Elizabeth “Betty” Greene and Mission Aviation
INNOVATION AND INGENUITY:
THE CALL FOR SPECIALIZATION
The typical nineteenth-century missionary, if there was one, was an evangelist. His time was largely consumed with saving souls and planting churches. Even if he practiced medicine or translated Scripture, he was first and foremost a preacher of the gospel. By the twentieth century that concept of a missionary was changing. Missionary work was becoming far more diversified. By mid-century many mission societies had been founded for the express purpose of promoting certain mission specialties, and in the decades that followed, it was assumed that a missionary would specialize in a particular aspect of ministry.
The base for this new trend in mission specialization was primarily the United States. It had actually begun in the nineteenth century as missionary doctors and educators went abroad, sponsored by denominational mission societies. In the following decades the trend continued, and by the middle of the twentieth century there were entire mission agencies that concentrated on one particular specialty.
During the years following World War I, there was a decline in religious fervor, and this was reflected in an ambivalence toward foreign missions. “The mood of the Protestant churches in the 1920s,” according to Winthrop Hudson, “was remarkably complacent.” There was “a growing missionary apathy,” and “missionary giving steadily declined during this period of booming prosperity.”1 The number of students volunteering for foreign missions fell significantly—from 2,700 in 1920 to only around 250 in 1928. The very motivation for missions was challenged by William E. Hocking and his colleagues in the Laymen’s Inquirey, warning against “conscious and direct evangelism.”
In fundamentalist-evangelical circles, however, the missionary spirit had never died. Even during the 1930s, despite the Great Depression, there was a growing movement to speed up the pace of world evangelism through innovative means. During that decade Clarence Jones and some of his visionary colleagues made the earliest attempts to establish missionary radio. At that time also, William Cameron Townsend began training missionary linguists and Joy Ridderhof was implementing her ideas for gospel recordings, while others were testing the practicality of aviation on the mission field. World War II, however, frustrated the plans of many of these missionary activists, and it was not until the end of the war that the real thrust of missionary specialization got underway.
The close of World War II brought a revival of religious fervor in America. Though nearly all religious groups played a role in this new religious spirit, it was the evangelicals, according to Hudson, “that gave the revival its most vigorous leadership.”2 Such newly formed organizations as Youth for Christ and the National Association of Evangelicals gave the evangelical movement a broader base. The close of the war also saw the emergence of a new missions association, the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, that was openly opposed to the religious liberalism of the twentieth century.
Spurred on by this wave of evangelical fervor, the embryonic specialty missions conceived in the 1930s began to blossom. With servicemen coming home from abroad, there was a new awareness and sense of urgency for world evangelism. Organizations such as Mission Aviation Fellowship, Far East Broadcasting Company, Far East Gospel Crusade, and Greater Europe Mission were all formed through the efforts of World War II veterans.
By the 1950s the “Iron Curtain” had barred mission work from much of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and vast portions of Asia were effectively closed to the gospel as well. Radio and literature were seen as the only viable means of reaching such people, and as a result, missions such as the Slavic Gospel Association, Trans-World Radio, and those promoting Bible smuggling found a solid base of support.
After World War II, Christian literature as a missionary tool expanded rapidly. Several organizations were founded that were geared almost exclusively to an overseas ministry, including the Christian Literature Crusade, the World Literature Crusade, Operation Mobilization, the Evangelical Literature League, the Pocket Testament League, Moody Literature Mission, and Evangelical Literature Overseas.
The mission specialties that became most associated with the new missionary “heroes” of the mid-twentieth century were those centered around medicine, translation and linguistics work, radio, and aviation. These specialties were often closely tied to one another, all dedicated to the goal of world evangelization.
Medical Missions: “Angels of Mercy”
From the beginning of the modern missionary period, medical work was a significant aspect of world evangelism, but not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did medical missions became a distinct specialty in its own right. By 1925 more than two thousand doctors and nurses from America and Europe were serving throughout the world, and mission-run hospitals and clinics were increasing rapidly.
The ministry of missionary medicine has been a monumental humanitarian effort the world over. But despite their goodwill, medical missionaries have often found themselves in direct competition with traditional doctors and types of medicine. Sometimes the opposition manifested itself in threats and attacks, and other times in deep suspicion. A missionary doctor in Africa waited eight years before he treated his first native patient. In China medical missionaries faced open hostility; yet in 1935 over half of the hospitals in that country were mission-operated facilities.
Medical doctors have generally received the most acclaim for their service in medical missions, but dentists, nurses, and other medical personnel have also made noteworthy contributions to the cause. Likewise, some missionaries with virtually no training in medicine learned by trial and error how to treat diseases, thereby alleviating suffering and death while paving the way for an evangelistic ministry.
The first noted medical missionary in the modern period was Dr. John Thomas, who preceded William Carey to India and later worked alongside him. Though Thomas was emotionally unstable, Carey praised his work, claiming that the “cures wrought by him would have gained any physician or surgeon in Europe the most extensive reputation.” Dr. John Scudder was the first noted American missionary to specialize in medicine and was the patriarch of a long line of medical missionaries to serve in India and elsewhere in the world.
Perhaps the most famous medical missionary of all time was the famed Albert Schweitzer, a medical doctor, musician, and biblical scholar, whose controversial theological views were widely disseminated in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus. His career as a medical missionary began in West Africa in 1913, where he established a hospital at Lambarene. There, except for a period of imprisonment by the French during World War I, he devoted his life to medical work in Africa. Although he was a sought-after author, lecturer, and concert organist and could have enjoyed a very comfortable life at home, he chose instead to serve “the brother for whom Christ died.”3
Though the field of missionary medicine was dominated in the early years by men, women began entering the field in the late nineteenth century, and soon their achievements were being heralded all over the world. Clara Swain, a Methodist and the first woman missionary doctor from America, arrived in India in 1870, and within four years had opened her first hospital. The first missionary nurse was Miss E. M. McKechnie, who arrived in Shanghai in 1884 and later founded a hospital there.
Wilfred Grenfell, missionary doctor to Labrador.
There were few regions of the world that medical missionaries did not enter. While most medical missionaries in modern history have spent their lives in tropical climates fighting against the ravages of fever, leprosy, and other tropical scourges, Wilfred Grenfell conducted an effective medical ministry along the frozen coastline of Labrador. In 1885, while completing his medical training in London, he attended a revival campaign where he was inspired by the words of D. L. Moody and C. T. Studd. Grenfell, also a cricket player, was deeply moved, and that night he was converted. Soon afterward he volunteered to serve as a missionary doctor for the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, and then, in the 1890s, he began ministering to people in the scattered villages where families were entirely without medical services.
To reach these villages, the adventurous doctor navigated his own steampowered launch along the dangerous coastline, “taking risks,” according to a biographer, “that would have made a professional sailor die of fright.” He “threaded the launch between islands and a fearful collection of submerged rocks … through fog and … against the strong winds and heavy seas.”4 In addition to his medical work, he was involved in economic endeavors that helped the impoverished villagers.
Grenfell traveled and spoke in churches, telling exciting stories of his work and his exploits. His fame spread, and money poured in as “Grenfell Societies” sprang up across the United States and Canada. He died in 1940, but his memory lives on today along the rugged coasts of Labrador.
The most renowned medical missionary family was the Scudders, who served for generations in India and elsewhere. In 1819 John Scudder left his growing practice in NewYork City and sailed for Ceylon with his wife and child. They served for thirty-six years in Ceylon and India, and during that time thirteen more children were born. Of the nine who survived to adulthood, seven became missionaries, most of them specializing in medicine like their father. In four generations, forty-two members of the Scudder family became missionaries, contributing well over one thousand combined years of missionary service. Among those forty-two was Ida, the daughter of John Scudder’s youngest son, also named John and also a medical missionary to India.
Ida Scudder was born in India in 1870 and grew up well-acquainted with the trials of missionary life, particularly the pain of separation from loved ones. When she was a youth, her family returned to America for furlough, after which her father sailed to India alone. Two years later her mother joined him, leaving her daughter with relatives in Chicago. It was a traumatic time, according to her biographer:
The memory of that night could still bring a stabbing pain. The rain outside had been as wild as her own fourteen-year-old helpless grief. She had not even been allowed to go to the station to see her mother off for India. When her clinging arms had been finally, regretfully, unloosed, she had rushed upstairs and sobbed all night into her mother’s empty pillow…. With the passing weeks and months the aching loneliness had never ceased, merely subsided.5
After high school she remained in the United States to attend a “young ladies’ seminary” in Northfield, Massachusetts, founded by D. L. Moody. She had no intention of joining the family tradition and becoming a missionary, but shortly after her graduation in 1890, she received an urgent cablegram informing her that her mother was seriously ill. Within weeks she was on her way to India, that “horrible country, with its heat, dust, noise, and smells.” Her purpose was to care for her mother, and when that obligation was met, she would return to America to pursue her own dreams.
Scudder’s stay in India was longer than she had planned. In addition to caring for her mother, there was other urgent work to be done. She soon found herself in sole charge of a school of sixty-eight girls. Although she was happy to be reunited with her family, she felt pressured from her parents and extended family to not shirk the Scudder duty of becoming a missionary. But she wanted more than the toil of missionary life. Then came the “three knocks in the night,” her “call” to medical missions—a parable that was pulling her back to India. Three different men—a Brahmin, another high-caste Hindu, and a Muslim—came to the door during the course of one night, pleading for her to assist in difficult childbirths, refusing the assistance of her physician-father because custom prohibited such contact.
I could not sleep that night—it was too terrible. Within the very touch of my hand were three young girls dying because there was no woman to help them. I spent much of the night in anguish and prayer. I did not want to spend my life in India. My friends were begging me to return to the joyous opportunities of a young girl in America. I went to bed in the early morning after praying much for guidance. I think that was the first time I ever met God face-to-face, and all that time it seemed that He was calling me into this work. Early in the morning I heard the “tom-tom” beating in the village and it struck terror in my heart, for it was a death message. I sent our servant, and he came back saying that all of them had died during the night. Again I shut myself in my room and thought very seriously about the condition of the Indian women and after much thought and prayer, I went to my father and mother and told them that I must go home and study medicine, and come back to India to help such women.6
The following year she returned to America, and in the fall of 1895 she enrolled at Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia. In 1898, when Cornell Medical College opened its doors to women, she transferred there to take advantage of its higher ranking accreditation, and she received her M.D. degree from Cornell. When she returned to India, accompanied by Annie Hancock, a good friend who had come to work with her and to conduct evangelism, she brought with her a ten-thousand-dollar check for a new hospital given by a wealthy woman supporter.
Her dream of serving her internship under the brilliant tutelage of her father was shattered when he unexpectedly died of cancer. To make matters worse, the people, though desperate for medical attention, did not trust her. As the months passed, her practice slowly grew, yet she continued to encounter superstitious practices that counteracted her best efforts. Medicine was prohibited on certain feast days, and critically ill patients were sometimes moved from place to place to escape evil spirits. On one occasion, after cleaning a serious wound she stepped aside to prepare the dressing, and when she turned back she was distressed to see the girl dabbing “holy ashes” in the wound.
Soon after she arrived in India, construction began on the hospital at Vellore that she had pleaded for before leaving America. But she quickly realized that an educational facility was also necessary. Indian women needed to be properly trained to go out among their own people in the villages. Building a nursing school for women became her all-consuming goal. From then on, fund-raising became an important part of her ministry. While home on furlough, she captivated her largely female audiences by her stories of the hopeless plight of the Indian women, and every meeting brought more money for the project. When the nursing school opened, she was deluged with applicants, and her first graduating class ranked high in the government exams.
In addition to her medical courses, Scudder taught a four-year Bible course on the apostle Paul and the Pauline epistles. But medical work consumed the vast majority of her sixteen-hour work day. In addition to running a hospital, a medical college, and village dispensaries, with her mother’s help she operated a small orphanage. More than twenty homeless children were taken into the Scudder home, and frequently she brought one or more of them along on her rounds. Her mother’s death at the age of eighty-six was a profound loss to her. Sixty-three years earlier, this tenacious woman had been denied mission-board support because of frailty. Her husband agreed to accept responsibility for her, and for a quarter of a century after he died, she continued on in the work.
As Scudder’s medical work grew, vast sums of money were needed to defray expenses and to update equipment. Women’s groups from four denominations were supporting the work, but still the funds were inadequate. Then, in the early 1920s, she received word that her work, along with other Christian schools in India, would be eligible for a one-million-dollar Rockefeller grant if two million dollars could be raised elsewhere. She returned to America for the grueling fund-raising campaign that netted three million dollars, a large portion of which went to build a new medical complex at Vellore.
Ida Scudder, missionary doctor in India.
In spite of the new facilities, Vellore Medical College could not keep pace with the new government requirements during the years following independence. A 1937 ruling required all medical schools to be affiliated with the University of Madras. For Scudder, “it sounded the death knell for her beloved medical school.”7 In the midst of the Great Depression, raising the necessary funds seemed impossible. The men’s Christian medical schools were being consolidated, but there were no other women’s medical schools. For many, including John R. Mott, a coeducational school was the logical solution, and some suggested that Vellore would be the ideal location.
Scudder enthusiastically shared the proposal with her supporters back home, only to be thrown into the most bitter controversy she had ever endured. Thousands of women had been mobilized to raise money to support medical missions for women in India, and the thought of sharing all they had worked so hard for with the men was unthinkable. Hilda Olson, a governing board member of the Vellore Medical compound, responded tersely to the proposal: “Vellore is as you say, God’s work, but I would like to add God’s work for women. Every dollar would have to be given back to the givers.”8
The governing board was bitterly divided on the issue, and Lucy Peabody, who had been one of Scudder’s staunchest supporters through the years, became her most caustic critic, accusing her of disloyalty to everything the board stood for. It was a depressing time for Scudder, but in the end, after years of sharp debate, the board voted to join the men, and Vellore became the site of the new coeducational school.
During these years and following, Scudder became widely recognized for her accomplishments. She was interviewed by reporters, and many stories were written about her work. The Reader’s Digest, among other magazines, gave her flattering coverage:
This extraordinary white-haired woman has, at 72, a spring in her step, a sparkle in her eye and the skilled, strong hands of a surgeon of 45. For 18 years she had been head of the medical association in a district with a population of 2,000,000. Doctors all over India send her their most difficult gynecological cases. Women and children come just to touch her, so exalted is her reputation for healing.9
She retired in 1946 at the age of seventy-five and was succeeded by one of her most distinguished pupils, Dr. Hilda Lazarus. It was a graceful retirement, according to her biographer. “She who had been all her life a leader—some had called it dictator—now found it possible to be a follower.”10 But she remained active for more than another decade. She taught her weekly Bible class (to both men and women), advised doctors on difficult cases, entertained friends and dignitaries at Hill Top, her beautiful Indian residence, and played a fast game of tennis. Although she was not what she had been at the age of sixty-five (when during a tournament she had beaten her teenage opponent in two sets, winning every game—after the girl scornfully objected to having to play a “grannie”), she continued to play regularly, and even at the age of eighty-three, according to her biographer, “she was still serving a wicked tennis ball.”11
So famous had she become that when a letter addressed simply “Dr. Ida, India” arrived on the subcontinent populated by some three hundred million people, it was sent immediately to her at Vellore.
Another well-known missionary doctor who served in south-central Asia was Viggo Olsen, who is most remembered for his widely read autobiography, Daktar: Diplomat in Bangladesh. Becoming a missionary was not something he had contemplated when he began his medical training. “I viewed Christianity and the Bible through agnostic eyes,” he writes, “feeling that modern science had outmoded much of this religious sentiment.”12 Following his conversion, however, he felt “God’s call” to overseas medical missions. Then, “three days later came the acid test.” In the mail was a letter: “We are happy to inform you that you have been accepted for a fellowship in the department of Internal Medicine of Mayo Clinic.” But he turned down the opportunity for a higher calling. He and his family began their ministry in East Pakistan with the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism (ABWE) in 1962, and four years later, amid political turmoil, opened Memorial Christian Hospital.
During the 1970s, when the Muslim majority fought for independence from West Pakistan, he remained at the hospital while his wife and children were evacuated. In the midst of the ravages of war, he was able to save the hospital, and after a time of home leave, he returned to his hospital to serve the people in the new country of Bangladesh.
Carl Becker was one of Africa’s most beloved doctors of the twentieth century. He began his medical studies in 1916 after working at a foundry for several years to help support his widowed mother and sister. But with the outbreak of World War I, he enlisted in the United States Medical Corps, which provided him training and a small salary. With his training over, he warned his fiancée that he had promised to give God his life if God would give him an education. “I don’t know if it means I’ll go to China or Africa as a missionary or what,” he told her, “but he has first claim on my life.”13
As he became settled into his practice in Pennsylvania, however, his promise to God was ignored until he received a letter from Charles Hurlburt of the Africa Inland Mission, a man he had met some years earlier. Hurlburt’s daughter-in-law, a medical doctor who was serving in the Congo, had died suddenly, and he was urgently seeking a doctor to take her place. Becker rejected Hurlburt’s request, but Hurlburt persisted, and in the summer of 1928, the Beckers sailed for Africa, leaving “a $10,000-plus income to earn $60 a month … to go to a primitive outpost he knew nothing about.”14
The Beckers’ first home in the Congo was a mud hut that Marie creatively turned into a “mud mansion.” In 1934 he moved with his wife and two children to the tiny mission station of Oicha in the dense Ituri forest to work among the Pygmies and other forest tribes. There his ministry bloomed. Walled in by the giant mahogany trees, he built a medical compound out of nothing—primitive in comparison to the facilities he had been used to back home, but that met the needs of the African jungle. He was not an organizer or a long-range planner, nor was he public-relations minded. Otherwise, writes his biographer, “he might have raised a large sum of money by promoting it as a memorial hospital in honor of some dear-departed saint.” As it was, he added room additions and buildings as they were needed, with “no overall general plan.”15 There was no budget for hospital construction, so much of the expense came out of his $60-a-month salary.
Evangelism was the primary purpose for Becker’s work in Africa, and weekends were devoted to itinerant work in the villages. Though without formal Bible training, he communicated the gospel effectively to the Africans. Bible stories were told with the use of his own crude drawings that became so popular that he began mimeographing them for distribution. On one occasion when he entered an outlying village, he noticed a crowd gathered in the road, and to his surprise he discovered an illiterate Congolese soldier sharing the gospel, using a set of his picture stories.
Despite his effective evangelistic work, Becker, as were countless other medical missionaries before and after him, was consumed with meeting the physical needs of the people. “What is the spiritual value of all this?” he frequently asked himself. The question could only be answered through seeing the results of his work:
In fact, far from imagining that medical work was only the soil-breaker for the seed—only the John the Baptist for the Messiah—he came to see it was a complete missionary ministry. It was an opportunity for mass evangelism, for where else could he find several hundred needy Africans each day, coming from distant places to one site where the gospel could be preached? It was also an opportunity for Christian nurture. With the inpatients he had a chance to help young Christians grow in their Christian life, to provide a sort of hothouse climate for young plants. And Dr. Becker felt, too, that it was an unparalleled opportunity to build a responsible African church.16
In many instances medical missions paved the way for evangelizing tribes that were otherwise very difficult to reach. Such was the case with the Pygmies of the Ituri forest. Long the brunt of discrimination by other Africans, the Pygmies withdrew into the jungle and shied away from all outsiders, but their need for medical services eventually overcame their extreme isolationism. They slowly developed a trust in the missionaries, and many were converted to Christianity. Likewise, medical missions played a crucial role in reaching lepers with the gospel. They too had been the brunt of discrimination, but the love and care they received from Becker and his staff gave them a renewed sense of worth.
Although he treated every disease and injury imaginable, the problem of leprosy concerned Becker the most, and he desperately sought to find a cure that would relieve the terrible suffering. Word of his compassion spread, and lepers by the thousands came to him for treatment. By the early 1950s he was treating some four thousand resident patients at his eleven-hundred-acre leprosy village, and the results were impressive—so much so that leprosy specialists from all over the world were visiting him and borrowing the notes on his research. Even Dr. Robert Cochrane from Cambridge, the world’s leading authority on leprosy, was impressed with his findings.
During this time Becker, with the help of nurses, was performing upwards of four thousand major and minor operations and delivering some five hundred babies each year. He nevertheless found time to branch out into other areas, including psychiatry, and he eagerly experimented with the most up-to-date treatments. Among his patients were some severely disturbed individuals who were viewed by their families as demon possessed. He established a mental ward and a psychiatric clinic, and he was the first doctor in equatorial Africa to use electric shock treatment—though he “remained convinced that simple Christianity was the soundest general therapy for the mentally upset, that ‘the Gospel of love and hope alone can banish superstition and fear.”’17
In spite of his selfless service in behalf of the people of the Congo, Becker did not remain immune to the violence that broke out in the 1960s. While most missionaries fled to East Africa for safety, he stayed on at Oicha until the summer of 1964, when it was learned that he had been targeted by the Simbas to face a firing squad. At the age of seventy, he bade farewell to his beloved African associates and, with his wife, three nurses, and a young associate, barely escaped the Simba guerrillas.
Considering his age, the evacuation in 1964 would have been an opportune time to begin retirement. But for the Beckers, Africa was home. In the words of his biographer, he was “allergic to furloughs,” and he had no desire to return to the United States. Although he recognized that he was slowing down, he wanted to remain in Africa as long as he could be of useful service. So after a year in the relative security of East Africa, the Beckers were back in Oicha to rebuild what the guerrillas had destroyed.
Becker was eighty-three before he agreed to return to the United States and retire. Art Buchwald, the well-known American newspaper columnist, wrote of him: “In all of Congo, the man who made the greatest impression on us was an American missionary doctor named Carl K. Becker…. We couldn’t help thinking as we left Oicha that America had its own Dr. Schweitzer in Congo.”18 But the greatest tribute ever paid Becker may have been made by an African medical trainee: “Many missionaries had preached Jesus Christ to me, but in the munganga [doctor] I have seen Jesus Christ.”19
William Cameron Townsend and Bible Translation
Bible translation, like medicine, can be viewed properly as a twentieth-century missions specialty, but virtually all pioneer Protestant missionaries were Bible translators—even as they were amateur medical specialists. William Carey is remembered as one of the first and most prolific of these missionary translators, but more than a century earlier the dedicated and energetic John Eliot translated the Scriptures for the Algonquin Indians of Massachusetts. It was Carey who made Bible translation an accepted, integral part of missionary work. Other well-known Bible translators included Robert Morrison, Adoniram Judson, Ann Judson, Robert Moffat, and Henry Martyn.
Not until the twentieth century, however, did Bible translation take on a new image. This came about with the introduction of the science of linguistics—and the tireless efforts of W. Cameron Townsend and his twin organizations, Summer Institute of Linguistics and Wycliffe Bible Translators, which became the largest independent mission agency in the world. Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) was founded in an Ozark farmhouse in 1934 as Camp Wycliffe by Townsend and L. L. Legters, both of whom were concerned about linguistics training for prospective Bible translators. But as important as SIL was to the work of Bible translation, it soon became evident that with its secular nature, it was not suitable as a mission support organization. Thus, in 1942 Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT) was officially established for the purpose of receiving funds for the support of missionary translators and to publicize the ongoing field work. The twin organizations, though separate, had interlocking directorates and the same goals and philosophy, but different duties to perform.
Cam Townsend was born in California in 1896 during the difficult economic period following the Panic of 1893, and much of his early life was plagued by poverty. After high school he enrolled in Occidental College, a Presbyterian school in Los Angeles. During his second year there he joined the Student Volunteer Movement and was further challenged by missions when John R. Mott came to the campus to speak. Then, during his junior year, the Bible House of Los Angeles appealed for Bible salesmen for Latin America. Townsend volunteered and was assigned to Guatemala.
Accompanied by a college friend, he left for Guatemala in 1917. Selling Bibles in Central America seemed like a worthwhile ministry, but he soon discovered that most of the Cakchiquel Indians could not read Spanish and that their own language was yet unwritten. Some people seemed offended by his preoccupation with selling Spanish Bibles. “Why, if your God is so smart,” asked an Indian one day, “hasn’t he learned our language?”20
Townsend was taken aback by the blunt question—a question that changed his life. He dedicated the next thirteen years to learning their language, reducing it to writing, and translating the Scriptures. Without prior linguistic training, he faced tremendous obstacles. The language, for example, had four different “k” sounds that to him were barely distinguishable, and the verb forms were mind-boggling. One verb could be conjugated into thousands of forms, indicating time, location, and many other ideas besides simple action. It all seemed like an impossible task until he met an American archaeologist who advised him to quit trying to force the Cakchiquel language “into a Latin mold,” and instead seek to find the logical pattern on which the language is based. That advice changed the course of his language study, and it led eventually to his forming a linguistics training program.
From the very beginning of his ministry, Townsend’s strong will and independence often clashed with the more conservative views of those around him. When his work as a Bible salesman ended, he joined the Central American Mission, only to realize that evangelism, not translation work, was what the mission expected of him—a factor that created strained relations. During this time, he married Elvira Malmstrom, who was also serving as a missionary in Guatemala, and her physical and emotional difficulties added to the strain with the mission—and to the marriage. Though she had at one point insisted that there was no problem “with my mind”—that rather “my problem pure and simple has been selfishness,”Townsend blamed her problem on “extreme nervousness,” during which time “she loses control of herself and says and does things painful to me and hurtful to our work.”
Whatever the cause, the mission board had censured her because her “condition is still causing considerable embarrassment to the work,” adding that “there is a difference of opinion as to the extent to which you are responsible for your actions.”21 Despite the problems, Elvira continued on in the work until her untimely death in 1944.
After ten years of translation work, the Cakchiquel New Testament was finished, and Townsend was eager to translate the Scripture for other tribes. But the mission wanted him to remain with the Cakchiquels. Because of these and other philosophical differences, he eventually resigned. Working under the authority of others was difficult for him, and he had insisted that administrators from the home office should not be making decisions of strategy for missionaries on the field. In 1934, with L. L. Legters, he founded Camp Wycliffe in Arkansas—a disorganized and unimposing venture that grew into the world’s largest independent Protestant mission organization.
Over the years, Townsend was embroiled in numerous controversies. The most often-repeated criticism was that he was attempting to gain an entrance in foreign countries under a false pretense, while at the same time being less than honest with supporters at home. To government officials, critics charged, the linguists claimed to be merely language specialists and literacy teachers, when in fact they were missionary Bible translators. To their mission supporters, their identity was reversed. So heated was the controversy that one veteran missionary returned from Central America to warn churches about the “dishonesty” and “fakery” of Townsend.22
Good relations with foreign governments was a top priority, but again critics cried foul—particularly when Townsend was perceived as serving the agenda of socialist regimes. He was also perceived as being too friendly with Roman Catholics. In Latin America the hostilities ran deep between Catholics and Protestants. The vast majority of evangelical missionaries believed that there should be no cooperation with Catholics, but Townsend was more tolerant. “It’s possible to know Christ as Lord and Savior,” he wrote, “and to continue in the Roman Church.”23 The test came when Paul Witte, a Catholic scholar, applied to become a translator under Wycliffe. Townsend sent a letter of support to the entire Wycliffe membership: “We must not depart from our nonsectarian policy one iota if we are to keep entering countries closed to traditional missionary organizations.”24 But despite his plea, Witte was denied membership by a two-thirds majority of the WBT voting delegates.
Roman Catholics were not the only unacceptable candidates for Wycliffe membership. In 1949, with the application of Jim and Anita Price, the issue of accepting Pentecostals flared into a heated floor debate. Most of the members, while not denying the sincere Christian faith of Pentecostal believers, felt that they would be incompatible with the non-charismatic evangelicals that filled the ranks of the organization. Again Townsend upheld the nonsectarian policy of Wycliffe, asserting that the theological issues involved were “nonessentials” and threatening to resign his position as general director if the Prices were rejected. This time he won the battle.
His tolerance also extended to race. During a time when many evangelicals were still defending segregationist policies, he appealed to blacks and other ethnic minorities to become involved in Bible translation work. He deplored race prejudice, and in a letter to the board in 1952 he wrote, “Our constitution has nothing that savors of discrimination. You won’t find it in the New Testament either. Please send along all the non-Caucasian workers you can, if they make out good in courses.”25
His call for equal opportunities for women was another issue that aroused controversy among members and supporters. Allowing single women to work with married couples was an accepted fact in mission circles, but permitting them to go in pairs into remote tribal areas was quite another issue. He himself expressed doubts when single women first requested tribal work, but he quickly agreed that there would be no restrictions on their service. Despite loud objections from protectors of the “weaker sex,” by the 1950s there were several pairs of single women translators in Peru alone, among them Loretta Anderson and Doris Cox, who served as his prime example in defense of women translators.
They initiated their work in 1950 among the Shapras, one of the most feared headhunting tribes of the Peruvian jungle, led by the infamous Chief Tariri, who had won his position by killing his predecessor. Though “scared most of the time during the first five months,” they were committed to “the agonizingly slow job of learning the language.”26 Soon Chief Tariri began helping them as a language informant, and a few years later he turned away from witchcraft and murder and became a Christian as did many in his tribe. Years later he confessed to Townsend, “If you had sent men, we would have killed them on sight. Or if a couple, I’d have killed the man and taken the woman for myself. But what could a great chief do with two harmless girls who insisted on calling him brother?”27
Unlike some mission founders and leaders, Townsend avoided authoritarian leadership. When SIL was first organized, he proposed that he be under the executive committee and ultimately under the vote of the membership. This, according to James and Marti Hefley, “was something new in the history of missions—a founder-director telling a crew of young green members, some unhappy with past decisions, to take charge. But he believed it was dangerous for one individual to have control. It meant he would have to use persuasion and charisma in attempting to put across his policies.”28 Because of this self-imposed policy, he was frequently stymied in carrying out his innovative plans. After one heated debate between him and his executive committee, one of the committee members commented, “Uncle Cam is probably right. He may be ten years ahead of the rest of us as usual.”29
Following the death of his first wife, he married Elaine Mielke, a former supervisor of special education in Chicago. The Townsends served for seventeen years in Peru, during which time their four children were born. They then moved on to conduct translation work in Colombia. Though he would become recognized the world over as a great missionary statesman, Townsend always thought of himself first and foremost as a Bible translator—with one more language to go.
After fifty years of ministry, rather than contemplating retirement, he was preparing to go to the Soviet Union with Elaine. Having learned that there were some one hundred languages spoken in the Caucasus, many of which had no Bible translation, he was determined to become involved at the grassroots level once again. So at the age of seventy-two, with Elaine at his side, he found himself in a hotel overlooking Red Square in Moscow, studying Russian several hours a day. After their initial period of study was completed, they traveled into the Caucasus to confer with linguists and educators.
Throughout his life one single philosophy motivated him more than any other: his high view of the Bible. “The greatest missionary is the Bible in the mother tongue,” he was fond of repeating. “It never needs a furlough, is never considered a foreigner.”30 But among the greatest missionaries of the twentieth century was Cam Townsend—a missionary who ranks alongside William Carey and Hudson Taylor in the nineteenth century. When he died in April of 1982, Bernie May emotionally spoke for the entire organization:
When the word came that Uncle Cam was gone, I had the feeling I’ve had on several occasions when flying a twin-engine airplane and one engine suddenly goes dead. All at once your goal becomes very important. You instantly turn to your guidance system. You keep on flying, but with a new intensity of reaching your destination as quickly as possible…. There are still 3,000 languages without the Bible…. This is our challenge. This is our call.31
During his lifetime and following his death, many of Townsend’s protégés effectively carried on the work. One of those was Kenneth Pike, who served for many years as director and president of SIL. Recognized the world over for his contributions to linguistics, he was the author of numerous scholarly works and was a professor at the University of Michigan. But he was also a missionary Bible translator in Mexico and other underdeveloped areas of the world where the Bible was unavailable in the native tongue. He felt as comfortable talking with an illiterate Mixtec Indian as he did with a distinguished French university professor; and with all his contributions to linguistic science, he remained first and foremost a missionary, eager to share the gospel with those who had never heard.
After graduating from Gordon College, Pike applied to the China Inland Mission but was rejected for missionary service due to his nervous disposition and his language difficulty. He then applied to other missions, but the only one to accept him was Wycliffe Bible Translators. When he arrived for training in 1935, Legters reportedly lamented, “Lord, couldn’t you have sent us something better than this?”32
In addition to translating the New Testament into the San Miguel Mixtec language, Pike helped other translators solve difficult linguistic problems, and every summer he taught at SIL. Making courses practical was always a top priority, and sometimes his lectures were as entertaining as they were scholarly. Even more entertaining than his lectures, however, were his language demonstrations that were often given to large public audiences—d emonstrations showing how quickly an unknown language could be learned without an interpreter. On stage with Pike, along with several blackboards and a few props (sticks, leaves, and simple objects of various sizes), would be a stranger whom Pike had never met and whose language he did not know. Before the session was over, however, the two would be communicating amazingly well with each other.33
Few linguists in history have received more honors and awards than did Dr. Kenneth Pike. With his first book, Phonetics, he “revolutionized the thinking of the field,” according to Professor Eric Hamp of the University of Chicago. And that was only the beginning, continues Hamp:
It is fair to say that something like one-half of all the raw data from exotic languages that has been placed at the disposal of theoretical linguists in the past quarter century can be attributed to the teaching, influence, and efforts of Kenneth Pike…. The boyish enthusiasm of Pike in all his studies and his modesty in attacking every fresh problem would scarcely suggest to the unprepared onlooker that he is in the presence of one of the few really great linguists of the 20th century.34
At the beginning, missionary radio was not seen as a tool to be used independently of traditional missionary outreach. But though some missionaries were skeptical at first, they soon realized the value of having radio pave the way for them. “It has given traditional missionary effort a tremendous weapon and means to spread the gospel,” according to Abe Van Der Puy of World Radio Missionary Fellowship. “Until recently, in many parts of Latin America, missionaries had a very difficult time getting people to talk with them about the gospel. These people, however, have been willing to listen in the privacy of their own homes…. Many times when personal workers are dealing with individuals about the gospel, the person being dealt with will say, ‘Oh, that means you are like those of HCJB.’ “ In recent decades, with the increasing size of transmitters and the greater affordability of transistor radios, Christian broadcasts are reaching more people than ever. According to Barry Siedell, “There is virtually no square foot on earth that isn’t reached sometime during the day by a gospel radio broadcast.”35
Like other specialized areas of missions, missionary radio had to fight its way into acceptance with the Christian public. Clarence W. Jones was a pioneer in this field who was not afraid to use the “tool of the devil.” People from his home church termed it “Jones’s folly.” Only a fool would go off to a foreign land to set up a radio station when there were only six receiving sets in the whole country. But Jones was convinced that missions had to be in the forefront of the field of communications if the world was to be evangelized.
Born in 1900 in Illinois, the son of Salvation Army officers, Jones played the trombone in the Salvation Army band from the age of twelve. In 1921 he graduated from Moody Bible Institute as class president and valedictorian, even though he had only completed two years of high school. During the years following his graduation, he worked with Paul Rader in his tent-meeting evangelism and later in his evangelistic ministry at the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle. Among other things, Jones played his trombone in a brass quartet and became program director for the Tabernacle’s radio broadcasting that began with the start of Chicago’s first commercial radio station.
In 1928, despite the skepticism of his friends and associates, Jones made an exploratory trip to South America, hoping to find an opening in Venezuela for radio ministry. As he traveled through the villages and towns, he was overwhelmed with the need for evangelism, as his diary indicates:
How endless the task of missions seems here in Venezuela at our present slow rate of response! This country is only a small portion of a whole great continent, with many places having no witness for missions. Missionary work could be supplemented and speeded up by the perfectly possible procedure of regular Spanish radio broadcasts. I am more and more impressed with the opportunity for evangelism in all Venezuela, and am spending much time in prayer these days, asking the Lord to do the great and mighty things.36
But instead of “great and mighty things,” the Venezuelan government officials refused his request. Before returning home, he visited Columbia, Panama, and Cuba with similar requests, but the answer was the same. Back home, he was frustrated and embarrassed. All the time and money that had been invested in his exploratory trip had come to nothing. Even his wife was discouraged: “Her initial reckless zeal had worn off, and with two little ones to care for, she just did not want to go to ‘the foreign field.’ Not at all.”37 For Jones it was a depressing period in his life:
Then there was the day of such discouragement that Clarence, desperately needing some money for his family, unable to shake off the feelings of total inadequacy and failure, and chagrined that this obsession with South America had made him look like a fool, decided to chuck it all—his work at the Tabernacle, his call to the mission field, his family—and went down to enlist in the Navy. He was rejected for lack of 20/20 vision.38
Jones’s dream of missionary radio might have faded away had it not been for a devoted couple that entered his life in the months that followed. Reuben and Grace Larson had been serving in Ecuador under the Christian and Missionary Alliance since 1924, and during their furlough in 1930 they visited the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle to present their work. To the Larsons, Jones’s trip to South America was not a fiasco; he had simply gone to the wrong countries. He had bypassed the beautiful land of Ecuador, not even seeking entrance until after he had met the Larsons, two individuals who would provide the key to missionary radio in South America.
Although Ecuadorian officials were at first skeptical about a Protestant radio station, Larson was persistent; and on August 15, 1930, he sent a cable to Jones, urging him to come as soon as possible, informing him that a twenty-five-year contract had been granted. “Clearly we saw the hand of God moving on the whole Congress of Ecuador,” he wrote, “causing them to allow, in this closed Catholic country, a ministry of gospel radio.”39 Jones, however, had not waited for Larson’s cable. So anxious was he to begin his work that he was already on his way to South America when the cable arrived.
The weeks following Jones’s arrival in Ecuador were discouraging ones. Hardly had the ink on their permit dried when the missionaries were told by engineers as well as by American State Department officials that Ecuador—particularly Quito—would never be suitable for radio transmission. The mountains and the close proximity to the equator would be insurmountable obstacles. But “unreasonable, illogical though it seemed,” in the words of Lois Neely, “Clarence was absolutely certain that Quito was God’s place for his voice to South America.”40 So he went ahead with plans, and in the year that followed, despite more disappointments, Radio Station HCJB (Heralding Christ Jesus’ Blessings) became a reality.
It was a historic day. The world’s first missionary radio program was broadcast live on Christmas Day 1931, coming from a 250-watt transmitter located in a sheep shed in Quito, Ecuador. With organ music in the background, Jones played his trombone and Larson preached in Spanish. All thirteen receiving sets in the country were tuned in, and the Voice of the Andes was on the air.
In the months that followed, the World Radio Missionary Fellowship was officially incorporated, and the daily broadcasts continued, though not without periods of crisis. As the Depression deepened back in the United States, contributions fell off. During the entire year of 1932 less than one thousand dollars was donated to the new mission. In 1933 the bank through which Jones and his associates had been receiving their monthly checks folded, and later the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle, the mainstay of the mission’s support, went bankrupt. The future of the fledgling radio station was in serious doubt. On his knees in a little tool shed, Jones pleaded with God for one whole day for direction: “Are we to carry on with HCJB, or pack it in and go home?”41
That day was a “low spot” in Jones’s life, but he left the tool shed with the assurance that God would see him through the crisis, and that night there was a buoyant enthusiasm in his voice as he went on the air with the evening broadcast. Within days, through a financial loan from a friend and a mortgage on the transmitter, the immediate crisis was averted, and HCJB slowly climbed out of its economic peril.
One of the reasons for HCJB’s survival was the growing recognition it received from the government and the people of Ecuador. From the very beginning, Larson and Jones had cooperated fully with government officials, agreeing to make their programming not only religious but educational and cultural as well. When gospel programs were aired, they were always presented in a positive vein to avoid antagonizing the Roman Catholic Church. Patriotism was a key element of their philosophy; the president of Ecuador had an open invitation to use the broadcasting facilities and often did so, especially on holidays.
As word of the radio station spread, the number of receivers in Ecuador grew rapidly, and HCJB, according to Neely, “was cutting across every level of society, breaking down barriers to the gospel. Missionaries (many whom had in fact strongly opposed the idea of Christian radio) were finding that where previously they were persecuted and stoned on the streets, now they could minister openly. And even when they encountered a ‘Protestants Not Welcome’ sign on a door, inside they could hear La Voz de los Andes, HCJB. Everyone seemed to be listening.”42
The decade of the thirties was one of tremendous growth for HCJB. The first major power addition was a thousand-watt transmitter that reached far beyond the borders of Ecuador; and before the decade closed, a ten-thousand-watt transmitter was installed. On Easter Sunday 1940, President Andres Cordova of Ecuador threw the switch to begin broadcasting over the new transmitter that would carry the gospel farther than ever before. How far was anybody’s guess, but even the most optimistic observers were surprised when letters began pouring in from New Zealand, Japan, India, Germany, and Russia. That a mere ten thousand watts would broadcast over such great distances was due to the location. Though Jones had been advised against locating near the equator, it was later determined to be the finest location for north-south broadcasting because the equal distance from magnetic poles makes it “the one place in the world freest from atmospheric disturbance.”43 The high elevation in the mountains near Quito was an added benefit. The hundred-foot tower perched on a 9,600-foot mountain was almost equivalent to a ten-thousand-foot antenna.
As the size of HCJB grew, so did its reputation for quality programming. Jones was a perfectionist who demanded excellence in every area of broadcasting, and some considered him “tyrannical.” Even his children feared his authoritarian control and were occasionally pulled from the program when their playing did not meet expectations.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s HCJB continued to grow, increasing its power to more than a half million watts. But the good times were accompanied by personal traumas for Jones and his family. In 1953 a head-on collision left Katherine in a coma and Clarence with such severe facial injuries that it was doubted whether he would every play his trombone again. Their recovery was slow, but by the end of the year both had returned to the ministry. Then in 1966, in another automobile accident, their only son, Dick, who with his wife and children was serving as a missionary in Panama, was killed. In both instances, Jones went back to the work with even greater zeal for radio evangelism.
In 1981, with Jones living in retirement in Florida, HCJB celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. But in the half-century since its founding, the World Radio Missionary Fellowship had become far more than a mere radio station. Its ministry included two hospitals, mobile clinics, a printing press, and television programs—all in addition to its 24-hours-a-day radio station in Quito (broadcasting in fifteen languages) and two sister stations in Panama and Texas.
In the decades following the founding of HCJB, there were other ventures in missionary radio, including the Far East Broadcasting Company, founded by John Broger, a young military officer who fought in the Pacific in World War II. He returned from the war with a desire to reach Asia with the gospel, and missionary radio was his vision. With two friends, Robert Bowman and William Roberts, and a combined total of one thousand dollars, they formed a nonprofit corporation and filed the necessary papers. All that remained was to raise one hundred thousand dollars. During the first three months of publicizing their venture, some ten thousand dollars was donated, and with that encouraging beginning, it was decided that Broger should return to the Far East to lay the groundwork for their proposed ministry. Despite setbacks, construction for FEBC in Manila began in the late fall of 1946. Programming began with the hymn “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name” as “the first of the Far East Broadcasting Company’s transmitters hummed with power … at 6:00 P.M., June 4, 1948, releasing the words of this majestic hymn to the waiting airways of the Orient.”44
After fourteen years of service, John Broger returned to military service and Robert Bowman became the president. By 1970 FEBC had twenty-one stations ranging from a thousand to 250,000 watts, broadcasting nearly fourteen hundred program hours each week in more than forty languages. After 1979, when China relaxed its barriers with the West, more than ten thousand letters came in during one twelve-month period from China alone—primarily from people interested in learning more about the gospel message.
Of all the missionary broadcasting organizations, the largest and most geographically diverse is Trans World Radio. Founded in 1954, TWR grew to more than five million watts of power capable of reaching eighty percent of the world’s population. From towers in Monte Carlo, Bonaire, Swaziland, Cyprus, Sri Lanka, and Guam, its giant transmitters beamed out Christian programs in more than eighty different languages and dialects.
As was true with HCJB and FEBC, Trans World Radio would never have been born, but for the vision of one man, Paul Freed—and his father. Having grown up in the Middle East, the son of missionaries, Freed sold his home and car to launch TWR. With that matter settled, he needed to secure a station director—“the best possible man.” Who else but his own father, a veteran missionary teaching at Western Canadian Bible Institute? But when he phoned, he learned that just three days earlier his father had accepted the presidency of the school. Paul was devastated. “I did not know what to say. I could not offer him anything that remotely resembled the financial security or prestige of this fine school.”45 Nevertheless, a few days later his father called back accepting the challenge. In the years that followed, despite massive financial and governmental obstacles, Paul Freed’s vision became a worldwide ministry—a ministry that stands as a monument to personal sacrifice and strong faith.
Elizabeth “Betty” Greene and Mission Aviation
Seventeen days in a dugout canoe, besieged by swarms of mosquitoes, traversing steamy jungle-lined rivers infested by poisonous snakes and alligators. Such was the travel of the jungle missionary—a twentieth-century professionally trained evangelist, severely impeded by outmoded transportation. It is no wonder that the introduction of aircraft to supplement missionary work was considered a godsend to those whose lives it changed.
This need led to the founding in California in 1945 of the first missionary aviation service organization, the Christian Airmen’s Missionary Fellowship, later renamed Mission Aviation Fellowship. As important a role as MAF has played in overseas missions, it became apparent early on that MAF simply could not meet the high demand for its services. Consequently, other aviation organizations were formed, the largest and most geographically dispersed being JAARS (Jungle Aviation and Radio Service), an arm of Wycliffe Bible Translators and Summer Institute of Linguistics. But other missions, including New Tribes Mission, the Sudan Interior Mission, and the Africa Inland Mission, developed their own aviation services as well.
It is no exaggeration to say that missionary aviation has revolutionized Christian missions in the past several decades. The weeks and months of arduous travel became a thing of the past, and no longer do isolated missionaries in remote villages endure months at a time without needed health services, fresh food, and mail deliveries. Today a single MAF pilot covers as much territory in a matter of weeks as David Livingstone covered in a lifetime of African exploration and with much less strain on health and family relationships.
It is ironic that the founding of one of the most male-oriented and male-dominated mission agencies was strongly influenced by a woman. Though Betty Greene denies that she was the founder of Mission Aviation Fellowship, she was the first full-time staff worker and the first pilot to fly for the newly formed organization. She had served in the U.S. Air Force during the early months of World War II, flying radar missions, and later was assigned to developmental projects that included flying B-17 bombers in high-altitude equipment tests. But military service was not Greene’s career objective. Her vision was mission aviation, and before the war was over, she began laying the groundwork for her life ministry as a missionary pilot.
Her interest in flying began as a young girl, and at the age of sixteen she began taking flight lessons. During her college years at the University of Washington, she enrolled in a government civil pilot training program in preparation for her dream of one day flying as a missionary. But when World War II intervened, she enlisted in the WASP (Women’s Air Force Service Pilots) in a spirit of patriotism and also to acquire the training and experience she would later need in mission service. During the war years she published an article in HIS magazine about the need for missionary aviation. The article was spotted by Jim Truxton, a navy pilot. He contacted her, asking her to join him and two fellow pilots in forming an organization for missionary aviation.
With her term of service with WASP over, Greene moved to Los Angeles, where she set up headquarters for the newly formed Christian Airmen’s Missionary Fellowship (later MAF). Soon after, in 1945, an urgent request came for assistance, and Greene was the only one available to go: “We were asked by Wycliffe Bible Translators to help them in Mexico with their jungle camp program,” she later recalled. “I went down in 1945 to see what the situation looked like. We bought an airplane in early 1946, paid in part by the savings of one of the MAF men in the military. It was a Waco cabin plane with a 229-horsepower engine. I flew the plane down to Mexico in February of 1946—the men were still tied up with Uncle Sam.”46
After several months of service in Mexico, Cam Townsend, founder of Wycliffe, asked Greene to help out in Peru. She agreed to go, and George Wiggins, a navy pilot, was sent to replace her. Then came the first real blow to the fledgling MAF. When Greene was “checking out” Wiggins for his new assignment, they crash-landed after clipping a small building near the runway. Neither one was hurt, but the plane was so damaged that Nate Saint, a skilled mechanic, was called down from the States to fix it. Greene went ahead with her plans to serve in Peru, where she flew a war surplus Grumman Duck amphibian biplane that Wycliffe had acquired. Her assignment involved flying missionaries and supplies into the interior, each time crossing the towering peaks of the Andes, winning the distinction of being the first woman pilot to do so.
After a year in Peru, she returned to the United States, where she again worked in the MAF home office. Her next overseas assignment was in Nigeria, where she flew support missions over varied terrain from the dense Nigerian jungle to the vast Sahara Desert. Then it was back home for another stint in Los Angeles, where she involved herself in much-needed public relations work in an effort to shore up the home base. After three years, she went to East Africa to serve as a pilot for the Sudan Interior Mission.
In 1960, after another stint in the home office, she went to Irian Jaya. To receive flight service, each mission outpost had to build its own airstrip, and before landings could be made, a qualified pilot had to make the overland trip to check it out. Most of her previous work had been in the air, and she soon realized that she was no match for her robust female companion, Leona St. John, or the carriers who were used to the daily tropical rainstorms, the frayed vine bridges, and the slippery mud embankments. “I didn’t know how hard it would be,” she recalls. “I suppose the carriers were perfectly aware of the trail, but for most of the way I wasn’t even sure there was one. The place we were going was supposed to be thirty miles away, but I think the map meant horizontal miles, and most of ours were straight up and down.”47 The physical discomfort was quickly forgotten when the party realized that it had inadvertently come upon a tribal war—a terrifying scene of death and carnage that the two missionaries and their carriers watched in horror.
All the misery she had endured on the arduous trek was worth it when they were greeted by the villagers and the resident missionary couple with a tumultuous celebration. The airstrip was deemed suitable for landings and takeoffs. The next day a coworker flew in with much-needed supplies, and Greene flew out with him for her next assignment.
Following her nearly two years in Irian Jaya, she retired from active flying duty and returned to headquarters to represent the mission and recruit more pilots—male pilots in particular. Despite her own success as a pilot, she never sought to interest other women in the field. In fact, she argued against female missionary pilots. When asked during an interview in 1967 if she would encourage girls to go into this sort of work, she answered: “MAF definitely frowns upon it, and so do I…. We have three reasons why we do not accept women for this work: (1) Most women are not trained in mechanics. (2) Much of the work connected with missionary aviation is heavy work. There is bulky cargo to load, in some cases impossible for a woman to handle. (3) The other is flexibility. For instance, if there is a place where it is necessary to base a pilot alone for a few days or weeks, you can’t do this with a woman.”48
Despite MAF’s past policy, women nevertheless continued to enter the field of missionary aviation and to serve with distinction. Even Greene, with her indisputable qualifications and experience, was written off as a “woman driver” in the mind of Nate Saint before he discovered firsthand that she was “a pilot of such caliber that local airline and military pilots regarded her with great respect.”49Her acceptance by her male counterparts in those early years no doubt had a lot to do with the fact that she willingly accepted their view that missionary aviation was a man’s world and that she was an isolated exception to the rule.
Perhaps the best known missionary pilot has been Nate Saint, whose role in the Auca tragedy made him a household name in evangelical circles. Unlike Greene, he was a pilot-mechanic, and as such, he was well suited for mission aviation. But Saint was also a risk-taker—a “dare-devil” in the minds of some. Not long after he became involved with MAF, he had a serious crash in Ecuador that left him in a full-body cast. The accident was “not a matter of inadequate equipment but the pilot’s inexperience.” He offered his resignation, but MAF was determined rather to focus on better training of pilots.50
Nate Saint, missionary pilot to Ecuador, martyred by the Aucas in 1956.
Although Saint had initially scorned the idea of becoming a “grease monkey for the Lord,” he became a very innovative pilot-mechanic. He developed, for example, a technique of dropping large quantities of canned goods and other supplies by a parachute device. “Immodest of me to say so,” he wrote, “but I get a big bang out of these ‘bombing runs.’ I enjoy my work to the full.”51 A far more difficult item to transport by plane was aluminum sheeting for roofs. But he was not deterred by the size or bulkiness of an item, so he improvised a harness sling and began transporting seven-foot lengths of aluminum to the grateful missionaries. When word of his rash experiments reached the “slide-ruling brethren,” there was anxious concern and an immediate rebuke. He responded by assuring the directors, conceding his poor judgment and adding: “I must admit I am completely defenseless.”52
It was a combination of Saint’s impulsiveness and his evangelistic zeal that so suddenly ended the life of this brilliant and dedicated young pilot in January of 1956, when he and his colleagues were slain by the Aucas. It was through his own ingenious bucket drop that the Aucas were thought to be friendly, and through his exceptional skill as a pilot that the men were landed safely in Auca territory. But skill and technique were not enough, and missionary aviation lost one of its finest pilot-mechanic-inventors on that fateful day. His contribution to missionary aviation did not end with his death, however, for his testimony lived on and others dedicated their lives as missionary pilots as a result of hearing his story.
If the airplane was a godsend to missionaries in jungle regions, it was perhaps even more so in Arctic regions, where nomadic bands roamed the vast ice-covered wasteland and where weather conditions prevented extensive travel by other means. The sparse population and the scattered missionaries in the Arctic regions did not generally make missionary aviation support services practicable, so missionaries in that area of the world frequently became their own pilots. One such pilot-evangelist was Gleason Ledyard, the chairman-director of the Eskimo Gospel Crusade, who began his ministry in the Hudson Bay region in 1946.
Missionary aviation work in the Arctic was in many ways more strenuous than in the jungle. The long flying distances with few landmarks, combined with unpredictable, rough weather made every flight a calculated risk. Emergency landings due to ice on the plane were common occurrences that meant building an igloo miles from nowhere and waiting out the storm. With temperatures reaching forty and fifty degrees below zero, the engine had to be kept warm with blow pots, and sometimes there was a two-or three-day wait before the journey could be resumed. Because of the sub-zero temperatures, high-altitude flying was rare, and sometimes, to avoid sudden wind gusts and icing, the planes were flown as low as ten feet off the ground.
Despite harrowing ordeals, the rewards of reaching remote bands of Eskimos were worth the risks involved, as Gleason later related concerning one such experience:
After the spring break-up season was over, and the lakes were free of ice, God gave me a most joyful experience—the joy of teaching a band of Eskimos, for the first time, the words of life…. Never before had I experienced such an eagerness to learn…. Every word uttered would be repeated after me. If something was not clear a pause would result. I would restate my thought. As soon as they got the meaning, they would repeat it in unison.53
He insisted that he was not “interested in taking anything of the Christian Church” to these remote people but only Christ, and it was this message and a man with an airplane that opened the door to the gospel among the remote peoples of the Arctic.54
Mission pilots, as did all missionaries, made many personal sacrifices for their profession. The Christmas story of Bernie May, a pilot for Wycliffe Bible Translators before he became the U.S. director, illustrates this. Three days before Christmas he had delivered emergency medical supplies to a remote village in the Amazon jungle. He had landed his pontoon plane safely on the river, and with the cargo unloaded, he set up a make-shift shelter for the night. But during the night it began raining, and the rain continued, leaving him in the jungle, wallowing in self-pity, as he later recalled:
It was Christmas Eve and night was descending on the jungle. There was no way I could get back home. Back in Pennsylvania, my folks would have returned from church and Mother would be getting the turkey ready. Outside the snow would be falling…. In Yarinachcha, six hours away, Nancy and the boys would be sitting at home alone. They knew by now, because I had been able to radio back that I was stuck in the jungle. I would not be with them for Christmas.
“Oh God,” I moaned, “I’m in the wrong place.” … That night, under my mosquito net I had a visitation from God—something like those shepherds must have had on the hills of Bethlehem. There were no angels, and no bright light. But as I lay there in my hammock, desperately homesick, I felt I heard God say: “My son, this is what Christmas is all about. Jesus left heaven and on Christmas morning He woke up in the ‘wrong place’—a stable in Bethlehem. Christmas means leaving home, not going home. My only begotten Son did not come home for Christmas—He left his home to be with you.”
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buckingham, Jamie. Into the Glory: The Miracle-Filled Story of the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service. Plainfield, NJ: Logos, 1974.
Buss, Dietrich G., and Arthur F. Glasser. Giving Wings to the Gospel: The Remarkable Story of Mission Aviation Fellowship. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995.
Cook, Frank S. Seeds in the Wind: The Story of the Voice of the Andes, Radio Station HCJB, Quito, Ecuador. Opa Locka, FL: World Radio Missionary Fellowship, 1976. Cowan, George M. The Word That Kindles: People and Principles That Fueled a World-wide Bible Translation Movement. Chappaqua, NY: Christian Herald, 1979.
Freed, Paul E. Towers to Eternity. Nashville: Sceptre, 1979.
Hefley, James C. The Cross and the Scalpel. Waco, TX: Word, 1971.
Hefley, James, and Marti Hefley. Uncle Cam: The Story of William Cameron Townsend, Founder of the Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Waco, TX: Word, 1974.
Hitt, Russell T. Jungle Pilot: The Life and Witness of Nate Saint. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1973.
Kerr, J. Lennox. Wilfred Grenfell: His Life and Work. New York: Dodd, 1959.
Ledyard, Gleason H. And to the Eskimos. Chicago: Moody Press, 1958.
______. Sky Waves: The Incredible Far East Broadcasting Company Story. Chicago: Moody Press, 1968.
Neely, Lois. Come Up to This Mountain: The Miracle of Clarence W. Jones and HCJB. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1980.
Olsen, Viggo, with Jeanette Lockerbie. Daktar: Diplomat in Bangladesh. Chicago: Moody Press, 1973.
Peterson, William J. Another Hand on Mine: The Story of Dr. Carl K. Becker of Africa Inland Mission. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
Pike, Eunice V. Ken Pike: Scholar and Christian. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1981.
Roddy, Lee. On Wings of Love: Stories from Mission Aviation Fellowship. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1981.
Steven, Hugh. Wycliffe in the Making: The Memoirs of W. Cameron Townsend, 1920—1933. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1995.
Wallis, Ethel E., and Mary A. Bennett. Two Thousand Tongues to Go: The Story of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959.
Wilson, Dorothy Clarke. Dr. Ida: The Story of Dr. Ida Scudder of Vellore. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959.