Discussing the Life of Elisabeth Elliot

The Omnibus Edition

Over the next several months I’m hosting conversations about my most recent project, Elisabeth Elliot: A Life, which is the first full-length single-volume biography of that remarkable and complex woman. Since not everyone has time for recurring discussions, we’re starting with a one-time conversation that covers the whole book. Then, for those who want more detail, I’ll post once a month for six months with a reading schedule, information about the current section, and questions to start a conversation. I hope you’ll consider joining us!

Welcome Back

And a happy second day of October, to all who celebrate. Not only am I firmly in the L. M. Montgomery camp (“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”) but my birthday is later this month. I’ve already received my first present, so I’m feeling particularly festive.

Last month I tossed a few too many balls up into the air, and getting this discussion launched on the last day of September was a ball that got dropped. But here I am in your inbox to get things going. I’m looking forward to our conversation, and I hope you’ll feel free to segue into the longer discussion (with shorter posts) that will run starting at the end of this month (or perhaps the beginning of next?). Let’s get started!

The Book I Wanted to Read

This book was born because I needed it. Back in 2009 I tried to find a couple of biographies of Elisabeth Elliot to read as research for a project. I was first incredulous and then shocked to find that there was no full-length biography in existence. None! All I came up with was a children’s biography that spent most of its length on about a decade in her life. So I started to dig.

I read Elliot’s books, which are autobiographical to varying degrees. I hunted for other people’s writing about her, and found an old Esquire magazine article from the ‘70s and tantalizing tidbits from a biography of Rachel Saint from the ‘80s. I reached out through Elliot’s website and discovered that the then-eighty-three-year-old was in dementia, but I was able to talk briefly by email with her husband and her daughter. I cobbled together enough to write the mini-bio I needed for my project.

My original project notebook.

Afterward, though, the life of Elisabeth Elliot kept niggling around in the back of my mind. There were still missing pieces and things I didn’t understand. I hadn’t been able to do much to flesh out the last almost-sixty-years of her life. And I wanted to know more about the environments that had shaped her, and about her teaching and writing. In the summer of 2012, I woke up one night in the small hours to find my brain busily creating possible outlines for a full-length biography. I decided to see if I could take Toni Morrison’s advice and write the book I wished I could read.

Structure

Knowing that Elliot’s generation was aging, I started my second round of research with interviews, and ultimately spoke with over two-dozen friends, family members, and people connected with institutions or events that were important in her life. I traveled to Massachusetts where Elliot lived for more than forty years, and saw her books and the rockbound coast she loved. I visited the Billy Graham Center Archives at her alma mater in Wheaton, Illinois, where Elliot’s papers are collected, and read reams of old letters. I also read a lot about what was going on in the world, in America or Ecuador, and in evangelical Christianity over about a 150-year period, in order to sketch in some of the bigger picture against which Elliot’s life took place.

A handful of texts from research 2.0.

Because Elliot was in many ways tradition-oriented, I decided on a traditional, chronological structure for the book. Part 1 begins with some background on her family of origin and takes us through her departure for Ecuador at age twenty-five. Part 2 covers the eleven years she lived in Ecuador. And Part 3 covers the last fifty-two years of Elliot’s life: about forty years as a writer and speaker and then a “silent decade” as she lived with dementia.

As you can see, Elliot’s eight-eight years are not evenly divided between the sections. There are a few reasons. First, her published writing deals fairly extensively with her life in Ecuador and her childhood but scantily with her life after 1961. Second, Elliot’s family letters are a major source of information about her life, but as the audience for the letters grew larger, the letters themselves became less intimate and specific. Third, the portions of Elliot’s journals that are available for scholarship end in 1973. And finally, her papers in the Archives are a wealth of riches, but as a condition for donation she closed each file for forty years after the date of the latest document it contained. Some papers were still closed to researchers when this book was due to the publisher. In spite of this there’s plenty to chew on.

Themes

While I was always on the lookout as I researched for opportunities to fill in gaps in the existing timeline of Elliot’s life and to answer the questions raised by my earlier foray into research, I wanted to make sure that I also paid attention to what the source material had to say, whatever it turned out to be. Here are some themes I saw emerge as topics came up repeatedly in various sources:

Reading and Writing

Books were always important in Elliot’s life, from her childhood identification with the characters in Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, through her college immersion in Holiness writing, her adult program of self-education in the literature of her generation, and her life-long shared reading with her brother Tom. Part of this was surely due to her personality, and part of it to a family culture of “the love of learning.” Writing, too, was a constant, not only public writing (the family newspaper, school papers, writing for publication), and semi-public writing (copious family letters and correspondence with friends and acquaintances), but the private writing in her journal that enabled her to process the events of her life. For Elliot, all of this was centered around her faith, but her attitude toward the life of the intellect and the life of faith wasn’t always well received (as in the conflict between Elliot and Rachel Saint).

The Will of God/Holiness/Obedience

This was the theme of Elliot’s first and best-selling book, Through Gates of Splendor, and one of the primary emphases of her thinking and writing throughout her life. Her parents had demonstrated the importance they placed on holiness and obedience when they left their much-loved work in Belgium, where they felt God had called them to be, to follow a new call to the Sunday School Times, where they were not excited to be, at least initially. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Elliot absorbed this lesson in her childhood, and although her understanding of how to discern God’s will and of what holiness looked like changed over the course of her life, her commitment to the end goal remained.

One of many “vision boards”—taped to a piece of cardboard for durability.

Missions and Colonialism

Elliot’s missionary story is probably what she’s most widely known for. Her parents came of age in the surge of missionary enthusiasm around WWI, went to Belgium as newlyweds, and emphasized the importance of missions to their children. At the same time, the environment Elliot grew up in was racialized and segregated and her attitudes were a mixture of openness and prejudice. As she got to know people from different cultures and from a wider swath of American life she began to recognize and reject some of her prejudices, but she never seems to have fully confronted them. Elliot’s understanding of what it meant to be a missionary changed greatly during her time in Ecuador. She seems to have seen her time there as a failure in terms of measurable results, and to have ultimately viewed it in terms of her own relation to God. On her return to the US, Elliot spoke frequently in opposition to what she called “the gospel business.” She didn’t totally give up on the concept of foreign missions, however—in the late ‘70s she joined the missionary society board for her church.

The Roles of the Sexes

Beginning in the late ‘60s, Elliot became increasingly known for her teaching on the roles of the sexes both in marriage and in the church. It’s unclear how much influence Jim had on her early views on the topic. Certainly he was outspoken and persuasive about his Plymouth Brethren beliefs (which included the silence of women in the church and the exclusive submission of women in marriage) and she was convinced enough by his other arguments that she became Plymouth Brethren herself for a time. After his death there was some indication that perhaps her views were changing, but they swung back again after her marriage to Addison Leitch and continued after his death through her marriage to Lars Gren. Her personal life intersects with her teaching on this topic in complicating ways.

The Complexity of Human Personality

As far as I know Elliot never took any of the prevalent personality-type tests that are widely used today, so we don’t know her Meyers-Briggs type or her Enneagram number. We do know that she recognized herself as an introvert, although in keeping with the common cultural view at the time she saw it as a weakness rather than a strength. Her personality (of course!) played a huge role in her life from birth to death, affecting her experience of family dynamics, her friendships, her working relationships, the way she was perceived by audiences and by individuals in public settings, and of course her marriages. And like every personality, it made her prone to weakness in some areas and gave her great strengths in others.

Sometimes you just need sources on actual paper.

Let’s Discuss!

But enough of what I saw. I’m interested in hearing what you see in the book and Elliot’s life. Here are some things I’m curious about:

• What background did you have with Elliot before this book? (The first way I knew about her was that my mom was the last of a line of women at church who passed around a copy of The EE Newsletter. Sometimes I’d idly read snippets as I lay draped over a chair in the corner of her study waiting to talk to her about something.) 

• What surprised you as you read? What was as you expected?

• Did you add any books to your TBR pile from Elliot’s own reading (or writing)? 

• How do you see the ongoing conversation about how Christians should balance or interweave faith and intellect? 

• How do you see Elliot’s family of origin and evangelical culture playing a role in her view of God as it comes through in Through Gates of Splendor? 

• How do you see the thorny question of what it means to know and do the will of God? 

• Did learning more details about the events surrounding the mission to the Waorani change the way you see the story? Or the concept of foreign missions? Why or why not? 

• What are your thoughts on Elliot’s teachings on men and women in marriage and the church? Does knowing more about her marriages affect your thinking? 

• Did learning more about Elliot’s personality change the way you saw her? 

• Do you have any take-aways after reading the book?

This is a long book with a lot to cover. I’ve tried to balance getting into enough detail to be interesting with keeping this post under 2,000 words (!). Don’t feel like you have to answer all the questions, but please chime in in the comments about any that interest you. And if there are things you want to talk about that aren’t in the questions, please bring them up!

Also, we’re all coming from different backgrounds and experiences and may see things very differently. Feel free to be real, but let’s try to avoid having the comments section become a “don’t read the comments” section. :)