“Being Elisabeth Elliott” is the second volume on the life of Elisabeth Elliott written by Ellen Vaughn. The first volume covered her time as a young missionary in Ecuador when members of a remote Amazonian indigenous people group killed her husband Jim and his four colleagues. Despite this, she stayed on in the jungle with her young daughter to minister to the very people who had thrown the spears and reached many of them for Christ. The second volume covers the last 50+ years of her life when she moved back to the United States and became a Christian author and speaker at conferences and later voiced a well-respected radio show. However, the book has a major flaw in that it essentially ends in 1977 except for a short summary of the remaining 38 years of her life.
The first volume revealed a courageous, highly respected Christian missionary woman who relied on God and even with great trials and losses maintained her faith and saw miraculous conversions. The second volume, which draws extensively from her private journals, shows her devolving into a dour, self-centered woman who was very critical of the main-line evangelical Christian church of the time. She became chagrined by American evangelicals’ stereotypical expectations for missionaries. Rather than believe God worked all things for good as the Bible teaches she increasingly had trouble accepting her losses and trials and felt God’s will/plans were a mystery that we could not understand.
Elisabeth felt she was a truth-telling prophet that was sent to the Evangelical Church to deliver her message but many churches simply quit asking her to speak due to her critical viewpoints on main line Christianity and standoffish ways. She was regularly offended when church people came up to her with platitudes such as “I am sorry your husband passed” (she wanted to tell them, no he is dead) or “I believe God will give you a message for us today”. She felt these people were too trite and superficial and seemed to think she was on a higher spiritual plane, although they were just being kind and were in most cases devoted Christians. She always complained the evangelical churches would not listen to her but she was never ready to listen to anyone else in her arrogance.
Elisabeth Elliott was a complex and flawed person and her character deficiencies are not overlooked in this book. One flaw, surprisingly, is that multiple married men made passes at her and she did not discourage them and even seemed to appreciate the attention although she refrained from any affairs.
The book is a quick, and relatively short, read although the author goes into extensive details on unimportant items like the fashions of the 1960s, minute details of the death of Elisabeth’s second husband, endless details on how Elisabeth maneuvered her daughter to her eventual husband, etc. and then leaves out some of the most important and interesting times of Elisabeth’s life. The last years of her life Elisabeth appears to have evolved to more conservative Christian viewpoints and again became the darling of many evangelicals. However, the author seems to sympathize with the more rebellious earlier years and as less journals were available to work with from this period (her third husband destroyed some of her later journals) she provides little information. Elisabeth had a bad third marriage during this time, with a controlling/verbally abusive husband, but interestingly some of the most productive years in her ministry work.
The book, having been based on her personal journals, was very gossipy about a lot of Elisabeth’s personal thoughts and details and may have presented a somewhat skewed view of her. Anyone interested in Elisabeth Elliot would likely enjoy this book but fans of hers should plan to be a little disappointed and other biographies should be referenced for information on her later years and for perhaps a more nuanced view of her.
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This post generates great interest in Mrs. Elliot and is well written. We shouldn’t be shocked she had flaws and failures and as you fairly suggested the author may have had some bias in presentation. The question I was left with was, “What was the substance of her continual critiques of the evangelical church?” I don’t believe the “Church” (evangelical or otherwise) is above critique, particularly after reading Yeshua’s own critique in Rev. two and three. Moreover, I don’t believe people have much patience with such criticism, even when it may be valid. Scripture does set a high bar for critique of leadership personally, but I wonder if Yeshua himself would attend a typical American worship service and think, “that was just great, exactly as the Holy Spirit had in mind.”
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She felt many churches thought that God should work in a set pattern – send the missionary out, support them and God will provide a great work. That was not her experience. Despite her fame as a missionary she was basically a failure as to results as although the tribe that killed her husband eventually accepted her, few accepted Christ, she could not get along with the other Missionary working with her and in general little progress was made. She eventually quit the field in frustration. She also thought many in the Church were too certain of their convictions as she struggled with doubt although she did not abandon the Faith.
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Jeremiah was a missionary to Israel before their captivity in Babylon. By the worldly standards of many churches he would be considered a failure, as his audience rejected him and his message. We know Jeremiah was called by God and fulfilled God’s purposes even through personal suffering at the hand of those to whom he was sent. The “church” should operate by faith rather rationalization, but this is rare to find, as men rely on their reason, money, plans and programs. When revival comes may the Lord set us free from our ways and means in exchange for His almighty power and wisdom.
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