Five Missionary Martyrs in
Ecuador
Our visit to Banos and Shell earlier this month encouraged me to ponder the lives of these missionaries who were martyred there fifty years ago. We knew one of their family members in Asheville NC. The movie "End of the Spear" chronicled their lives and impact. So, with permission, I'll share a bit of the story written by John Cowart several years ago.
Nate Saint, while a maintenance crew chief in the Air
Force, decided to become a missionary at a New Year's Eve church service in
Detroit.
He wrote, “It was the first time I had ever really heard
that verse, 'Follow me and I will make you to become fishers of men.' The old
life of chasing things that are of a temporal sort seemed absolutely insane”.
After his discharge from the Air Force, he joined Mission
Aviation Fellowship as a pilot.
While Ed McCully attended law school at Marquette
University, he worked as a night-desk clerk at a hotel. During the slack hours
before dawn he read the Bible.
He wrote, “On the way home yesterday morning, I took a long
walk and came to a decision which I know is of the Lord. I have one desire
now—to live a life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy and
strength into it... If there's nothing to this business of eternal life we
might as well lose everything in one crack and throw our present life away with
our life hereafter. But if there is something to it... Well, that's it”.
Roger Youderian had jumped, as a paratrooper, into the
Battle of the Bulge. He was decorated for his part in the fighting. In a letter
to his mother he said, “Ever since I accepted Christ as my personal Saviour
last fall and wanted to follow Him and do the will of the Lord, I've felt the
call to either missionary, social or ministerial work after my release from the
service.. . . I want to be a witness for Him and live following Him every
second of my life”.
Youderian's call led him to work among the head-hunting
Jivaros, and he developed a technique using drawings to teach them to read and
write in their own previously unwritten language.
Youderian went through some deep physical and spiritual
struggles, but, concerning divine guidance his diary records, “The Holy Spirit
can and will guide me in direct proportion to the time and effort I will expend
to know and do the will of God”.
Pete Fleming had been converted at age thirteen through the
testimony of a blind evangelist. When he chose to become a missionary, he had
already earned his master's degree in literature and was majoring in philosophy
at the University of Washington. Concerning his decision to go to Ecuador, he
wrote, “A call is nothing more or less than obedience to the will of God as God
presses it home to the soul by whatever means He chooses”.
As he decided to move from work among the relatively
peaceful Quichuas to the warlike Aucas he said, “It is a grave and solemn
problem; an unreachable people who murder and kill with extreme hatred. It
comes to me strongly that God is leading me to do something about it, and a
strong idea and impression comes into my mind that I ought to devote the
majority of my time to collecting linguistic data on the tribe. ... I know that
this may be the most important decision of my life, but I have a quiet peace
about it”.
The fifth missionary, Jim Elliot, wrote to a friend
mentioning his motive for being a missionary: “The command is plain; you go
into the whole world and announce the good news.... To me, Ecuador is simply an
avenue of obedience to the simple word of Christ. There is room for me there,
and I am free to go.... The will of God is always a bigger thing than we
bargain for”.
The Auca tribe came to the attention of the missionaries
when two Indian survivors of an Auca raid staggered into a mission station.
Saint described the victims before he flew them to a hospital:
The woman was being carried on a bamboo stretcher and had a
serious-looking lance puncture under the armpit They told us that the lance
broke off in the wound. Her attacker was going to jab at her again but she
grabbed the end of the lance and hung on to save her life. She is about six or
seven months pregnant The man arrived under his own power although considerably
crippled up with chest punctures, a hole all the way through one thigh and a
hole through his hand where he had apparently tried to stop one of the deadly
shafts.
The missionaries decided to reach the Aucas and began
learning rudiments of their language from an Auca woman who had been captured
as a slave by another tribe.
They made air drops of gifts useful to the Aucas: copper
kettles, red shirts, buttons and small knives. Nate Saint devised a method to
exchange items with people on the ground without landing the airplane. As his
plane circled, he played out a long rope with a basket tied to the end.
Centrifugal force caused the basket to gravitate to the center of the circle as
it dropped lower and lower. When the rope was fully extended from the spiraling
plane, the basket remained almost stationary a few feet above the ground and
trade items or messages could be placed in it.
The missionaries used this method to lower pictures of
themselves so the people would recognize them when they landed. And as they
flew over villages in the dense jungle, the Americans shouted over the plane's
loudspeaker, “We like you. We like you. We are friends”.
The Aucas took the gifts and replaced them with fruit,
feathered headdresses, live parrots and even a balsa-wood carving of the
airplane in exchange. This friendly commerce continued for months before the
missionaries hazarded direct contact
Saint landed the plane on a firm sandbar in the Curaray
River at a spot near two Auca villages. The Indians first sent out a nubile
young girl, apparently intended as a gift, to meet them. The missionaries
nicknamed her Delilah.
She left abruptly.
During a supply flight, Saint spotted a large party of
Aucas approaching. He quickly landed, and the missionaries prepared to greet
their visitors.
The Aucas attacked.
They skewered the Christians with spears and hacked them
down with stolen machetes. In a frenzy they peeled the fabric from the fuselage
of the plane and twisted its steel landing struts.
Then they crept back into the jungle to await the massive
retaliation which their culture taught them to expect.
It never came.
Instead of bombs, Mission Aviation Fellowship pilots
continued to drop trade items on the Auca villages, just as though the attack
had never happened.
The widows of the five missionaries asked the outraged
Ecuadorian government not to send the army against the Indians. These women
continued to study the language of the Aucas and to pray for access to the
tribe.
Within three years Mrs. Jim Elliot, her daughter, Valerie,
and Rachel Saint, sister of the pilot, were living in an Auca village teaching
the Indians about a forgiving Christ.
Soon a Christian church was established among the Aucas. Nathaniel Saint's son was baptized on the sandbar in the Curaray by an Auca
pastor who had once been in the raiding party which martyred his father.
A Mission Aviation
Fellowship spokesman said, “About a third of the
tribe are baptized believers, and meet weekly in six different settlements for
Bible study and prayer.
“In the years since Saint and his fellows were killed,
quite a few Christians—I would estimate several thousand in the overall
missionary community—have dedicated their own lives to Christ because of the
example of these men. M.AF. constantly gets applications from people who have
been inspired by the story. This is still going on right now”.
NOTE: This piece
is a sample chapter from Bluefish Books upcoming offering, Strangers On The
Earth by John Cowart. Projected publication date: February 2006.
