more than sixty million people without any missionaries, was where God wanted him. But from the beginning, he confronted enormous obstacles, especially in obtaining sponsorship and support. With no mission societies in North America willing to risk sending personnel into the disease-infested Sudan, he sailed to England, hoping to find support there.
In the meantime, his mother and staunchest supporter sought additional recruits to join in the venture with her son. That she had already sent a daughter to China did not dampen her enthusiasm. She was an ardent missions supporter, as Bingham readily observed. She had invited him to her home after hearing him speak. Convinced that he would make an ideal partner for her son, she passionately presented to him the needs of the Sudan. She was a persuasive woman, and “the next morning,” wrote Bingham, “when I went to call on Mrs. Gowans, it was to announce that I expected to sail in two weeks to join her son in a common enterprise. Was she glad? She was the whole board and I was accepted on the spot.”15
Rowland Bingham was born in 1872 in Sussex, England, where he had a carefree childhood until financial devastation hit the family after the death of his father. At the age of thirteen he quit school to work, and three years later he emigrated to Canada. He had been converted in England through the ministry of the Salvation Army, and soon after arriving in Canada, “God made it clear,” he wrote, “that He wanted me to preach the Gospel, and following His leading I joined the Salvation Army as an officer.” It was through this ministry that he first met Mrs. Gowans.
After committing himself to the new missionary venture, Bingham traveled to New York, where he contacted Thomas Kent, a friend of Walter Gowans, and persuaded him to join the venture. They sailed together in the spring of 1893 to join Gowans and to begin their trek into Africa from the West Coast. On arriving in Lagos, the trio quickly learned why other missions had been so wary about sending missionaries into the Sudan. The head of the Methodist Mission in West Africa gave them an ominous warning: “Young men, you will never see the Soudan; your children will never see the Soudan; your grandchildren may.”16 Missionaries from other societies also offered gloomy predictions, but the fact that no other missionaries were preaching the gospel in the Sudan was the very reason for which they had come, and they refused to turn back. However, their hope of setting off together as a team was dashed when Bingham contracted malaria and remained on the coast to set up a supply base.
In less than a year after they left on their eight-hundred-mile overland journey, both Gowans and Kent, true to the pessimistic predictions, had succumbed to malaria. When word of their deaths, only three weeks apart, reached Bingham, he was devastated. He returned to England, uncertain about his future and his faith:
My faith was being shaken to the very foundation…. Why should those most anxious to carry out the Lord’s commands and to give His gospel to millions in darkness be cut off right at the beginning of their career? Many questions faced me…. Was the Bible merely an evolution of human thought, even biased thought, or was it a divine revelation? For months the struggle over this great issue went on before I was finally brought back to the solid rock.17
His faith renewed, Bingham returned to Canada, determined to go forward with the mission. Realizing his own inadequacies for mission work, he took a basic medical course at a Cleveland hospital and then, in the fall of 1895, he enrolled in Simpson’s Bible school in New York City, the same school Gowans and Kent had attended. Before returning to Africa in May of 1898, he established the Sudan Interior Mission. In that same month he married Helen Blair, the daughter of a man to whom Bingham owed a debt of gratitude: “Just five years before, when her father had emptied his bank account to help send me to Africa, he little thought that I might some day return and ask his daughter to share in that work. In view of the fact that our first effort had nothing to show but two lonely graves, he found the first gift easier than the second.”18
By 1900, seven years after his first attempt, Bingham and two young volunteers were ready to try again to reach the Sudan. This time he found the missionaries in Lagos “more than ever out of sympathy” with his plans, and they strongly expressed their views to his partners. More discouragement followed, and within weeks Bingham, seriously ill with malaria, returned home. Though his young recruits had promised to go on without him, they lost heart after hearing more dismal predictions, and they returned home on the next ship.19
The news plunged him once again into the depths of depression: “It would have been easier for me, perhaps, had I died in Africa, for on the homeward journey I died another death. Everything seemed to have failed, and while I was gradually regaining strength in Britain, a fateful cable reached me with word that my two companions were arriving shortly, I went through the darkest period of my whole life.”20 Still he refused to give up. He returned to Canada, met with the council, and found four more recruits to join him for the third attempt to reach the Sudan.
This third attempt, made in 1901, was successful, resulting in the first SIM station in Africa, located at Patigi, some five hundred miles up the Niger River. But with each step forward there were two steps backward, and within two years only one of the original party of four remained. One had died and two were sent home physically debilitated, never to return. Though barely hanging on, with only a few converts made during the first ten years at Patigi, the SIM gradually spread out to new stations and became firmly grounded in that desolate region of Africa.
One factor influencing the staying power of SIM in Africa after the turn of the century was the perfected use of quinine as a cure for malaria. With the proper use of that drug, missionaries no longer had to fear the dreaded disease. Another factor, according to Bingham, was Mrs. Gowans. She was “one of the greatest prayer helpers that ever blessed and strengthened” the SIM. “With her prayer and faith she carried us from the first seven barren years into the years of harvest.”21
Besides malaria, the missionaries faced other obstructions that were in some ways equally frightening. “There is the constant invisible warfare,” wrote Bingham, in reference to the demonic world he had encountered in Africa:
It is fashionable in the Western world to relegate belief in demons and devils to the realm of mythology, and when mentioned at all it is a matter of jest. But it is no jest in West Africa or any other mission field for that matter. One has not to go far in the jungles of Nigeria, the Sudan or Ethiopia and visit a few of the African villages to believe in devils and demons. They are all around you, and soon, very soon, one begins to share the beliefs of the pagans as to the reality of these malign agencies without, of course, as a Christian sharing their fears or their vain oblations to propitiate them. Fetish men, devil men, ju-ju, lycanthropy, witches, wizards, ordeal by poison all flourished unchecked in the early days of the Mission.22
As the missionaries battled the “powers of darkness” and preached the gospel, they realized they could not ignore the physical needs of the people around them. Leprosy in particular was a dreaded African disease, and SIM soon became actively involved in eradicating its awful scourge among the people. The work began among the lepers in the 1920s, and by the 1960s the mission was treating more than thirty thousand leprosy patients in Nigeria alone. Many of the Africans who sought treatment were Muslims, and “many made their choice for Christ in spite of their early Muslim teaching and their parents’ threats.”23
As SIM grew and spread out across Africa, the needs of Ethiopia became apparent, and the church that was established there by SIM missionaries was a fitting climax to Bingham’s sacrificial life of service for Africa. In 1928 Dr. Thomas Lambie had opened up the southern provinces of Ethiopia to mission work and settled in the province of Wallamo, where he practiced medicine and conducted evangelistic work. Other SIM missionaries joined the effort, and for several years they poured themselves into the work with few results. Then, in 1935, when the Italian military forces moved against Ethiopia, the situation became grim. The American and British embassies advised all their citizens to leave immediately, but the SIM missionaries stayed on—with the blessing of their general director, Rowland Bingham. “You are under higher orders than those of the King of England or the President of the United States. Get your instructions from Him and we are one with you.”24
At this time there were only seventeen baptized believers in Wallamo, and the missionaries realized that their days were numbered. “Because we knew our time was short,” wrote one missionary, “we did everything we could to teach the Christians and get the gospel message out…. It was unsafe to leave the mission compound, but the urgency and importance of using the little time which remained to further train the young Christians warranted the danger.”25
The last nineteen missionaries and seven children remaining in Ethiopia were forcibly evacuated in 1937—giving them nearly two years of “borrowed time” to build the little Wallamo church. But even with the added time the number of believers remained small—only forty-eight—and the missionaries left with a deep sense of sadness and doubt:
As we turned the last corner around the mountain and saw in the distance the wave of their hands in farewell, we wondered what would happen to the little flickering flame of gospel light that had been lit in the midst of so much darkness. Would these young Christians, with no more of the Word of God in their own language than the Gospel of Mark and a few small booklets of selected Scripture portions to guide and teach them, be able to stand under the persecution that would inevitably come?26
And persecution did come—severe persecution that tested even the most faithful as it had in the early church. But despite the oppression the church rapidly grew. “The warm love displayed by the Christians toward one another in the times of severest persecution made a great impression on the unbelievers…. Word of such love, hitherto unknown and unheard of, spread far and wide.”27
By 1941 the war in Ethiopia was over, and the following year the first missionaries were allowed to return—though only by working under the British government. What they found amazed them. The forty-eight Christians they had left five years before had grown to some ten thousand, and instead of one fledgling church there were nearly one hundred congregations spread out across the province. It was one of the greatest stories of Christian evangelism in African history—one that overwhelmed the sixty-nine-year-old Rowland Bingham.
The painful losses of his early years in Africa had turned around, and he had just completed a book on the fifty years of SIM, Seven Sevens. Amid the celebration, he made plans to go to Ethiopia, but before he left Canada in December of 1942, he died suddenly of an apparent heart attack.
In the years after his death, SIM witnessed both victories and setbacks in Africa. When Sudanese28 independence was declared in 1955, the missionaries found themselves in the midst of political turmoil, and when civil war broke out between the southern tribal people and the northern Muslim Arabs, they were accused of aiding the southern rebels. The new government nationalized mission schools, and in 1964 the Muslim-controlled government expelled all missionaries in the south. With the missionaries gone, life for the Sudanese Christians only seemed to get worse. The northern government armed some southern tribes to fight other southern tribes, exploiting tribal animosities to weaken southern resistance. Some of the tribes in the south were ruthlessly crushed, and over a half million died. Christians were tortured and churches were burned.
By the early 1970s, however, the political climate in Sudan turned around. The Soviet advisors were dismissed, and the missionaries were allowed to return. A small Bible school was established, and many health care programs were initiated. In Ethiopia political turmoil increased as the Soviet Union became involved and a Marxist government was established. By the late 1970s the SIM missionary force there was only a fraction of what it had been, though there remained some twenty-five hundred churches and dozens of Bible schools connected to the mission.
Peter Cameron Scott and the Africa Inland Mission
The AIM, like the Sudan Interior Mission, barely survived its turbulent infancy. The torture of the African environment took its toll on the Western missionaries, and for a time the dream of fulfilling Johann Krapf’s vision of establishing a line of mission stations across Africa from the east coast turned into a grueling nightmare. The venture that had begun with promise in 1895 was within a few years barely alive. Yet by 1901 the situation had begun to reverse itself, and AIM was on its way to becoming the largest mission in East Africa.
The Africa Inland Mission was founded by Peter Cameron Scott, a young missionary who had served for a short time in Africa under the International Missionary Alliance (later the Christian and Missionary Alliance) but was forced to return home due to repeated attacks of malaria. He was born in Glasgow in 1867, emigrated to America when he was thirteen, and settled in Philadelphia, where, as a gifted vocalist, he trained with an Italian maestro. Although his parents objected to his pursuing a career in opera and insisted he learn the trade of printing, the lure of the stage was strong. But on the steps of an opera house, as he was on his way for an audition, he made the crucial decision to serve God in missions rather than to pursue a career in music.
With that decision behind him, he enrolled at the New York Missionary Training College founded by Simpson to prepare for missionary service in Africa. In 1890, at the age of twenty-three, he was ordained by Simpson, and the following day he sailed for the west coast of Africa to begin mission work. Within months after he arrived, he was joined by his brother John, but the reunion was short lived; John joined the multitude of other missionaries in “the white man’s graveyard.” Peter constructed a crude coffin and dug the grave himself. There were no church bells or flowers or eulogies, but alone at the grave, he recommitted himself to preaching the gospel in Africa.
Back in England some months later, broken in health, he found inspiration again at the tomb of David Livingstone in Westminster Abbey as he knelt and read the inscription, “Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring.” He would return to Africa and lay down his life, if need be, for the cause for which this great man had lived and died.
From England, Scott returned to America and there met with others to lay out a strategy for penetrating Africa from the east, moving beyond the coastal regions where the Anglicans were serving and on into the “unreached tribes of the interior.” Among those involved in the first planning sessions were A. T. Pierson and C. E. Hurlburt, men who would play significant roles in AIM in the years to come. The Bible Institute of Pennsylvania became the headquarters for the new mission and the scene of the farewell service in August of 1895 when Scott and seven others, including his sister Margaret, were officially commissioned to service in Africa.
Peter Cameron Scott, founder of the Africa Inland Mission.
The missionary party arrived in Zanzibar, and from there they traveled inland to establish the first of several mission stations that would be located in Kenya. Within months after founding the first station, Scott was scouting out new mission sites. More recruits, including his parents and younger sister, Ina, were on the way, and he was optimistic about the future. In 1896, when he submitted his first annual report of AIM, he recounted the significant accomplishments that had occurred in only one year. Four stations had been opened, houses had been built, educational and medical programs had been set up, and there was steady progress in language acquisition.
But hardly had Scott’s first annual report been issued when word came that he had become ill. The harsh African environment had once again brought him down, and his hectic travel schedule on foot—covering some 2,600 miles in a year—only aggravated the situation. His mother patiently nursed him, but to no avail. He died in December of 1896, just fourteen months after the work had begun.
Scott had been the lifeblood of AIM, and with his death, according to Kenneth Richardson, “The young mission passed through deep waters…. One after another, several of its valuable workers passed away. Others had to give up for health reasons. Still others—including the remaining members of the Scott family—left to serve Africa in other ways.” By the summer of 1899 the only missionary remaining on the field was William Gangert, a solitary symbol that AIM was in Africa to stay. He was soon joined by two new recruits, and the rebuilding process began. Then in 1901, C. E. Hurlburt, who had been appointed general director of the mission, uprooted his wife and five children (all of whom later became AIM missionaries themselves) and relocated in Africa, where he could have a closer scrutiny of the work and become involved himself.
By 1909, AIM had expanded its work into Tanzania and later into the north-eastern part of the Congo—but not without powerful political influence. In 1908, while on furlough in the United States, Hurlburt had been summoned to the White House to meet President Theodore Roosevelt and to advise him concerning a safari he was planning in East Africa. When he visited Africa the following year, Roosevelt renewed his acquaintance with Hurlburt and laid the cornerstone for Rift Valley Academy, offering to use his influence should the mission ever need it. Hurlburt remembered that pledge in 1910 when he confronted Belgian authorities blocking AIM’s entrance into the Congo, and he called upon the ex-president for help. True to his word, Roosevelt contacted the Belgian government and permission to enter was granted. A communications mix-up caused the local chiefs to believe Roosevelt himself was on his way in, so the first contingent of missionaries received an unexpected royal welcome.
Hurlburt had surprised many people by bringing his five children to Africa, but he was convinced of the importance of a stable family life and did not think children should be sent back to the homeland for their education. He became one of the pioneers of the missionary children’s school—a boarding school located on the field. Rift Valley Academy was established soon after he arrived in Africa; and in the years since, it has expanded to serve hundreds of missionaries in East Africa with a schedule of three months at school and one at home, allowing children to return to their families three times each year.
Hurlburt was a leader in the 1913 conference in Kenya that sought to encourage missionary cooperation based on the authority of Scripture and the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. “It seemed tragic,” writes Richardson, “that the denominational differences which divided Christians in the homelands should be imported into Kenya.”29 Although there was adverse reaction to the proposals of unity (especially from some Anglicans), a loose alliance was formed that fostered cooperation among mission societies.
There were other difficult issues confronting Hurlburt—particularly ones relating to the African tribal customs. During the 1920s the practice of female circumcision created a crisis that nearly destroyed the young Africa Inland Church. This custom, accompanied by tribal rites, involved circumcising girls at the age of puberty. The young girls were taken to a secluded forest camp where they were mutilated without anesthesia by older women using unsterilized, crude instruments that frequently resulted in serious infections as well as complications at the time of childbirth.
Within the African churches feelings ran high on both sides of the issue, but the mission insisted that the African church leaders condemn the practice or lose their positions. Only twelve refused to comply, but the crisis was not over. For taking a stand against this time-honored tribal practice, some African Christians were persecuted, and self-appointed circumcisers went out into villages in search of uncircumcised girls.
Then came the ultimate act of degradation. “It was bound to happen,” write James and Marti Hefley. “An elderly, deaf AIM missionary, Hilda Stumpf, was found choked to death. First reports said she had been killed by a thief. Then the real facts came out. She had been brutally mutilated in a fashion that pointed to the work of circumcision fanatics.” This “shocking murder caused some of the tribal zealots to back off. But the deeper conflict between Africans and Europeans dragged on and culminated in the bloody Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s.”30
Following this uprising, AIM leaders realized the urgent necessity of releasing more control of the mission activities to the Africans themselves. In 1971 AIM turned over its properties to the Africa Inland Church. The mission continued its work in Africa as set forth by Peter Cameron Scott in 1895, but at the invitation of the African church.
C. I. Scofield and the Central American Mission
During the same decade that A. B. Simpson was commissioning missionaries all over the globe and Bingham and Scott were penetrating central Africa, another American, who would later become famous for his popular edited Bible, was laying the groundwork for a gospel witness in Central America. C. I. Scofield was not the first to catch a vision for Central America, but when that area of the world came to his attention in the late 1880s, “there was only one Spanish-speaking Gospel witness” in that region.31
Scofield was born in Michigan in 1843 and raised in Tennessee. During the Civil War he joined the Confederate forces and served in Lee’s army. Following the war he studied law, served in the Kansas State Legislature, and then became a U.S. Attorney under President Grant. Later, in 1879, while practicing law in St. Louis, he was converted through the witness of a client. For Scofield, “a slave to drink,” the conversion was dramatic. He began an intense study of the Bible, and in 1883 he was ordained as a Congregationalist minister. For the next thirteen years he served as a pastor in Dallas. Later he became a conference speaker and the founder and first president of Philadelphia College of the Bible. In Dallas his concern for missions developed.
For several summers Scofield had attended the Niagara Bible Conference, and there he formed a lasting friendship with Hudson Taylor. Then, in the summer of 1888, he learned of the needs of the people in Costa Rica. When he returned to Dallas, he formed a prayer fellowship with its focus on that small country. In the fall of 1890, with the help of others, he organized the Central American Mission (CAM), and within four months its first candidate, William McConnell, was serving in Costa Rica, soon to be joined by his wife Minnie and their three sons.
C. I. Scofield, Bible editor and founder of the Central American Mission.
When McConnell arrived in Costa Rica, he met two women, Mrs. Ross and Mrs. Lang, both married to coffee plantation owners living in San José. They were active in a church founded by the Scotch Presbyterians and had been meeting together to pray for missionaries. Years later, McConnell described the women as “the first to heartily welcome us to the country and encourage us in the work,” adding that they had been “loyal friends and helpers ever since.”
By 1894 there were seven CAM missionaries in Costa Rica, and the following year the mission began work in Honduras and El Salvador. In 1899 missionaries arrived in Guatemala, and the following year in Nicaragua. In its first decade the mission had twenty-five missionaries working in five Central American countries, and despite setbacks, the work continued to grow, with some three hundred missionaries serving in six Central American countries and Mexico by the late twentieth century.
Although Scofield’s concern was specifically for Central America, all of Latin America had been passed over by Protestant missions. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, there was a growing awareness of this oversight. The Neglected Continent, a book by Lucy Guinness, underscored the “spiritual neglect of South America” and helped awaken many Christians to their responsibility. It is estimated that in 1900 there were only fifty thousand evangelical Christians in all of Latin America, a figure that increased nearly a hundredfold in the fifty years that followed and numbered tens of millions by the late twentieth century. “Nowhere,” writes Kane, “has Christianity grown so rapidly in the twentieth century.”32
The primary reason that Protestants passed over this region, according to Harold Cook, was the “violent Roman Catholic opposition” that “made Protestant missions to Latin America unattractive if not impossible.”Another factor, he suggests, was that Latin America “lacked the glamour that was somehow attached to areas like the Orient, Africa or the South Seas.” Likewise, some of the leaders of Protestant mission societies argued that Latin America was nominally Christian, so Protestant activity in that area could not properly be classified as missions in the same sense as the work in India, China, and Africa. This was particularly true of some of the delegates at the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910.33 It was also true of some of the “faith” mission leaders whose prime concern was to reach inland frontiers where Christ had not even been named.
But if certain individual mission societies hesitated to enter Latin America, most mainline denominational societies and newer “faith missions”—especially those founded around the turn of the century—had no such compunctions. They moved into the region “with the express purpose of ‘converting’ Roman Catholics.” Historically, writes Stephen Neill, “American Protestants, unlike most other Christians, have never had any hesitation over proselytizing work in nominally Roman Catholic countries, and treat such efforts as ‘missions’ without distinction from missions in non-Christian countries.”34 Most of the people living in Latin America, particularly the native Indians, were Roman Catholic in name only and had not had even minimal instruction in the faith.
Many of the new missions focused on the native peoples. The South American Indian Mission, the Andes Evangelical Mission, Wycliffe Bible Translators, and New Tribes Mission were all founded for the purpose of reaching these people, of whom Charles Darwin wrote, “One can hardly make one’s self believe that they are fellow creatures.”35 To the missionaries, however, there was no difficulty in believing that they were fellow creatures and far more—priceless souls for whom Christ died. For this, missionaries were willing to risk their lives—including Jim Elliot and four other young men who were killed by the Auca Indians of Ecuador in 1956. The tragedy became the missionary headlines of the century, with magazine covers, books, and a film all reporting the details.
The most stunning aspect of this incredible story is that it was a virtual repeat of a tragedy that had occurred a decade earlier in Bolivia when Cecil Dye, his brother Bob Dye, and their three companions, all with New Tribes Mission, entered the jungle in an effort to open the way for mission work among the bárbaro. This was a tribe, they were told, that “uses short arrows with such deadly effect that even the neighboring tribes … are terrified of them.” Others who heard of the missionaries’ plans also warned of danger: “They … attack any civilized person who comes near them”; “impossible to tame”; “you won’t come back alive”; “they’ll club their victims in their hammocks at night.” But the determined party refused to be dissuaded. “God had called them to reach this socalled ‘hardest tribe’ first.” “Of course it is risky going to them,” wrote George Hosback, the youngest member of the team, “but didn’t God stop the mouths of lions by His angels … and is He not ‘the same yesterday, today and forever’?”36
After the men entered the jungle by foot, they were never heard from again, although early in 1944, months after they departed, items belonging to them were found by a second search party. During the years that followed, rumors surfaced periodically about the men—one in 1946 reporting that they had emerged from the jungle in a remote area of Brazil. “We wondered,” wrote Jean Dye, “how much more we could bear of these waves of hope—raised only to be dashed.”
In the meantime, the wives of the missing men remained in Bolivia “more determined than ever to win these souls to Christ”37
In August of 1947 the first real breakthrough with the Ayorés occurred. The painstaking work of Joe Moreno, a self-described “flunky” missionary not chosen for the team, had paid off. He had inquired about Ayoré customs and began leaving gifts in their abandoned camps near the perimeter of their territory. Eventually, native men followed the gifts to the settlement where the missionaries were stationed; and as more time passed, the missionaries learned the language and presented the gospel to them. It was not until 1949 that the wives learned conclusively that their husbands had been killed.
That such a tragedy as this could recur in such similar circumstances a decade later illustrates how truly independent many twentieth-century faith missionaries had become, and it also shows the degree of cooperation that existed among missionaries from different evangelical mission societies. Operation Auca, which claimed the lives of five young men, was not a project designed by a mission society. Rather, it was a hastily drawn-up plan devised by members of three different missions with virtually no consultation with their leaders or with senior missionaries on the field. They were “faith” missionaries operating “by faith,” depending on God for direction.
That is not to suggest, however, that they ignored pertinent data relating to the Indians and the experience of other missionaries. Indeed, as they planned the contact with the Aucas, they pored over the details of the New Tribes tragedy in Bolivia the previous decade, noting with grave interest their mistakes and vowing not to fall into any of the same traps themselves.
The five missionaries involved in Operation Auca were all what might be termed junior missionaries. Nate Saint, a pilot working under Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF), was the most experienced, having served in Ecuador for seven years. The others had only two or three years of experience each. Roger Youderian was serving with the Gospel Missionary Union; and Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, and Ed McCully were with Christian Missions in Many Lands, an organization with ties to the Plymouth Brethren. This organization channeled money to some thirteen hundred missionaries, though it claimed it was “not a mission board, nor … in any way a mission society.” It encouraged its missionaries to “depend directly on the Lord for guidance in their work,” reminding them that they were not “answerable to any mission board—only to God”—an approach that opened the way for such a project as Operation Auca.
Operation Auca was born in the Ecuadorian jungle in the fall of 1955 in an effort to reach one of the most hostile Indian tribes in all of South America with the gospel. For centuries the Aucas, like the Ayorés in Bolivia, had been the subject of hair-raising stories. “Spanish conquistadors, Catholic priests, rubber hunters, oil drillers—all had been targets of Auca spears. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, had been killed. No outsider had ever been able to live in Auca territory”—so said Dave Cooper, a veteran missionary to Ecuador. The most recent publicized killings by the Aucas had occurred in 1943, when eight Shell Oil employees lost their lives at the hands of this most unfriendly tribe. These very accounts held a certain fascination for the five young missionaries. What a glorious victory it would be if such a tribe could be converted to Christianity!
Jim Elliot had graduated from Wheaton College in 1949 and was preparing for missionary service in Ecuador. His single-minded enthusiasm to reach South American Indians deeply influenced Pete Fleming, a graduate of the University of Washington. In 1952 they left together for Ecuador, both still single, though that would soon change.
Also arriving in Ecuador that year was Ed McCully, with his wife Marilou. He, like Elliot, was a graduate of Wheaton College, where he had been a star football player. Also a Wheaton alumnus was Nate Saint, who, with his wife Marj, had served in Ecuador since 1948. Roger Youderian, a World War II paratrooper and graduate of Northwestern College in Minneapolis, was the most recent arrival, coming in 1953 with his wife Barbara and infant daughter.
Although Youderian was an enthusiastic participant in Operation Auca, his brief tenure as a missionary working among the headhunting Jivaros had not been a satisfying time, and he had been on the verge of giving up and going home. “There is no ministry for me among the Jivaros or the Spanish,” he had written in his dairy, “and I’m not going to try to fool myself. I wouldn’t support a missionary such as I know myself to be, and I’m not going to ask anyone else to. Three years is long enough to learn a lesson and learn it well … the failure is mine…. This is my personal ‘Waterloo’ as a missionary.”38
But Operation Auca changed all that. The excitement of being involved in what was hoped to be one of the great missionary breakthroughs in modern history brought new life into his missionary work. For the others too, Operation Auca provided, in the words of Nate Saint, “high adventure, as unreal as any successful novel,”39 a welcome change in the midst of routine missionary work. Though Jim, Pete, and Ed had been invited by Chief Atanasio to come and teach his tribe of Quichuas, it was the fearsome Aucas that captured their imaginations.
The dream of reaching the Aucas had been in the minds of the missionaries for years. Ever since Nate had arrived in Ecuador and heard stories of them, he had dreamed of one day sharing the gospel with them. Pete and Jim had also been deeply burdened for them. In December of 1953 Pete wrote of this burden in his diary:
Last night with Nate and Cliff [a visitor from the States] we talked a long time about the Auca problem. It is a grave and solemn one; an unreachable people who murder and kill with a hatred which causes them to mutilate the bodies of their victims. It came to me strongly then that God is leading me to do something about it … I know that this may be the most important decision of my life but I have a quiet peace about it. Strangely enough I do not feel my coming marriage as prohibiting myself from being eligible for this service.40
The first breakthrough came nearly two years later, on September 19, 1955. As Nate Saint flew over Auca territory in his single-engine Piper Cruiser, he spotted for the first time an Auca village. In the weeks that followed, regular visits to the “neighbors” began. As he was at the controls, one of the other missionaries would drop gifts (including machetes, knives, clothing, and life-sized pictures of themselves) and shout friendly Auca greetings learned from Dayuma, an Auca woman living outside the tribe. On one occasion while circling above, Nate used a rope to lower a bucket containing gifts, and he was excited to pull it back up filled with gifts from the Aucas—a live parrot, peanuts, and a smoked monkey tail. This response was taken as a genuine sign of friendship.
The speed with which the missionaries moved forward in this dangerous undertaking, and the secrecy that surrounded it, have in the years since been the most controversial aspects of the effort. “The whole project,” wrote Ed McCully to Jim Elliot, “is moving faster than we had originally dared to hope.” But why such haste? “The reason for the urgency,” wrote Nate Saint, “is the Brethren boys feel that it is time now to move.” Presumably he was referring only to Jim and Ed, as Pete Fleming had warned against moving ahead quickly—especially before they had a better command of the language. Jim, who was “always quick to make decisions,” was described as “chewing the bit,” while Nate was cautioning that nothing be done suddenly, allowing each advance to “soak in” before another step was taken. Yet less than three months after the first gift drop, the men had landed in the midst of Auca territory.41
But if speed was a top priority, secrecy was even more so. A code system was developed so that the missionaries could communicate over short-wave radio without their plan being discovered. They themselves were sworn to secrecy. No one other than their wives and Johnny Keenan, an MAF pilot who would provide backup support should they need it, was to know. Nate Saint wrote to his family back home requesting special prayer, hinting at what was underway, but couching even the vaguest clues in such phrases as “do not mention,” “CONFIDENTIAL,” “guard your talk,” and “tell no one.”42
The reason for the strict secrecy, according to James Hefley, was that “they feared that if word got out, a horde of journalists, adventurers, and curiosity seekers would make contact impossible.” But the veil of secrecy extended to others who could be trusted and who could have given invaluable assistance. Frank Drown, with twelve years experience among the Indians, was not told of the venture until the plans had been finalized.
Another key individual left out of the planning was Rachel Saint, Nate’s sister, who had spent months studying the Auca language with Dayuma, who had fled from her people. Rachel hoped to reach them with the gospel herself, but she knew the necessity of extreme caution. From Dayuma she had been warned: “Never trust them…. They may appear friendly and then they will turn around and kill.”43 Such warnings were probably not what Jim Elliot wanted to hear, nor did he want to risk her reporting their planned venture to her supervisors at Wycliffe.
Certainly the five missionaries were aware of the danger, but they were convinced that no risk was too great to take for God. “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose,” was Jim Elliot’s motto; and he solemnly vowed that he was “ready to die for the salvation of the Aucas.”44 They were all looking to God for guidance, and they saw signs of what they viewed to be God’s direct intervention. The Curaray River, for example, seemed to shrink from its banks, providing a beach airstrip at a time when the beach normally would have been flooded.
Nevertheless, there was great trepidation as the time approached for the landing in Auca territory. Aside from the fierce nature of the Aucas, there were other serious safety factors to consider, particularly concerning the landing and takeoff from the short sandy beach along the river. Nate Saint was a skilled pilot, but he knew all too well that a sandy beach was not the same as a packed dirt airstrip. This awesome responsibility kept him awake most of the night on January 2, 1956.
The alarm clocks rang before 6:00 A.M. on Tuesday, January 3, and the adrenaline was flowing as the men began dressing. For Olive Fleming, married to Pete for only a year and a half, it had been a “rough night.” Her apprehension could not be disguised. Jim Elliot had initially advised against Pete’s going since it would mean risking the lives of three of the four male missionaries who knew the Quichua language, but by late December the consensus of opinion seemed to have changed. On December 27, Pete wrote in his diary: “It was decided that perhaps I ought to prepare to go on the expedition in order to gain by numbers more relative security for all.”45 The decision was made that Pete should fly out with Nate each night. Reports of previous Auca attacks indicated they invariably struck during the predawn hours.
The plan called for Nate Saint to make several trips to Palm Beach (the name designating a sandy shoreline along the Curaray River), ferrying the missionaries and equipment in. The first landing and takeoff were crucial: “As we came in … we slipped down between the trees in a steep side slip…. As the weight settled on the wheels I felt it was soft sand—too late to back out now. I hugged the stick back and waited. One softer spot and we’d have been on our nose—maybe our back. It never came.” On takeoff, after leaving Ed alone on the beach, “the sand really grabbed the wheels,” but within seconds Nate was airborne and on his way back to the base to begin his second trip.46
January 3 was a busy day on Palm Beach as Nate ferried in the missionaries and equipment. By nightfall the men had constructed a tree house, and three of them slept there while Nate and Pete flew back to the base at Arajuno to spend the night. They returned the following morning and spent a relaxing uneventful day with the other three on the beach before flying out again in the late afternoon. Thursday was much the same. Then on Friday, things began to happen. At 11:15 A.M., three naked Aucas (two women and a man) suddenly appeared out of the jungle from across the river. Jim waded out to meet them, and a friendly exchange took place. They accepted gifts and appeared to be at ease with their hosts. That night the Auca visitors departed, and Saturday was another uneventful day.
By Sunday the missionaries were restless and anxious for something to happen, wondering if their visitors had forgotten them. Nate decided to fly over the Auca village, which appeared deserted. On the way back he spotted a band of Aucas “en route” to Palm Beach. “That’s it, guys! They’re on the way,” he shouted as he touched down on the beach. The missionaries waited. At 12:30 P.M. Nate made his scheduled radio contact with Marj at Shell Mera, promising to contact her again at 4:30.
The 4:30 contact never came. Nate’s watch (later found smashed against a stone) had stopped ticking at 3:12 P.M. But Marj refused to believe the worst. Perhaps the radio transmitters had broken down. It was a sleepless night as she prayed and thought of the unthinkable. Early the next morning Johnny Keenan was in the air flying over Palm Beach. His report back to Marj was grim—a report that Marj relayed on to Elisabeth Elliot: “Johnny had found the plane on the beach. All the fabric is stripped off. There is no sign of the fellows.”47
“Suddenly, the secrecy barrier was down,” writes Russell Hitt. Word spread rapidly. Missionaries and government officials organized a search party. A Time magazine correspondent and a Life magazine photographer were dispatched to the scene. The story was on news wires, and people around the world waited for news. On Wednesday afternoon two bodies were sighted from the air, and on Friday the ground search team reached the site. “The missionaries in the ground party,” according to Hefley, “pulled four badly deteriorated bodies from the river. Some still had palm wood spears sticking through their clothing. From personal belongings, they identified Jim, Pete, Rog, and Nate. Ed McCully’s body apparently had been washed away.” It was a somber scene. “The darkening sky indicated a jungle storm would soon be upon them. Hurriedly, the missionaries dug a shallow grave. As the rain came down in sheets, Frank Drown offered a quick committal prayer.”48
At Shell Mera the five widows congregated to hear the grim details. Ahead of them was the task of putting their lives back together. For the stoical Elisabeth Elliot, there were “no regrets.” It was God’s will. “This was not a tragedy…. God has a plan and purpose in all things.”49 For Olive, who was left alone with no children, the trauma might have been unbearable. During her brief marriage she had endured the strain of two miscarriages and now the tragic death of her husband. But the very Bible passages she and Pete had been reading together before his death became her strength during this time of desperation, especially 2 Corinthians 5:5: “He who has prepared us for this very thing is God.”
As with the slaying of the five missionaries in Bolivia in the previous decade, the public response was mixed. From everywhere came an outpouring of sympathy for the families; and many Christians, on seeing the commitment of these five, dedicated themselves to God and to missionary service. But to others the incident was “a tragic waste” of young lives.
Despite the trauma that ended Operation Auca, the Aucas themselves were not forgotten. MAF pilots resumed the gift drops, and Rachel Saint continued her study of the Auca language. But no more dramatic entries into Auca territory were planned. The effort proceeded with caution, and after nearly two years, some of the Aucas slowly began to make overtures to others outside their tribe. Then, in September of 1958, Dayuma returned to her tribe with two Auca women, and three weeks later they reappeared and invited Rachel Saint and Elisabeth Elliot to visit them. So began mission work with the Aucas. There were no newsmen or photographers to record the breakthrough, for there was nothing to record except that two women were once again venturing into the jungle to preach the gospel—routine missionary work.
In the aftermath of the tragedy there were many theories put forth as to why the Aucas killed the five missionaries—for example, that internal issues among the Aucas were contributing factors. Perhaps so. But the overriding factor was that the Aucas were territorial people. Outsiders entering their territory were considered enemies. To protect their families, by the dictates of their worldview, they had no choice but to eliminate their adversaries. The missionaries failed to appreciate and recognize that worldview.
“For those who saw it as a great Christian martyr story,” Elisabeth Elliot later reflected, “the outcome was beautifully predictable. All puzzles would be solved. God would vindicate Himself. Aucas would be converted and we could all ‘feel good’ about our faith.” But that is not what happened. “The truth is that not by any means did all subsequent events work out as hoped. There were negative effects of the missionaries’ entrance into Auca territory. There were arguments and misunderstandings and a few really terrible things, along with the answers to prayer.”50
Eliza Davis George and the Elizabeth Native Interior Mission
While many faith missions such as the Sudan Interior Mission, the Africa Inland Mission, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, New Tribes Mission, and Christian Missions in Many Lands grew rapidly during the course of the twentieth century, each sponsoring hundreds of missionaries, others remained small and obscure, though not without making an impact among the people they encountered. One such mission is the Elizabeth Native Interior Mission founded by Eliza Davis George for the purpose of training young Liberian nationals to evangelize their own people.
It was not easy for a woman to establish her own mission society, especially if that society was not specifically a Catholic religious order or a Protestant “female agency.” But complicating matters for Eliza Davis was the fact that she was a black woman. Merely obtaining a missionary appointment was a major hurdle for such a person. Others before her had struggled against racism in their efforts to answer God’s call to missionary work. Most had given up, but she refused to be intimidated and founded a mission despite the great odds.
Mary McLeod Bethune offers an example of the difficulties faced by black women who desired a missionary vocation. She was one of seventeen children born to an impoverished South Carolina farm family. Her secondary education was funded through scholarships, and with the financial aid of a kindly Quaker woman she enrolled at Moody Bible Institute. There she prepared for missionary work in Africa with a Presbyterian mission board, but after graduating in the 1890s she was told that “there were no openings for black missionaries in Africa.” Despite this rejection, she “accomplished remarkable things in her eighty years,” writes Elliott Wright. “She built a college and hospital for blacks in Daytona Beach, Florida. She mothered the influential National Council of Negro Women.” She “advised presidents, had a hand in shaping the Charter of the United Nations, and worked for voting rights for all American women.” Only missionary work to Africa was denied her.51
Eliza Davis (1879–1980) faced similar obstacles. She grew up in Texas in the late nineteenth century. Soon after she completed her studies at Central Texas College, during the heyday of the Student Volunteer Movement, she dedicated her life to foreign missions at a prayer meeting at her alma mater, where she had been asked to stay on as a teacher and matron. During a long prayer, while the leader went “all the way around the world and halfway back again,” praying
for India, China, Japan, and Africa, Eliza’s heart was suddenly filled with an overwhelming desire to see her brothers and sisters in Africa…. As clearly as if she were there, she saw black people from Africa passing before the judgment seat of Christ, weeping and moaning, “But no one ever told us You died for us.”52
The immediate response to Davis’s disclosure that she had been called to be a missionary was, “You don’t have to go over there to be a missionary—we have enough Africa over here.” That was only the beginning of the opposition she faced. When she sought denominational support from her church, the Southern Baptist Convention, she was rebuffed. Never before had a black woman from Texas become an overseas missionary, and church leaders “did not believe she was able to take on such pioneering work.” Finally, however, she was permitted to present her case at a special meeting. Her words gripped the hearts of those obstinate men.
Eliza sat down, realizing that she had never once even looked at the notes clenched in her hand. Then, startled, she heard the board members applauding. Dr. Strong stood up, cleared his throat to bring the members to attention, looked at Eliza, and said:
“Miss Davis, your eloquence and sincerity have moved us deeply. I for one can no longer stand in the way of your fulfilling your life’s ambition.”53
Davis arrived in Liberia in 1914 and began working with another single woman in the interior, where they established a Christian trade school, the Bible Industrial Academy. Within two years the school had an enrollment of fifty boys, who were housed in a bamboo building with a thatched roof. “Even more thrilling to Eliza was the response to the gospel among the tribal people. Within the year more than a thousand converts had accepted Christ in the villages.”54But news from home was not so positive. The Texas Baptist Convention had separated from the National Baptists, who were in charge of the work in Liberia. Since Davis was from Texas, her appointment and support were now in jeopardy.
With an uncertain future, Eliza Davis felt vulnerable and alone. It was in that frame of mind that she made a critical decision that would haunt her for years to come. Her acquaintance with C. Thompson George, a native of British Guyana who was working in Liberia with a Portuguese company, led to a marriage proposal from him, which she initially turned down. “I didn’t come here to marry,” she responded in a short note. “I came here to work for the salvation of the souls of these natives, and nothing will deter me from my course.” But that was before she received the letter from the Convention telling her that a Reverend and Mrs. Daniel Horton would be replacing her at the Bible Industrial Academy, the school she had worked so hard to establish.55
With that devastating revelation still ringing in her ears, George’s promise that he would leave his job and help her start a new mission suddenly became more appealing. “Though she didn’t love this little man with his English accent and his vast experience, she did respect and admire him…. And he was offering her the only hope she had to remain in Africa.” Initially they worked together as a team, George keeping his promise to forsake his worldly ventures for her ministry. Very quickly, however, problems developed. She “had not found the physical intimacies of marriage easy, but she attributed this to the fact that she had been an ‘old maid’ when she married. But to have her husband smell of liquor repulsed her.”56
Despite their marital conflicts, Eliza and Thompson continued to work together in the years that followed, often in the face of heavy financial difficulties. Yet they continued to make progress in their work. They traveled around holding revivals in churches as well as in areas where there were no churches. They trained more than fifty boarding students at the thatched-roofed mud school they operated. And many of the students became future leaders in Liberia.
In 1939, after more than twenty years of marriage, Thompson died. A friend who knew them both later assessed the marriage:
She was very sad about that situation. I don’t think it could have worked; in the light of her character, her gifts, and her calling, it would have been difficult to have found a suitable husband. She was too absorbed in working for people to give sufficient affection, attention, and time to her husband. He would have to have been exactly like her. But husbands want to take the lead and want the wife to give them a certain amount of time. It would have been hard for her unless he had changed.57
In the years after Thompson’s death, Eliza witnessed the greatest growth and progress ever in her work. By 1943 her mission work included four substations besides her mission center at Kelton, and the local churches were cooperating in the work. But once again she faced opposition from church leaders in America. She was sixty-five, and the National Baptist Convention (from which she had received some support) was determined to retire her and replace her with one of her Liberian former students who had gone to America for a college education. The letter bearing this pronouncement indicated concern for her health, but she knew that once again her work had been undermined. Determined to stay on and continue without any denominational support, she sought to put the incident behind her. In her recorded memoirs she simply states the hard facts: “In 1945 the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention of America saw fit to discontinue my services as a missionary.”58
From that point on, Eliza worked “by faith,” supported largely by “Eliza Davis George Clubs” in the United States. She continued her independent mission work in Liberia, which became known as the Elizabeth Native Interior Mission. The mission acquired thousands of acres of land in the years that followed, and by 1960 there were twenty-seven churches in the Eliza George Baptist Association, which was closely related to the mission. She continued to be actively involved in the work until she was past the age of ninety, and she lived to reach one hundred. When she died, the work was carried on by capable nationals who had worked beside her over the years.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
David, Raymond. Fire on the Mountains: The Story of a Miracle—The Church in Ethiopia. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1975.
Elliot, Elisabeth. Through Gates of Splendor. New York: Harper & Row, 1958.
Hitt, Russell T. Jungle Pilot: The Life and Witness of Nate Saint. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1973.
Hunter, J. H. A Flame of Fire: The Life and Work of R. V. Bingham. Scarborough, ON: Sudan Interior Mission, 1961.
Johnson, Jean Dye. God Planted Five Seeds. Woodworth, WI: New Tribes Mission, 1966.
Kane, J. Herbert. Faith Mighty Faith: A Handbook of the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association. New York: Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, 1956.
Richardson, Kenneth. Garden of Miracles: The Story of the Africa Inland Mission. London: Africa Inland Mission, 1976.
Spain, Mildred W. “And in Samaria”: A Story of More than Sixty Years’ Missionary Witness in Central America, 1890–1954. Dallas: Central American Mission, 1954.
______. Witness in Central America, 1890–1954. Dallas: Central American Mission, 1954.
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