Stacy Long
AFA Journal staff writer
October 2015 – This year, amid the normal, noisy news cycles, one quiet event caused the Christian world to pause and take notice. Christian missionary, author, and speaker Elisabeth Elliot passed away. Anne Graham Lotz, John Piper, Kay Warren, Franklin Graham, World Magazine, and Christianity Today, and many others, published one remembrance after another. The stir was not only in the Christian world. Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal were also among those who memorialized her.
Elliot is best known for the counterintuitive decision to live with the Waorani tribe in Ecuador not even two years after they had speared her husband Jim Elliot to death. Likewise, her influence was not based on human reckoning, but on God’s determination to use her in a powerful way. Even after the end of her life, her legacy is set to flourish in the future.
Taking the baton
One direct descendant from Elliot’s ministry is Revive Our Hearts radio program. In 2000, Nancy Leigh DeMoss received a letter indicating that Elliot was stepping down from her radio program Gateway to Joy, and DeMoss was asked to host a successor program. Revive Our Hearts is that program.
DeMoss said on reviveourhearts.com, “My own life and ministry stand on the shoulders of this remarkable woman of God. It has been a huge privilege to minister through ROH in what is a legacy ministry.”
ROH is “a threefold ministry of media, publishing, and conferences and events,” spokesperson Mike Neises told AFA Journal. “The goals of the ministry are really borne out in our byline, which is ‘calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.’
“The ministry of biblical womanhood gets expressed and borne out in the Titus 2 aspect of mentoring,” Neises added. “Through books and materials, Elisabeth mentored Nancy, and these many years later, Nancy has taken the baton Elliot passed to her and is mentoring younger women.”
Equipping for the call
ITEC (Indigenous People’s Technology and Education Center) is a fruit of the mission Elliot and her husband shared with a small group of missionary families in the jungles of Ecuador in the 1950s. While attempting to build a relationship with the vicious Waorani tribe, Elliot’s husband, Jim, along with co-laborers Nate Saint, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, and Peter Fleming were speared to death by the natives. (To read more about the deaths of the five missionaries and to see how Life magazine covered the incident in 1956, read this blog.)
Jaime Saint, Nate Saint’s grandson, is now vice president of vision and ministry at ITEC. He described the connection between that original mission and ITEC. “In 1994, after my great aunt Rachel Saint died in the jungles of Ecuador [where she served after her brother Nate died], the Waorani tribe asked my dad to come live with them and teach them. They realized that critical need – dental, medical, or for transportation – is a door opener for the gospel. But if short term missionaries don’t speak the language, it can be difficult for them to do more than help with physical problems.”
This led to training programs in 60 countries to equip indigenous Christians to meet needs and use the opportunity to share the gospel long after ITEC teams leave. ITEC also began a division called Life Focus to address needs in our own country, where people struggle with family, career, and finance.
A legacy like Elliot’s, Saint said, relies on common matters and ordinary people.
“Those five men who died on January 8, 1956, were common men whom God used in an extraordinary way because they were willing and obedient,” he noted. “Beyond those five men were the five widows and Aunt Rachel and the Waorani tribe.”
Their stories began long before the day the five men died, and it continues long after, because of God’s work in their lives.
“Before my grandmother Marjorie Saint died in 2004,” Saint said, “she shared how, as a young girl, she told God, ‘Your will for my life at any cost.’ She recounted the cost: losing her first husband Nate Saint, being a widow with three young kids, losing her second husband, cancer, all the trials of life. Then she said, ‘If I had to go back I would still say, “Your will for my life at any cost.”’
“That’s what God wants, and that’s why the lives of these people had such impact. God doesn’t call super Christians to do great things. He calls those who are willing, and He equips them for the call He has given.”
Total sellout
Nate Saint served with Mission Aviation Fellowship, which began a decade before the death of Jim Elliot and the others in 1956. Gene Jordan, an MAF pilot for 38 years, explained the connection between the missionaries and MAF.
“Preceding World War II,” Jordan told AFAJ, “a missionary trekking from village to village would say, ‘Boy, if I could only fly directly, I would save tons of time.’ Well, in 1947, Betty Greene, a Women’s Auxiliary Service pilot in World War II, began flying to southern Mexico in support of Wycliffe Bible Translators. That introduced aviation to support missionary work in remote areas – and Mission Aviation Fellowship was born.
“Betty Greene had a mishap in the jungles of southern Mexico, and Nate Saint was asked to go repair her plane. That pulled him into MAF.”
Jordan’s parents were missionaries at a Christian broadcasting station in Quito, Ecuador, and it served as a hub for missionaries in the area. Jordan’s mother Ruthie became good friends with Elisabeth Elliot, and Jordan “grew up knowing of MAF and Nate Saint and his little yellow airplane.”
Of course, the impact of their stories reached far beyond the jungles of Ecuador, as Jordan is still witnessing 60 years later.
“One day, before a display of the bones of Nate Saint’s airplane, I found a man sitting on the floor, full suit on, just weeping,” Jordan shared. “And this man said, ‘This incident caused me to go into fulltime Christian service, and I am very grateful for the way God used this to push me into serving Him.’
“There were many young men and women who heard the news of those five men killed on the beach and said, ‘I need to go take their place.’ Still, in 2015, we have those candidates. The story still challenges people to go into missions.”
The reason for the long lasting influence of that story is not because of the people, but because of how they responded to God.
“There was nothing special or privileged about them,” Jordan said. “They were responding to a call of God in their lives, and they did it with total dedication. The complete sellout to God with the five guys on the beach, and with Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint, captured the Christian world.”
The story of dedication and sacrifice still captures the Christian world, and Elisabeth Elliot’s death serves as a reminder of the type of legacy built upon small, single acts of obedience. 
Mission Aviation Fellowship maf.org
800-359-7623
ITEC itecusa.org
352-465-4545
Revive Our Hearts reviveourhearts.com
800- 569-5959
Heard on American Family Radio (M-F, 8:30 p.m., CT)
