Five Missionary Martyrs

He is no Fool

2006-03-01T15:58:00.000-08:00

Remembering Five Missionary Martyrs - InterVarsity

2006-01-11T19:14:00.000-08:00

Remembering Five Missionary Martyrs
January 11, 2006

Fifty years ago this month the world learned of five men who gave their lives to take God’s message of love to one of the most savage tribes in the South American jungle. While the price that they paid was unusually high, their commitment was not unusual when compared to the hundreds of thousands of other young men and women who have attended InterVarsity’s Urbana Student Missions Convention and given up their own ambitions to serve God’s purpose in the world.

For one of those five men, Jim Elliot, the Urbana convention nurtured and encouraged his dream of becoming a missionary. He and his Wheaton College roommate, David Howard, attended InterVarsity’s first missions convention in Toronto in 1946 and returned in 1948 when the convention moved to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

By Urbana 48 Jim was president of the Student Foreign Missions Fellowship at Wheaton. He had written a drama which he presented to Urbana delegates to challenge them with information about the areas of the world still unreached with the gospel. “It gave a strong appeal to students to consider what God wanted them to do,” David recalled.

Jim missed Urbana 51; he was already on the mission field in Ecuador. David had been working on staff with InterVarsity; he became assistant director of Urbana 51. But soon he too was on the mission field in Costa Rica. After Jim married David’s sister Elisabeth, the honeymooners visited David and his wife in Costa Rica. “So the last time I saw Jim Elliot was on his honeymoon at our home in Costa Rica,” David said.

Pete Fleming, another of the five missionaries, was a leader of the InterVarsity chapter at the University of Washington as an under-graduate. Inspired by the chapter adviser to consider an academic career, he entered graduate school and taught a student Bible study. Even after he had joined his friend Jim Elliot on the mission field in Ecuador, he was considering ways of ministering to university students in Quito.

At the first Urbana convention following their deaths, Urbana 57, surprisingly little was said about the five martyred missionaries, at least according to the recorded remarks of the plenary speakers and David’s recollection.

“The book that my sister Elisabeth wrote to tell that story, Through Gates of Splendor, was not out yet. And [neither was] the next book, The Shadow of the Almighty, which was the biography of Jim Elliot. Those books—and Jim Elliot’s journals—began to have a tremendous influence.”

Subsequent Urbana conventions did nourish the legacy of the five martyred missionaries. Elisabeth Elliot spoke at Urbanas 73, 76, 79 and 96. Both of her books telling the story have been featured as Books of the Day at Urbana. David Howard returned from the mission field to become director of Urbana 73 and Urbana 76. “I’ve been in probably 80 countries,” David Howard said, “and almost everywhere I go I invariably run into people who tell me they’re serving today on the mission field because God used Urbana to call them into the field.”

But God is also using Urbana to call men and women to more than traditional missions activities. David attended the 2004 convention of the Evangelical Theological Society because his son David Jr., a professor and dean at Bethel Seminary, was president that year. “I was amazed at how many theologians and professors of theology, and other members of that society, came to me to thank me because Urbana 73 or 76 was a major factor in leading them into God’s service. Not to the mission field,” he pointed out, “but serving God as professors of biblical studies, theology and so on.”

One of David’s best Urbana stories involves his niece, Valerie—the daughter of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot—and Valerie’s husband Walt. “They’ve gone this past year to Congo, as missionaries,” he said. “In a prayer letter that she just sent out, she indicates that at Urbana 76 she and her husband felt called of God into missions. But God led them elsewhere for 29 years–in pastoral ministry–before the way finally opened for them. So now they’re on the field, in Africa.”

The complete David Howard interview is an InterVarsity podcast; you can listen to it here.

The story of Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Nate Saint, Roger Youderian, and Ed McCully is dramatized in the movie The End of the Spear, which begins showing nationwide on January 20th.

© 2006 InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA

Five Missionary Martyrs

2006-01-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

Scores of remarkable missionary stories in this century have been full of drama. We wonder, while so many have laid down their lives in China, Russia, the Congo and elsewhere, how is it that the muffled footsteps by that stretch of sand on the Curaray River still reverberate around us. It happened on the eastern side of the rugged Andes in Ecuador, in the expansive rain forest beyond. There, on January 8, 1956, the most publicized missionary massacre of this century occurred.

Nate Saint, jungle pilot, called that Sunday over the plane’s radio, “We are hoping for visitors at about 2:30. I’ll call you again at 4:35.” When his punctured body was pulled from the river, his wrist watch read 3:12.

Missionaries endured staggering hardship in those rain forests. Sometimes they could not fly and, in order to reach isolated groups, had to travel over land by foot. They hazarded unpredictable rivers by canoe to reach poorly mapped territories where fear-ridden tribal peoples lived. Knowing what we know, our surprise is not that so many died, but that so many other missionaries have survived.

In 1944, five missionaries working with New Tribes Missions in Bolivia were killed trying to reach the fierce Ayores. The five were probably murdered weeks before the search party even left to look for them. Their bodies were never found, and the entire event received little notice by the world press. After all, this news item was buried beneath the happenings of World War II. Today, if someone mentions the five intrepid missionary martyrs to the jungles of South America, few recall the names of Cecil and Bob Dye, Dave Bacon, George Hosbach or Eldon Hunter.

Naturally speaking, we see several reasons why the deaths of Jim Elliot, Peter Fleming, Ed McCully, Nate Saint, and Roger Youderian created such a sensation. There was a lull in world news at that moment. The mystique of the jungle savage excited curiosity. Careful records were available in the journals of the missionaries. The public was informed in a blow-by-blow manner as the facts of the massacre came to light. And here were five striking young men, with intelligent wives and winsome children. These young men looked like fellows we might meet in our own neighborhoods. What were they doing there?

Spiritually speaking, we also see reasons why God was pleased to speak so clearly in that event on January 8, Here is a story that inspires us more the more we know of it. The martyrs all were raised with the gospel from youth. Each was considered a role model.

Jim Elliot was from Portland, Oregon. At Wheaton College, he was president of the Student Foreign Missions Fellowship. A persuasive communicator, he wrote in college: “O God, save me from a life of barrenness, following a formal pattern of ethics, and give instead that vital contact of soul with Thy divine life that fruit may be produced, and Life-abundant living-may be known again as the final proof for Christ’s message and work.” He married Elisabeth Howard from a prominent Christian publishing family in Philadelphia. At the time of the murder, the Elliots had an infant daughter.

”’He makes His ministers a flame of fire.’ Am I ignitable?” he wrote. “God deliver me from the dread asbestos of ‘other things.’ Saturate me with the oil of the Spirit that I may be aflame. But a flame is transient, often short-lived. Canst thou bear this, my soulshort life? In me there dwells the Spirit of the Great Short-Lived, whose zeal for God’s house consumed Him.” (Splendor, p. 18; journal entry summer of ‘47).

Peter Fleming was from Seattle, Washington. At 27, he was a year younger than Jim Elliot. Pete had recently received his M.A. in literature. He was married to his childhood sweetheart, Olive.

Peter wrote: “[The Lord] has been leading my meditation to the stringent statements of Christ regarding discipleship specially those words of Christ to His disciples before He sent them out…’He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it.’ I have been directed to these and similar passages again and again. I should like to put these truths to the utmost test … Seemingly God delights in many instances to place men in situations which magnify their weaknesses for the simple delight of showing Himself strong to all observers” (Liefeld, p. 48, Aug., ‘51 to Jim Elliot.)

Ed McCully, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was president of his senior class at Wheaton. He won the National Hearst Oratorical Contest in San Francisco in 1949 and went on to Marquette University Law School. He and his wife, Marilou, had two sons and were expecting a third. “I have one desire now-to live a life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy and strength into it,” Ed wrote in a letter to Jim Elliot immediately after leaving law school on September 22,1950 (Splendor, pp. 5051).

Roger Youderian came off a Montana ranch. An airborn ranger who was at the battle of the Bulge, he later went to Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis, where he met his wife, Barbara. They joined the Gospel Missionary Union and were evangelizing the headhunting Jivaros when the Elliots, Flemings, and McCullys arrived.

Nate Saint had flown missionaries in and out of the Ecuadorean jungle since 1948 for Missionary Aviation Fellowship. Builder, inventor, and skilled pilot, Nate had devised a ingeniously simple back up fuel system for single-engine planes. Nate was married to a nurse, Marj, whom he had met in the service. They had three children.

In a message broadcast over HCJB in Quito, Nate said, “During the last war we were taught to recognize that, in order to obtain our objective, we had to be willing to be expendable … Yet, when the Lord Jesus asks us to pay the price for world evangelization, we often answer … It costs too much … God didn’t hold back His only Son…” (Splendor, p. 176: Dec. 18, in Nate’s journals on Operation:Auca.)

The five couples did not come to Ecuador planning on reaching the Waorani tribe. But in Ecuador they heard about these Indians referred to as “Aucas” meaning savages. They had never been subjugated by soldiers or won over by missionaries.

The missionaries often prayed and plotted about, how this dreaded tribe could be reached. As they witnessed a series of events opening the way, the five united their hearts to reach the Waorani. To read the missionaries’ own account, we are compelled to agree with Nate Saint that “It the Lord’s Time.”

All volunteered. They planned carefully. All were aware of the danger. As Jim Elliot said to his Betty: “If that’s the way God wants it to be, I’m ready to die for the salvation of the Aucas.”

After a series of long-distance contacts, the next step was to find a landing place close to the Waorani village. On the Curaray River they found a landing site on a sand bar. They named it “Palm Beach.” On Tuesday, January 3, a final prayer meeting was held at Arajuno, then the intrepid couples sang Edith Gilling Cherry’s hymn to the tune Finlandia:

We rest on Thee, our Shield and our Defender,
Thine is the battle, Thine shall be the praise;
When passing through the gates of pearly splendor,
Victors, we rest with Thee through endless days.

On Friday, they had a visit from three Waorani. On Sunday, Nate flew his plane over the area and spied a group of men walking toward the beach. He radioed Marj. “A commission of ten is coming. Pray for us. This is the day!” The next communication was scheduled for 4:30 PM. It would never come.

As newspaper headlines read, Five Missionaries Missing in Ecuador, a rescue party was moving overland. Missionary pilot Johnny Keenan flew over Palm Beach and saw a body; on a second pass, he spied a second one in the river.

By Thursday, two US Navy fliers went in with a helicopter. They found four bodies in the river, speared and hacked by machetes. Jim, Nate, Peter, and Roger were identified. It was speculated that the first body seen from the air was Ed McCully’s and that it had been carried away in the river’s current.

The January 23 Newsweek magazine ran the news. But it was Life photographer Cornell Capa who was at Palm Beach via helicopter when the last body was being lowered into the grave. His sensitive photography and the account of the drama published in Life made this the missionary story of the century. Readers Digest also published the story in 1956.

By Friday, Jan. 13, the Air Force flew the widows over the common grave. As Olive Fleming looked down to see the scar of white sand, 2 Corinthians 5:1 sounded in her mind: “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”

Some church leaders responded to the massacre as did Judas when the costly perfume was poured on the Lord Jesus, saying, “Why this waste.” To such we can only say that God’s ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8-9). The foolishness of God is wiser than men (1 Corinthians 1:25). In following months, mission boards were deluged with offers to “take the place” of the martyrs. Eternity magazine counted six hundred missionaries who credit the martyrdom as influencing them to go overseas.

The work with the Waoranis was only beginning. The girl, Dayuma, an escapee from Waorani territory who helped Rachel Saint learn Waorani, had entrusted herself to the Lord Jesus Christ. To her amazed relatives she returned to their village safe. They assumed she had been cannibalized by the strangers. She explained that the missionaries had come peaceably. She also had an object lesson to help them understand how the Lamb of God was led to slaughter as a sacrifice for sin. “Just as you killed the foreigners on the beach, Jesus was killed for you.”

In the fall of 1958 Rachel Saint and Betty Elliot and her toddler, Valerie, hung their hammocks among the Waorani. While Valerie played with the children of her father’s murderers, Rachel and Betty became acquainted with the murderers themselves: Gikita, Kimo, Nimonga, Dyuwi, Minkayi, and Tona.

Nine years later, the first copies of the Gospel of Mark in Waorani were dedicated at “God’s Speaking House.” Kimo prayed, “Father God, You are alive. This is Your day and all of us have come to worship You. They brought us copies of Your Carving, enough for everybody. We accept it, saying, ‘This is the truth.’ We want all of your carving.”

Surely the enduring attraction to this story is as much about the lives of the martyr’s survivors, as it is about the five men that gave their lives. We not only know the five men by their journals and aging photos. We know them by the lives of the missionary widows, their children, the lives of the Waorani converts and the missionaries that continue to serve them. This is more than a memory. By their fruits we know Ed, Jim, Nate, Pete, and Roger.

God Used For Good - CBN

2006-01-05T19:19:00.000-08:00

CBN.com – “GOD USED FOR GOOD”

In 1956, Steve was five years old when his father, Nate, flew a Piper Cruiser plane with four other missionaries into the jungles of Equador and dared to make contact with the most dangerous tribe known to man, the Waodani (whoa-DONNY) also known as “Auca,” or naked savage.

After several months of exchanging gifts with the natives, the five men were speared multiple times and hacked to death with machetes.

One of the men in the tribe that fateful day was Mincaye (min-KY-yee). Years later Steve found out that Mincaye actually delivered the final spear that ultimately killed his father. (Three of the six warriors from that day are still alive.)

Today they consider themselves family and harbor no resentment. Steve says he has never forgotten the pain and heartache of losing his dad.

“But I can’t imagine not loving Mincaye, a man who has adopted me as his own, and the other Waodani,” says Steve, who made his first trip into Waodani territory when he was 9 years old.

By 1956 Steve’s Aunt Rachel had been living in the jungle but not with the Waodani for several years. Rachel loved her younger brother (Steve’s dad) like a son, but even after he was killed, she continued to live with the Waodani until her death in 1994. Her affection for them was a major influence in Steve’s life. He visited her every summer.

When he was 14, Steve and his sister, Kathy, decided to be baptized and chose a couple of Waodani to perform the baptism in the same water next to the beach where their father was killed. After Rachel died, the tribe asked Steve to live with them. (Steve and his family lived in the jungle for a year and a half.) “What the Waodani meant for evil, God used for good,” says Steve. “Given the chance to rewrite the story, I would not be willing to change it.”

Many are confounded by the relationship Steve has with Mincaye. He says that a USAToday reporter commented that if he were in Steve’s shoes, he could “forgive Mincaye, maybe. But love him, that’s morbid.” Steve says that their relationship doesn’t make sense unless you put God in the equation. Even though his dad’s death was painful, Steve says Mincaye would not have adopted him and he would not have been part of the mysterious, stoneage Waodani world. Also thousands of people, who were stirred by the missionaries’ deaths, would not have dedicated their lives to helping take the gospel to unreached groups like Waodani all over the world.

DID THEY HAVE TO DIE?
Steve remembers as a young boy standing on the bank of dirt that separated his house from the sand and gravel airstrip. He watched his dad take off to fly in the jungle each morning, and then anxiously wait for his return. Even at five years old, Steve knew this was a huge risk.

A week after Christmas 1955, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming and Roger Youderian made plans to make the first-ever-friendly contact with Waodani. After a few days, his father didn’t return. Finally one day, Steve’s mom told him his father would never come home.

“My world started to cave in as my little mind filled with all sorts of questions,” says Steve.

For years, Aunt Rachel told Steve to never ask the Waodani what led to the killings that day. If he did, they might suspect that he was trying to find out who was responsible in order to avenge his father’s death. Over time, the trust between the tribe and Steve grew strong. After Rachel’s funeral, the Waodani told Steve what happened the day he was waiting for his dad’s plane to return.

“There are too many factors that all had to work together to have allowed the events to happen as they did,” says Steve. “Too many for me to believe it was just chance.”

He believes that all of the men died as part of God’s plan. “I know that might offend some,” says Steve. “But I don’t think what happened to my dad and his four friends caught God by surprise.”

Steve says he believes God was much more involved in what happened than merely failing to intervene.

“I have personally paid a high price for what happened, but I have also had a front row seat as the rest of the story has been unfolding for half a century. I believe only God could have fashioned such an incredible story from such a tragic event,” he says. Because those five men were willing to die, everyone else in the tribe had a chance to live.

Copyright Christian Broadcasting Network

Piercing Memories - Christopher Lewis - Avant Ministries

2006-01-03T19:46:00.000-08:00

Fifty years ago, Avant’s Roger Youderian was one of five jungle missionaries martyred at the End of the Spear. It marked the beginning of a tribe’s epic transformation. Yet it took a modern tragedy by the so-called civilized to bring the story to theaters.

By Christopher Lewis
Avant Senior Editor
Posted January 2006

Somewhere along the way, you can find yourself in this story. That is, if you’re willing to get utterly lost in it.

January’s nationwide release of the film End of the Spear is the 50-year trail marker on a timeless story of redemption and reconciliation: how the martyring of five young missionary friends on a jungle shoreline in Ecuador became a beachhead for ushering peace into the most violent tribe ever documented.

The film thoroughly captures a true story that grabbed headlines worldwide in January 1956. This reality overwhelmed the 300 people attending a recent screening in a Kansas City movie theater. The lights dimmed on a chatty crowd casually munching popcorn; 111 minutes later, the credits rolled past a hushed and motionless audience, many with tear-streaked faces.

FYI: You are entering not just a theater, but a remote trail of the heart. And it’s best journeyed without a geographical, religious or cultural compass. Without flawed instruments of human logic and presumption that would come undone in the dense mystery of the Amazon Basin.

Where do you begin telling a story as mighty and as fragile and as unending as the Amazon River that flows through it, yet cannot contain it? Perhaps with a resolute widow who forgives, befriends and takes up residence with the natives who speared her husband.

Or maybe with the transformed tribesmen who resisted telling their side – until the tragic 1999 Columbine school shootings, a generation and a continent away, convinced them to peel back the rainforest curtain.

Or even with the novice Christian producer who spent $30 million filming the story – despite a conservative church upbringing that barred him from stepping foot inside a movie theater before this project began seven years ago.

Producer Mart Green (far right) chats with an actor on the film set. Photos courtesy of Every Tribe Entertainment.

Actually, End of the Spear begins with the narration of a son, Steve Saint: “Some people say we live in a world of irreconcilable differences ...” Saint was baptized by the very Waodani Indians who had killed his father, in the same waters where they’d dumped the bodies … of Nate Saint, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, Jim Elliot and Avant’s own Roger Youderian.

* * *

Watching the movie “was extremely emotional. It wasn’t just a ‘spiritual thing.’ Dad really did suffer,” says Saint, now 54, from his home in central Florida. “People are so fascinated by all the little subplots. God doesn’t promise that all the chapters will be easy, but in the last chapter God does promise to make sense of all the others. It’s the same in everyone’s story.”

It was Saint’s speech at a 1997 missions seminar that inspired Christian retail mogul Mart Green to break into filmmaking in 2002 with Beyond the Gates of Splendor. This gripping documentary version was distributed on DVD to 15,000 churches last year and later to retail outlets, as a primer and momentum-builder for this month’s big-screen adaptation. Rated PG-13, End of the Spear is opening in 1,200 theaters, in target markets modeled after The Passion of the Christ – Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Atlanta. “The Passion showed us that there is an audience [for spiritual films], if it’s quality,” says Green, 44, of Oklahoma City. The CEO and founder of Every Tribe Entertainment, Green says the award-winning films intentionally lack Mel Gibson’s star power.

“We’ve always wanted the story to be the star,” Green says.

The loudest part of the story is not quite so audible. The script purposely eschews evangelistic overtones, which frees the average viewer to embrace the story and identify personally with the transparent themes of love and forgiveness, Green says. Saint vehemently disagrees with murmurings among some conservative churches and surviving family members who say the gospel isn’t trumpeted enough. “Besides, that would be preaching to the choir,” he says.

End of the Spear appeals to post-modern generations who don’t tolerate bullhorn pulpits, Christian or not. Saint believes the message is forthright and culturally relevant – in the same way Jesus spoke in parables. Movies are “the medium where our culture opens their heart, in the dark, for two hours – much more than in church,” Saint says.

This puts the marketing onus where it belongs, Green says – on a church body now empowered with a real story. He’s counting on Christians to continue the film’s conversation buzz around cafés and office water coolers. “What’s the most influential ‘mission field’ in the world? It’s Hollywood. But when’s the last time you saw Christians positively portrayed in a film?” Green says. “People start weeping during this film – not because we told them what to think, but because they’re on an emotional journey.”

For both filmmaker and viewer, the story “takes you out of your comfort zone. And it comes at a price,” Green says. “But the journey is worth it.”

The journey has been questioned by some Christian organizations. They are rankled that the film’s secular cast and crew unwittingly included a homosexual actor and others who partied with prostitutes during film shoots in Panama. Saint says he “agonized” over such behind-the-scenes behavior, but then realized the hypocrisy of wanting a top-notch crew to portray Christians both on camera and off. In effect, the film field became a mission field.

“I remember breaking for ice cream once at a McDonald’s in Panama, and an actor sat down beside me and said, ‘I don’t know anything about the Bible, but I really affirm this story. Thank you for letting me be a part of it. It makes me want to know what’s in that book that made the families want to go [to the jungle],’” Saint recalls. “I mean, imagine if the five missionaries had said, ‘We’ll risk our lives, but only if the people meet certain standards.’”

Another actor, while visiting the Waodani, asked, “What is sin?” At the actor’s request, the Waodani excitedly gathered and prayed for him to walk the trail of Waengongi, Creator God.

News reports of the jungle tragedy in 1956 startled Christians and non-Christians alike. But End of the Spear is more than a 50th anniversary commemoration. It doesn’t gloss over the gruesome sacrifice made by the missionaries. But it doesn’t loiter around it, either. In fact, the viewer may not even see it as a missionary movie. And ultimately, it’s not. For that, screening audiences have been grateful, Saint says. “They say, ‘Oh, thank you. I’m so relieved this is not another Christian movie. I won’t be embarrassed to bring my friends.’”

The power is in the parallel storytelling. Green dumped three early film scripts that ignored his creed of telling the Waodani side – one writer even dared to turn in a comedy. “They told me it was impossible, that a North American audience wouldn’t empathize with the Indian view,” Green says.

In the end, the “white man’s” perspective is threaded so deftly with first-hand Waodani accounts that they become one voice, of one accord.

The missionary thread

Beyond the Gates is interspersed with vivid movie segments to promote the feature film. Beyond mere marketing, however, the documentary is really the historical loom supporting a well-woven story. It’s homespun with a collage of interviews, family photos and 16mm footage from Wheaton College track meets, graduations and weddings. Roger’s widow, Barbara, and his former field partner, retired Avant missionary Frank Drown, are among the many loved ones who reminisce with sentimental humor and candid emotion. You hear about courtship, marriage proposals, and practical jokes. About how Jim Elliot, the ringleader and life of the party, convinced Ed McCully, class president and champion orator, to put off law school and join the mission field. About how McCully’s mother feared he wasn’t a Christian because he loved to dance.

By 1953 the five missionary couples were scattered at various base camps in Ecuador, connected by mission pilot Nate Saint’s ferrying about visitors and supplies from his home in Shell Mera. Steve Saint’s boyhood character and his dad’s little bush plane take center stage in the movie – Steve recalls him working on a toy model of the PA-14 Piper cruiser in 1955. The 5-year-old was disappointed on Christmas morning when he didn’t find the model wrapped as a present beneath the family tree. Days later, beneath the jungle trees, it was presented to the Waodani as a friendly “first-contact” gift.

The Waodani thread

Many Waodani are both interviewed in the documentary and role-played in the movie (by a Panama tribe). Some of the same tribesmen who speared the missionaries are today church elders. Their xenophobic memories pierce the film scripts and narrate the raw footage shot by the white cowadi, or foreigners, in their final hours.

They graphically describe the vicious cycle of blood feuds and vendettas, even within the tribe, that forced the Waodani to the brink of extinction. One anthropologist found that 60 percent of Waodani deaths for five generations had been homicides. Within just a few years of the missionary killings, after Jim Elliot’s widow and Nate Saint’s sister boldly moved in with the tribe and began teaching the Bible, the homicide rate dropped 90 percent.

Says former Waodani warrior Mincaye: “We acted badly, badly, until they brought us God’s carvings. Now we walk His trail.”

In post-World War II America, the martyred missionaries became a household story that galvanized a generation of Christians to live their part in the Great Commission. In fact, in the 11 years following the massacre, Avant’s missionary roster in Ecuador jumped from 51 to 91. (It was then known as Gospel Missionary Union.)

Mincaye has traveled the world with Steve Saint and the United States with Christian songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman, who three years ago recorded a music video with both men in the jungle. Mincaye spices the documentary with humor when his Waodani mind tries to comprehend American showers, credit cards, grocery stores (“big food houses”) and escalators (“that’s why all the foreigners are fat” – the “trail” moves instead of their feet, he says.)

However, when Saint first took Green to Ecuador in 1999 for permission to film the Waodani side of the story, the tribe said “No.” They changed their minds when Saint described the Columbine massacre in Colorado just months earlier. Ashamed of the tribe’s legacy as Auca, or “naked savages,” Mincaye’s wife tore off her blouse: “Tell them to show us like we were,” Ompodae shouted. “But also to tell how we are now.”

Family flight pattern

One of the Columbine victims was a Christian student who was martyred by a classmate for professing her faith. Ironically, the school shootings triggered a major turning point for the Waodani in overcoming shame about their own past. Case in point: Avant’s Frank Drown accompanied Steve Saint on a jungle flight in the 1980s. Sitting in a large hut full of Waodani, Saint explained to them that Drown was the Ecuador missionary who’d led the search party to recover and bury his five friends on a jungle hillside.

“They all got up and started for the door,” recalls Drown, now 83. “They thought I’d come back for [revenge]. Steve jumped up and said, ‘No! It’s OK! He’s a Christian!’”

In fact, Saint makes a cameo in End of the Spear – playing Frank Drown’s character. How tight is the Amazon bond? Drown’s son Ross, today an Avant board member, married Steve Saint’s sister, Kathy. Nate Saint, who was Frank Drown’s jungle pilot, must be smiling down on the two grandsons they now share – both are piloting F-15 jets in the U.S. Air Force.

“One of my greatest disappointments in life was that dad didn’t live to teach me how to fly,” Steve says. So it was an emotional thrill – if a bit unnerving – for him to pilot the stunt flights in the movie.

Steve Saint has also trained one of his childhood Waodani playmates, Tementa, as a bush pilot transporting medical supplies and sick Indians. It poignantly reflects Saint’s criticism of traditional missiology, which creates an unhealthy dependency on missionaries who “fish” instead of teaching nationals to fish for themselves, he says.
“That’s characteristic of much of 20th century missions. We dominate the national church until they are ‘like us,’” Saint says. “But Avant has taken a radical step of saying, ‘Let’s change.’ I hope what Avant has done catches on – recognizing the critical involvement of nationals. There’s a lot of [organizations] just giving this lip service, but Avant is doing it. Jesus said don’t just preach the gospel, but disciple and be sure the fruit remains.”

Saint’s Indigenous Technology Education Center (ITEC) is working on a “kit” airplane that Waodani could build and maintain, another step toward a self-supporting church. Indeed, half of all film proceeds will go toward helping indigenous tribes help themselves. The Waodani have also learned basic dentistry skills, which they use as an evangelism tool for reaching outside tribes. But even among their own people, some have resorted again to killing sprees.

More than playmates and planes, Steve’s bond with Tementa is virtually a blood covenant: Tementa’s father, Nenkiwi, was speared by his fellow Waodani months after Nenkiwi had played a pivotal role in the missionary attacks. Swimming with Tementa and friends as a child, “I was just one of the crowd,” Steve recalls in Beyond the Gates. “My father had been speared, too.”

Drown led a tense two-day canoe trip, escorted by U.S. and Ecuadorian soldiers, to recover the bodies. He was too emotional to rope together Nate Saint’s feet and pull him onto the beach, but composed himself to lead a storm-ridden funeral near the missionaries’ beachfront tree house.

“It was the most violent, sudden storm I’d ever seen. Clouds as black as night, thunder, lightning,” Drown says. “Some of the soldiers got scared and ran in. I was telling them, ‘No, you need to go out and stand guard.’ I didn’t have time to regret. We had to get everyone out of there.”

The speared bodies had been cut with the same machetes air-dropped as gifts from Nate Saint’s plane. The Waodani had hacked to pieces the wings of the “wood bee.”

This is where the film really takes flight, although the storyline’s full circles are almost too wide to capture on screen: how Rachel Saint and Elisabeth Elliot move in with the tribe and tip-toe around family rivalries – “Do you think your people will spear me, the way they speared my husband?” asks Elisabeth. How Rachel mentors Dayumae, a Waodani woman who’d fled her community as a child (Viewer’s Guide). How Dayumae becomes the village preacher and helps spark revival. How Rachel and Elisabeth separate because of differences over ministry.

When Rachel died in 1994, after 30 years with the Waodani, the tribe asked Steve Saint and his family to leave Florida and make their home in the jungle. Which they did, for 18 months. Steve’s son Jesse became so close with nene (“grandpa”)Mincaye that the tribesman attended Jesse’s Florida high school graduation in 1997.

Mincaye lives to tell this story because Jesse’s real nene had kept a promise made half a century earlier: Although they were armed, the missionaries on the beach that January afternoon had vowed never to shoot the Waodani. As Nate Saint’s character tells little Stevie in End of the Spear, “Son, we can’t shoot the Waodani. They’re not ready for heaven, and we are.”

2003 Article - Widows of the Martyrs

2005-11-29T14:51:00.000-08:00

Monday, March 10, 2003

MISSIONARY MOVIE "BEYOND THE GATES" RETELLS FOR A NEW GENERATION THE STORY OF FIVE MARTYRED MISSIONARIES IN THE ECUADORIAN JUNGLES IN 1956

By Michael Ireland
Chief Correspondent, ASSIST News Service

OKLAHOMA CITY, OK (ANS) -- The story of five missionary men -- Jim Elliot, Peter Fleming, Ed McCully, Nate Saint, and Roger Youderian -- speared to death by the feared "Auca" Indians of Ecuador in 1956, has been told and retold through book, film, theater, and other avenues. Yet much of the world still has never heard the amazing story of redemption for this one group of people deep within the heart of the Amazon. (Pictured: The widows of the five martyred missionaries were at the North American screening of "Beyond the Gates." Left to right: Barbara Youderian (Roger), Marjorie Van Der Puy (Nate Saint), Olive Liefeld (Pete Fleming), Elisabeth Elliot Gren (Jim Elliot), Marilou McCully (Ed)).

According to Christian Film News, July 24, 2002, (ChristianFilmNews.com) the new "Beyond the Gates" movie was originally intended as a dramatic presentation. "Beyond the Gates" became a documentary to be completed around September 2002.

With a new change in the production team, BeyondtheGatesTheMovie.com listed the Executive Producer as Mart Green (Bearing Fruit Communications), Producer Kevin McAfee, Writer/Producer/Director Bill Ewing, Co-Director Jim Hanon (Bearing Fruit Entertainment/Compass Arts), with other involvement by Dave and Miles Hanon. Christian contemporary artist Steven Curtis Chapman also teamed up to help promote the project during his musical tours. The production team released this feature documentary to select theaters in late 2002.
Executive Producer Mart Green mentioned that in August, 2002, the producers took the finished documentary to Ecuador and showed it to the Waodani [formerly known as the "Aucas"]. He said at the time: "This will be the first public showing of the documentary and we are excited that the Wao will be the first ones to see it. We will then bring it back and show it to the widows and their children in mid-August."

WHAT IS "Beyond the Gates"?

The movie's website http://btg.bearingfruitcomm.org/ reports that Beyond the Gates is a feature-length reality film that tells the story of how North American families became part of a Stone Age tribe in the Amazon jungle, after that same tribe had speared to death their loved ones.

"The film combines interviews with character story telling to carry the audience from the early 1950's to the present day across two continents and three languages as well as from the Stone Age to the twenty first century," the website says.

Jim Hanon, Director/Writer, writing in a "director's journal" said: "The story begins in the Eastern Amazon Basin with interviews of the actual Waodani who had speared five missionaries in 1956, a story made famous in Life Magazine. The Waodani were known at the time as Aucas and were the most violent society ever documented. Six out of every ten adult Waodani deaths were from homicide.

"The wife of one the men and sister of another went to live with the tribe after their loved ones were speared. Within two years the homicide rate in the tribe dropped over ninety percent.

"Years later the son of one of the men who was killed moved his family from Florida to live with the tribe. His children learned to call one of the elders in the tribe 'grandfather,' even though he was one of the same men who killed their real grandfather.

"This is a story of how love can transform any situation and how faith makes a family from the most opposite of people," he said.

Hanon said Beyond the Gates was made so that this story, that reveals so many insights about faith and family could be discovered by a broad audience.

"The reality and documentary film style was chosen because we want the authenticity of the story to be fully understood. In this case the truth goes beyond our imagination. We also want the audience to have a film experience, that is, an emotional journey through fascinating characters with whom you laugh and cry and see some part of yourself. In the end we hope the audience is entertained and is thankful for the journey as they leave the film with a more meaningful and hopeful sense of faith and family.

THE DIRECTOR'S TRAIL

Hanon said: "This story spanned three generations and three cultures and we knew it would be imperative to have a central, cohesive thread for the audience to follow. During filming, writing and editing I was constantly faced with the choice of what to emphasize and what to omit. We filmed a staggering one hundred and twenty hours of footage and the truth be told another director making the film could arrive at something entirely different than this version by making different choices in the edit.

"Few documentaries reach a substantial audience and our desire to draw a larger audience to the film affected how we approached making it. Documentation is the primary task of a documentary film, but humanity sees facts through emotions. There is really no getting around it. The facts about a story are colored by the emotions of the people who lived the story. We set out to document emotions as well as the facts behind them. This is the human journey and so was also the journey of the film making team," said Hanon.

"From the start I believed that the people we needed to interview would share more from the heart if they loved and trusted the person interviewing them. I had never met any of the people before except for Steve Saint who was five years old when his father Nate was killed. He knew all of the family members involved in the story and held their trust. We asked him to not only set up the interviews but conduct them as well. I reviewed a list of questions with him and operated the camera.

"Our production manager David can tell you this is not the most efficient way to approach filming. The massive amount of footage makes a strong testament to this fact. Yet, in the end it was the only way we knew to get the authentic and genuine emotional feeling we have in the interviews. We would come to a moment in each interview where the person talking to Steve would see him in the story with them and the camera would be lost and they would share a memory together. This film is a collection and documentation of these intimate memories," said Hanon.

"When you shoot more film than planned it ripples through the production cycle. More film means more editing. As it is many of the people we interviewed never made it into the final edit. This valuable footage will no doubt find its use in the future as specific parts of the story warrant illumination. I have fond memories of the interview stages of the filming that I'm sure will grow fonder as time passes and we gather our strength again. As part of making the interview as comfortable as possible we traveled to where the people lived and often filmed in their homes. These homes ranged in location from South America and Florida to Chicago and Seattle, and most places in between."

Hanon recalled: "Steve (Saint) told us early on that we would one day walk away from this story and move on to the next film project. He and the rest of the families we interviewed did not have that option and would have to deal with whatever happened as a result of the film we made. Though no one in the film team was born into the story, I can tell you the people we interviewed often made us feel like family."

THE SOUTH AMERICAN SCREENING

The movie website http://btg.bearingfruitcomm.org/screenings/ reports that on August 2, 2002, Executive Producers Mart Green and Bill Ewing along with Producer Kevin McAfee, Director/Writer Jim Hanon, Production Manager David Hanon, Editor Miles Hanon, Steve Saint and Steve McCully led a large group of North Americans to Nemopade, Ecuador to the South American Family Reunion and Screening.

"The documentary had just been finished a couple of days before this and the first audience for the documentary would be the Waodani. There were 35 from North America who had traveled down to visit with the Wao. Steven Curtis Chapman and his two sons and several of his band members were a part of the group. The Wao loved to hear Steven as he sang to them,the website says. (Pictured: Steven Curtis Chapman in concert in Ecuador).

Over 100 Waodani were in attendance for the showing which took place on August 6h. Many had walked in through the jungle over the course of several days to be there.

"We had carried a reflective movie screen with us but needed to construct a stand for it. The makeshift movie screen was held up with sticks that the Wao had cut and the bottom was held secure by a 9 foot blow gun. The theater seats had been jungle trees just a few hours earlier. The Wao went out and cut down trees and made boards with a chain-saw then used stumps to hold up the new seats. It was exciting to see their response to the film. Dayumae, Mincaye and Ompodae, Kimo and Dawa, Dyuwi and Dabo all sat on the front row. When the film was over the Waodani gave the film a hearty hand clap."

THE NORTH AMERICAN SCREENING

According to the movie website, on August 17 the producers had the North American Family Reunion and Screening where they showed the film in a theater for the first time.

"All 5 of the women and their nine children who lost their husbands and fathers were in attendance. This was the first time since 1957 that all 14 had been together. The 45-year wait was well worth it. Tears of joy were shed throughout the weekend as old friendships were rekindled and new ones were formed."

The "families" that were in attendance included the five families who represented the story from 1956, the Bearing Fruit family, the I-Tec (ministry run by Steve Saint) family and the Wycliffe family and donor family.

"It was an incredible blessing to have all of these groups come together to share what the Lord had done in bringing this project to completion," the producers said afterwards.

"After the screening of the movie the group sat in silence for a moment to take in the power of the movie. Then there was a time of sharing in which all 5 of the women and several of their children shared their thoughts. Their unanimous feeling was that the movie was a powerful tool that had great potential to reach a whole new generation with this story."

Whose idea was it to make the movie?

"Mart Green had the vision and put the film team together which has now grown to be Bearing Fruit Communications and Bearing Fruit Entertainment, said Steve Saint.

"Mart heard Mincaye and me speak at a Wycliffe Associates anniversary celebration. Mincaye summed up his testimony by saying, 'we acted badly, badly until they (Aunt Rachel and Betty Elliot) brought us God's carvings, now we walk His trail.' That impacted Mart and he thought people in our own culture need to hear this story of transformation and reconciliation.

"I was actually quite involved. I served as the go-between to the five families and to the Waodani tribe. I got to conduct all of the interviews and got to fly the recreations of Dad Nate doing the bucket drop. Then, the Director, Jim Hanon decided he wanted someone in the story to do the narration; and I got to be the voice inside the story, telling the story.

What was is like for Saint to revisit the story again? "It is an incredible story. It grows more and more powerful the more detail I understand of it. But then, God is the Master story-teller. He is writing millions of stories with people's lives all around the world. Great stories. But every once in a while He chooses one to publish. This is not a unique story really, but it is one that caught people's attention and was used by God to motivate tens of thousands of people to make themselves available to His service.

"It is the hope of the Bearing Fruit film team that the story will now impact a secular audience. It is made for that audience, though it will appeal to Christian audiences for sure."

Saint concluded: "I am merely serving the story. This is something God is doing."

** Michael Ireland is an international British freelance journalist. A former reporter with a London newspaper, Michael is the Chief Correspondent for ASSIST News Service of Garden Grove, CA. Michael immigrated to the United States in 1982 and became a US citizen in Sept., 1995. He is married with two children. Michael has also been a frequent contributor to UCB Europe, a British Christian radio station.

Aerial Shot of the Plane

2005-11-19T13:46:00.000-08:00

Info about "Beyond the Gates" film

2005-11-01T18:43:00.000-08:00

By Dan Wooding
Founder of ASSIST Ministries

GARDEN GROVE, CA (ANS) -- When I was a new Christian in Birmingham, England, the incredible story of how five missionaries who gave their lives to reach a tribe of Ecuadorian Indians in the 1950s, had a deep impact on my life and that of my wife Norma, who gave her life to Christ the night a slide-show about their story was shown at my father’s little church, The Sparkbrook Mission. (Pictured: Mincaye, one of the Waodani tribesmen who killed Christian missionaries in Ecuador in 1956, now is Christian himself. picture by Elliot Walach).

In 1956, Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, Nate Saint, and Roger Youderian reached out to the Auca [Waodani] people, perhaps the most violent culture ever documented. This primitive tribe had terrorized the more peaceful people the missionaries had been working with, so the five approached the Aucas with gifts, friendly messages, and a plane ride. But just as they thought they were forming friendships, a band of Auca warriors attacked with spears and machetes, killing the men and throwing their bodies into the river. (Pictured: Nate Saint with one of the Waodani tribesmen on the beach where he was later murdered).

But what made the story even more extraordinary was the heroic leap of faith and understanding that drove the families of the slain missionaries to seek out the very same tribesmen that killed their relatives decades earlier.

I have just watched an advanced copy of the critically-acclaimed true story of sacrifice and redemption, BEYOND THE GATES OF SPLENDOR that arrives on DVD and VHS October 4, 2005 from Fox Home Entertainment and I recommend as a “must see” for all Christians and church groups.

It is an intense and inspiring feature-length documentary from Bearing Fruit Communications about faith, forgiveness and crossing cultural boundaries. BEYOND THE GATES OF SPLENDOR recounts the chronicle of five missionaries who gave their lives to reach a tribe of Ecuadorian Indians in the 1950s and the heroic leap of faith and understanding that drove the families of the slain missionaries to seek out the very same tribesmen that killed their relatives’ decades earlier. (Pictured: DVD cover, BEYOND THE GATES OF SPLENDOR).

This compelling adaptation of Elisabeth Elliot’s international best-seller Through the Gates of Splendor was awarded the 2004 Palm Beach International Film Festival’s prestigious Audience Award and the Heartland Film Festival’s Crystal Heart Award and will be available to own for the suggested retail price of $19.98 U.S./$26.98 Canada on DVD and $12.98 U.S./$14.98 Canada on VHS.

The compelling documentary contains moving first-hand accounts from the missionaries’ widows and interviews with their children and the actual tribesmen involved in the missionaries’ killings, the documentary provides a compelling look into the spearing deaths that providentially changed the violent nature of the tribe. It also details the remarkable story of how two American women reached out and brought peace to the Waodani people as a result of the spearings by living among the very people who killed their loved ones.

What makes the film even more extraordinary is that it is narrated by Steve Saint, son of slain missionary Nate Saint, who after he grew up went back to serve the Waodani people –he doesn’t like to call them Aucas as that means “naked savages.” Steve Saint also served as principal advisor on a wide-release, feature-length version of the story, End of the Spear.
Norma and I were moved to tears as Steve Saint gave the accounts of the relationships that he and the others developed with some of the very men who killed his father. It is an incredible example of radical and forgiveness.

A highlight was the account in the film of how Rachel Saint, sister of Nate Saint, lived among the Waodanis until she died in 1994. Nate's two children, Kathy and Steve, spent their summers there, too. Kathy Saint was baptized at her own request by Kimo, one of the warriors who speared her father. In 1995, Steve Saint, who was 5 when his father was killed, took his wife and children to the tribe to build an airport and a hospital. Steve Saint has worked tirelessly since then to help indigenous people become more self-sufficient. (Pictured: Steve Saint with Mincaye, one of the warriors that was involved in the killing of the five missionaries).

Bearing Fruit Communications has announced the national availability of Beyond the Gates of Splendor, an award-winning documentary commemorating a classic Christian testimony of tragedy, triumph, forgiveness and redemption. Bearing Fruit Communications was formed to educate and empower Christians with stories that demonstrate the relevance of God’s Word for today’s world.

As part of the national launch of the documentary, Bearing Fruit Communications is offering more than 10,000 free kits of Beyond the Gates of Splendor to churches that are interested in screening it for their congregations or as part of outreach events. The church screening kits contain an abridged (40 minutes) version of the documentary, marketing materials and ads for promoting the screenings, as well as additional study guide materials to aid pastors, lay and small group leaders in sharing an unforgettable story.

Bearing Fruit Communications was commissioned by and is a member of the Forum of Bible Agencies – North America, an alliance of leading ministries specifically committed to communicating God's Word in its various forms. Open Doors, a worldwide Christian ministry to persecuted Christians, is also a member of the forum.

Dr. Carl A. Moeller, President/CEO of Open Doors USA, has urged churches to order the documentary and use the kit to impact their congregation and community. “Beyond the Gates of Splendor is an inspiring story of hope, forgiveness and God’s transforming power among the Waodani tribe in Ecuador. From the slaughter of the five missionaries in 1956 came changed hearts and changed lives. I encourage your church to order the documentary kit today. It is a powerful testimony.”

The BEYOND THE GATES OF SPLENDOR church kit release is the first of three stages planned to bring this compelling story to audiences. In October, the full-length version of the Beyond the Gates of Splendor documentary will be available for purchase in DVD format in stores nationwide.

In January 2006, Bearing Fruit Communications is taking the story to the “big screen.” Bearing Fruit Communications contracted with the for-profit production company, Every Tribe Entertainment, to produce and release a full-length feature film, End of the Spear, in theaters across the nation.

Churches, schools and nonprofit organizations interested in receiving a Beyond the Gates of Splendor screening kit can visit www.beyondthegatesthemovie.com or call (800) 695-9847.

Note: BEYOND THE GATES OF SPLENDOR debuts on DVD and VHS October 4, 2005 From Fox Home Entertainment.

** You may republish this story with proper attribution.
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Did They Have to Die? Oct. 1996 CT

1996-10-15T18:57:00.000-07:00

Did They Have to Die?

Forty years after five missionaries lost their lives in the Ecuadorian jungle, the killers explain what really happened.

Steve Saint

The year of Christianity Today’s birth also brought the death of five American missionaries in Ecuador: Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, and Peter Fleming. The story of what happened on that January day in 1956-first told in newsweeklies and Life magazine and then in numerous books and documentaries-became a primary narrative for the young evangelical movement, reinforcing and illustrating to the world our core ideals. Their noble sacrifice and the heroic follow-up work of family members like Rachel Saint, the sister of Nate, and Jim Elliot’s widow, Elisabeth, inspired a generation of Christians-some to go to the mission field and many more to live a more mature and sacrificial Christian life.

While the story is familiar, many of the details have been unknown. Why were the missionaries attacked, especially after such promising initial contacts with their eventual killers, the Huaorani? Why didn’t the missionaries use their guns to defend themselves?

Steve Saint grew up with these questions about the final moments of his father’s life. Despite spending school vacations among and working with the now-Christian Huaorani, Steve only recently has gotten his answers-which have served to make the story even more amazing and inspiring still.

This article, like our August cover story, appears as a chapter in Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith, a collection of essays edited by Susan Bergman (Harper San Francisco).

As I made my final approach to the short jungle airstrip, I could tell I was coming in a little high. I pushed the flap lever all the way down, but it still wasn’t going to be enough to get me down on the tiny mud-and-grass strip. I decided to pick up speed, staying on the approach glide path to get the feel for my next try. I had just spent three weeks building a new airstrip with the Huaorani people in Ecuador, but this was my first landing in Huaorani/Auca territory, and this little strip wasn’t exactly what the engineers had in mind when they designed this Cessna 172.

Racing down the field just ten feet in the air, I could clearly see the faces of the Huaorani people lining the strip. As I pulled up and banked to the left to start another approach, I could see the river and what is left of the sandbar where my father, Nate Saint, had made his first approach, the very first approach ever in Huaorani territory, just 40 years ago. He and fellow missionaries Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Pete Fleming, and Roger Youderian had set up camp on that little sandbar in hopes of making contact with the primitive Aucas, known for their fierce infighting and hatred of outsiders. The five missionaries had a deep burden to share the gospel message with a people known only for hunting and killing. Their initial friendly contact ended in death by spearing.

On my second try, I was right on the numbers. Crossing the final bushes, I cut the power and the wheels touched down solid, just ten feet from the mark I had chosen. I hopped out to say hello, but I was in a hurry to take off again before the afternoon thunderheads started to drop their torrential rains and trap my little plane in mud, making a takeoff impossible. Dad, I remembered, had flown the Piper Family Cruiser off the beach each afternoon for much the same reason while awaiting the first contact with the “savages,” as the Quechua word Auca means.

So much was the same, and yet circumstances were so different! The past three weeks I had been carving a new airstrip out of the virgin jungle with “the people” (which is what their own Huaorani word means), some of whom had murdered my father and his friends just before my fifth birthday.

Mincaye was one of them. Mincaye, with whom I had just gone hunting, who laughed and joked about everything, who had tried the hula hoop on his first friendly contact with the outside. He had been on the beach that fateful day in 1956. There was no laughing on that visit.

Dyuwi, shy, sweet Dyuwi, who hung around our camp each night waiting for a break in the conversation so he could thank Wangongi (creator God) for keeping us safe from falling trees, Konga ants, and poisonous snakes: he too had been there. Just a teenager then, and certainly just as shy, he was nevertheless an up-and-coming killer who knew what they had come to do and went about it-no doubt with the same vigor I had seen him demonstrate on a huge stump he’d been working for the last three days to clear from our landing strip.

Kimo, who brought his canoe full of provisions so we would have plenty to eat while we worked on the strip, had also been there in 1956. He told me that the last of the five young cowodi (foreigners/strangers) had fled across the river, away from the attack, and instead of fleeing into the jungle and safety, had climbed onto a log and called in poor Huao, “We just came to meet you. We aren’t going to hurt you. Why are you killing us?” It was this same gentle Kimo who listened to this plea and then ran a nine-foot hardwood spear through the foreigner’s chest.

Why did these gentle, kindhearted men I had been eating, sleeping, and working alongside kill my father and his friends? Why did the missionaries not defend themselves with guns against primitive spears? Why leave five young women widowed, nine children fatherless? What had caused the Huaorani to kill the very men who had called to them from the plane that they were friends, who had exchanged gifts with them on a line dropped from the circling plane?

Historically, every encounter with the Huaorani had ended in death, from the sixteenth-century conquistadors to seventeenth-century Jesuits to nineteenth-century gold and rubber hunters. Toward the end of 1955, the oil companies were closing in on Huaorani territory, an area of about 2,500 square miles. This tribe of unknown size and location was seen to be an irritant to development. Not only had they killed oil company employees who ventured into their territory, but they had even lain in ambush outside the big oil camps and killed unsuspecting employees right outside their own quarters. Little was said about the raids made by gun-wielding oil company men against the people, but every Huaorani killing was told and retold in the oil camps until “Auca” savagery and killing prowess gained almost mystical power to strike fear into the hearts of even seasoned jungle workers. Soldiers had been dispatched to protect oil camps, and there was talk of a military attempt at wiping out this “nuisance.”

Confrontation was inevitable, and the question was not would the Huaoranis be contacted, but who would contact them and with what intentions. Would the contact group take medicines and go in peace to live among the people, or would they go with poisoned meat and booby traps and guns to see the nuisance was eliminated or driven deep into the jungle where it would no longer impede the progress of civilization?

Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, and Ed McCully, three college friends working as missionaries in Ecuador, had a burning desire to follow Jesus’ command to take the gospel message into all the world. They had prayed for years for this primitive group that had never heard the redemption story of peace with God through the death of Christ. Now the men began to feel they should act soon or perhaps lose the opportunity for peaceful contact.

The first challenge was somehow to establish that they were friendly and intended no harm-no easy task when you can’t speak a common language or safely get close enough to try communicating in any other way. They didn’t even know for sure where in the jungles the semi-nomadic Huaorani could be found. My father had generally avoided flying over their territory as he delivered goods to various missionaries in the dense jungle, but as the dry season approached (the time most likely to expose a sandbar big enough to land Dad’s small plane), he and Ed flew over the area and spotted one small Huaorani clearing.

The three men rounded out their team with two more: Pete Fleming, a friend of Jim and Ed’s, working in Ecuador with the same mission group, and Roger Youderian, who had been working with the Jivaros, known as the “head shrinkers” of the Ecuadorian jungles. A veteran of the World War II paratroopers, Roger possessed a jungle savvy and an ability to live and travel like the Indians.

These five men were not cast from the same mold. Jim was impetuous but focused. Both a college wrestler and a writer, his good looks and physical strength were matched by a deep introspection. Ed McCully, president of his college class, had played football end and won his senior oratory contest. Everyone expected him to go to law school, but something stronger called him to the jungles of the Amazon. Dad was born into an artist’s family but picked up a stray gene. He loved the technical and mechanical aspects of life and wanted to use his interest and skills for a purpose with dimensions that would honor God and outlast the temporal. Flying support for missionaries was a way to fulfill both of his desires. Pete was the youngest of the group, but in some ways the group’s sage. Roger was the guy you sent to do the job when it took dogged determination and a completely willing heart to get it done.

Here were five common young men whose unifying distinction was less their inherited abilities or acquired skills than their commitment to seek God’s will and to carry out his purposes for their lives . They were aware of the risk they were taking but felt it was justified, though they could have had no idea of the impact their martyrdom would someday have.

The men studied oil company reports and talked to everyone they could who might give them additional insight into the Huao culture. They began to develop a plan, knowing there was no way to eliminate all danger, but also realizing they each had a family and other responsibilities that dictated caution as well as speed. My father and Ed flew back and forth over the jungle and discovered a tiny clearing. They gleaned a short repertoire of Huao phrases from Dayuma, a Huao girl who had fled almost certain death from intratribal spearings and was living on a hacienda outside Huao territory. My father’s sister, Rachel, was living with Dayuma and studying the Huao language, sure that God had called her to live with this tribe someday and teach them how to walk on God’s trail.

The missionaries began making regular overflights to drop friendship gifts from the plane, calling over a loudspeaker, “We like you. We are your friends.” Soon they decided to try the bucket drop, a technique Dad had developed to deliver and retrieve items from missionaries who had no airstrip. He circled his plane overhead in tight circles while a long cord with the goods attached was reeled out behind the plane. Air friction on the basket at the end of the line would make the cord cut to the inside of the circle flown by the airplane, while the weight of the basket caused the cord to fall. When enough line was extended behind the plane, the end of the line would actually hang motionless in the air. Letting out more line at that point would make the line drop straight down where it could be made to hover just above the ground.

The Huaorani tell me that when this technique was used, they understood that the gifts were being deliberately offered and signaled their understanding and desire to continue the exchange by tying on gifts of their own. They remember receiving machetes, a metal axe (a prized possession among people who traditionally used stone axes), brightly colored ribbons, and aluminum cooking pots. In exchange, they returned a Huao comb, a feather headdress, smoked monkey, and even a live parrot, which became my childhood pet.

After making 13 weekly gift drops, Dad located a small sandbar on the Curaray River. By flying over the sandbar and dropping small paper bags of flour at timed intervals, then repeating the process on his own airstrip at Shell Mera, he measured the sandbar to be 650 feet long. It was only about six miles from the Huaorani settlement, although by trail, it would be many, many miles of arduous trekking up and down ridges and across water. (A Huaorani moving at a fast pace could get there in three to five hours.) On January 2, 1956, Dad flew the four other men in one by one, and they set up camp on what they called “Palm Beach.” They made repeated flights back and forth to the Huaorani settlement so that the people would figure out that the plane was no longer flying off into the distance but landing in their territory.

After three days of waiting on the beach, the men suddenly saw two naked women step out of the jungle onto the opposite bank. Two missionaries waded out into the river to greet them. When it was apparent the women were being well received, a man joined them on the beach. Dad’s journal records that the three Huaorani seemed relaxed and acted in a friendly manner. They shared the missionaries’ hamburgers and Koolaid and carried on an animated conversation as if their every word were understood. The man, whom the missionaries nicknamed “George,” made it obvious that he understood the men had arrived in the ibo (Huao for woodbee or airplane) and he wanted a ride. Dad took him for a quick spin, which wasn’t enough, and then for a second ride over his settlement, where his people saw him in the plane. Dad recorded that George got so excited that he tried to crawl out the open doorway onto the strut, apparently having no concept of how high they were or how fast they were traveling.

Late in the afternoon, Dad and Pete flew out to a friendly jungle station as usual, to avoid getting trapped by a downpour on the frequently flooding river. Shortly afterward, the younger of the two women went into the jungle as abruptly as she had appeared. Soon “George” inconspicuously followed. The older woman stayed on the beach well into the night. (When the missionaries came down from their tree house in the morning, the coals by her fire were still hot).

The next day there were no visitors, but in an overflight on January 8, Dad spotted a party of ten Huaorani on their way to the beach. (The jungle growth is too thick to be able to see the trail, so this chance spotting probably occurred as the group crossed the Tiwaeno River.) At noon, Dad radioed to my mother. “Looks like they’ll be here for the Sunday afternoon service. This is it! Pray for us. Will contact you again at 4:30, over and out.” As soon as 4:30 came without word from the always punctual Nate, Mom knew something was wrong and contacted the other missionary pilot. He flew over the beach the next morning, spotting the plane stripped of its canvas covering and one body in the river. Four days later a weary but tense ground party made up of missionaries, Quechua Indians, and military personnel found the other bodies, identifiable only by their watches, rings, and other personal effects.

Photos developed from film found in Dad’s camera at the bottom of the river, a diary fished out of his pocket, and his watch, stopped at 3:10, seemed to be all there was to tell about the end of his life.

Many times over the years I have wondered what the end was like. When did they realize they were being attacked? Why didn’t they attempt to defend themselves? What went through their minds in those last minutes before losing consciousness? They knew that they were dying on a temporary sandbar in an obscure river in unknown territory. Each surely thought about the wife he was leaving behind, who loved him and would miss him like life itself. They must have pictured the nine children among them, one still unborn, who would wonder what happened to Daddy. I imagine they felt they had failed in their objective of taking the gospel to a needy and murderous tribe, as they lay dying, bodies pierced by the wooden spears of Gikita and Nampa and Kimo and Nimonga and Mincaye and Dyuwi.

After the murders, my Aunt Rachel continued learning the Huao language, taking the apostle Paul’s words as a personal promise. “Those who were not told will see, and those who have not heard will understand.” Dayuma also believed the words Rachel taught her from the Bible and decided to return to her people, to teach them what she had learned about God and the outside world of the cowodi. Less than three years after the massacre, Aunt Rachel and Jim Elliot’s widow, Elisabeth, had made contact and were living among the tribe. There they practiced basic medicine and began to notate an oral language in hopes of someday translating the Scriptures into Huao-tidido (the Huao language).

I grew up in Quito, Ecuador, and enjoyed spending school vacations whenever I could with my Aunt Rachel among the Huaorani. Being fatherless did not make me unique there: most others had lost family in intratribal killings. Though I knew which men had killed Dad, it was not something I asked about. According to Huaorani tradition, as my father’s oldest son I would be primarily responsible for avenging his death in kind, so I never wanted to appear too interested in the particulars. Even Aunt Rachel, who died last year after 37 years with the Huaorani, knew very little of the details.

But finally, last year, during my most recent journey to build a new airstrip and clinic with the Huaorani, I asked the evangelist Dyuwi how many times he had killed before he began to walk on God’s trail as a young man. We were sitting outside Dayuma’s house in the village of Tonampade, named after one of my childhood friends, Tona. He became the first Huao martyr, speared wh ile trying to reach his downriver relatives with the gospel. I sat in the shade with Dyuwi and others, some of us swinging in hammocks and some squatting by an open groundfire. Children played nearby with clipped-winged birds. In a rush of stories, Dyuwi, Kimo, Dawa, Gikita, and Mincaye, all participants that day on the beach, paid me a high compliment by speaking openly of the killing. They knew that all of us have experienced God’s forgiveness and that they had nothing to fear from me.

As they described their recollections, it occurred to me how incredibly unlikely it was that the Palm Beach killing took place at all; it is an anomaly that I cannot explain outside of divine intervention.

Though I was familiar with the story as we knew it from the photographs and diaries, I began to hear of a very different drama being played out within the Huao clearing. Nankiwi (the man called “George” by the missionaries) wanted to take another wife. For several reasons, the young girl’s mother and brother disapproved. This made Nankiwi furious, and he began to threaten to kill the brother. Their disapproval also frustrated the young girl and she, in typical Huao fashion, made a dramatic case out of her thwarted plans, threatening, “If you won’t let me marry, then why should I go on living? I’ll just go to the foreigners in the ibo and let them kill me.” Certainly it was no coincidence that of all the small groups of Huaorani scattered throughout their large territory, this group was the one from which Dayuma had fled, and this very girl was her sister. Being of the same stubborn stock as Dayuma, who had escaped to the fearsome “outside,” she set off for Palm Beach. Nankiwi apparently saw this as an opportunity to be alone with her and took off after her. One older woman, seeing what was going on and knowing that discovery of their tryst would probably lead to killings within the group, decided to go along as chaperone.

When my father took Nankiwi for a ride, and the rest of the tribe saw him in the plane, they decided to go visit the cowodi, too. The next morning, they took the trail for Palm Beach. But before reaching the beach, they ran into Nankiwi and the girl, who were unchaperoned. Her brother, Nampa, flew into a rage and was ready to kill Nankiwi. Apparently to divert attention from his own indiscretion, Nankiwi told the group that the cowodi had attacked them and they were fleeing. Scoffing as she told me this, Dawa implied that most of the Huaorani found this hard to believe, since Nankiwi had a reputation as a troublemaker. Someone asked about the older woman; “she had to flee another way,” Nankiwi lied.

As tempers flared, the oldest man, Gikita, took over. He had lived longer than any of the rest and knew better than any how savage and deceptive the outsiders were. While the group made their way back to the village, Gikita began to recount all the killings that had been committed by outsiders.

While they were sharpening spears and working up their fury, the older woman returned from the beach. When she saw the men making spears and readying themselves for an attack, she knew Nankiwi had lied to them, and she tried to convince them that no one had been attacked. She told them the cowodi were completely friendly and meant no harm. Listening to her description of events on the beach, Gikita did not understand all that was going on, but he knew enough about the cowodi to know that they had never been friendly before, and he was determined that they should be killed.

What I find hard to explain is that killing the cowodi only made sense if they had indeed attacked the three Huaorani, since they were otherwise a wonderful resource for the greatly prized and much-needed knives, machetes, axes, and cooking pots. Yet, if they had attacked, according to Gikita’s logic, they would certainly attack again, and they obviously had the superior technology of guns and an airplane. The Huaorani killed for various reasons: revenge, anger, frustration, fear. Sometimes it took very little provocation. But they always wanted two things: superiority of force and surprise. In contemplating an attack on Palm Beach, they knew they would not have a superior force. Six men with spears was hardly a match for five likely armed cowodi. If they killed the cowodi they knew they would have to burn their houses, leave their gardens, and flee as they always did after attacks, because they knew that other cowodi would come in their ibos and find them. Add to this the fact that five of the six attackers were just teenagers, not seasoned killers, and that one witness to the Friday contact insisted the cowodi were friendly. Under these circumstances, it seems hard to believe there ever was an attack; yet there was.

On Sunday afternoon, when the killers finally arrived at Palm Beach, they could see that there were five cowodi, and that they had guns. We know that the guns, which were primarily intended for protection from animals, were usually kept out of sight. The missionaries had vowed to one another before God that they would not defend themselves against human attack, even in the face of death.

Dyuwi tells me that some of the young attackers, seeing they did not easily outnumber the foreigners, got scared and asked Gikita how they could attack. Gikita said that he would first spear each of the five and then the younger men could finish the job. He sent three women over to the far side of the river to distract and separate the missionaries. This seems to have worked as planned. When two of the women showed themselves, two of the men (Jim and Pete, I imagine, since they knew the language best) waded into the river to greet them. Gikita started to rush the three left on the beach but slipped on a wet log under the leaves of the jungle floor and fell. All his spears hit the ground, making a loud noise. The men on the beach turned to see what the noise was, and the element of surprise, the second critical factor, was now also lost.

This was too much for the young attackers, and they started to flee. Gikita called them back, saying, “We came to kill them. Now let’s finish it or die here ourselves.” This seems at least half-heartedly to have rallied the troops. Nampa ran across the beach toward the two men in the river, spearing the larger man in the river through the torso. Kimo showed me how the cowodi began to claw at his side “like a gata monkey that has been shot with a dart.” (This was probably the man trying to get his pistol out of his holster, which had a snap-down cover.) As the foreigner began shooting into the air, one of the two women in the shallow river, Nampa’s mother, grabbed the foreigner’s arms from behind so Nampa could spear him again. Kimo said that when the women pulled on the cowodi’s arms, Nampa was grazed by a gunshot and fell down hard. According to Dawa, Nampa recovered from this wound before dying a year or so later while hunting.

Gikita says he recognized my father from the many overflights and speared him first. A second foreigner ran to help him, and Gikita speared him, too (this was most likely Ed). Mincaye said the third man on the beach ran to the airplane, partially climbed inside, and picked up something like he was going to eat it. Mincaye asked why he would do this, and as he mimicked his action, I could see he must have been picking up the microphone to report the attack. Nimonga speared him from the back, and he fell out of the plane onto the ground. When they showed me how he speared him, I knew the man must have been Roger, because that is the angle of the spear that is protruding from Roger’s body as it is being towed behind the canoe in the rescue party pictures.

During the attack, the “smaller” of the two cowodi who had been crossing to greet the women rushed to a log on the far side of the river and began calling to the attackers in phrases that Kimo and Gikita say they understood to be “We just came to meet you. We aren’t going to hurt you. Why are you killing us?” (This was probably Pete, who, though he was tall, was the thinner of the two men in the river when the spearing started. He al so knew the language the best.)

“Why didn’t he flee into the jungle?” Mincaye emphatically asked me. “If he would have fled, surely he would have lived.” Instead, he just waited for Kimo to wade out and spear him.

Dawa, one of the three women, told me she had hidden in the bush through the attack, hearing but not seeing the killing of the five men. She told me she had been hit by gun pellets in the wrist and just above the knee. (These obviously came from random warning shots fired to scare the attackers, because Dawa was hiding on the far side of the narrow river and the men couldn’t have known of her presence.) She also told me that after the killing she saw cowodi above the trees, singing. She didn’t know what this kind of music was until she later heard records of Aunt Rachel’s and became familiar with the sound of a choir.

Mincaye and Kimo confirmed that they heard the singing and saw what Dawa seems to describe as angels along the ridge above Palm Beach. Dyuwi verified hearing the strange music, though he describes what he saw more like lights, moving around and shining, a sky full of jungle beetles similar to fireflies with a light that is brighter and doesn’t blink.

Apparently all the participants saw this bright multitude in the sky and felt they should be scared, because they knew it was something supernatural. Their only familiarity with the spiritual world was one of fear. (Dawa has said that this supernatural experience was what drew her to God when she later heard of him from Dayuma.)

After the killing, the Huaorani showed their customary disdain for their victims by throwing the men’s bodies and their belongings in the river and stripping the plane of much of its fabric covering. When they reached their settlement, they burned their houses and fled into the jungle, fearing the retribution from the outside they were sure would come.

As they repeatedly discussed the raid, one inexplicable question haunted the Huaorani: why hadn’t the cowodi used their guns to defend themselves? If Nampa and Dawa had not been wounded, the answer would have been quite simple: either the men didn’t really have guns, or the guns didn’t work. After the adrenalin rush of any frightening event, it is easy to question what we think we saw or heard. But the Huaorani were certain that the superficial wounds were unintended, since Nampa was hit only after his mother grabbed the cowodi’s arms and Dawa knew no one saw where she was hiding.

These wounds, actual evidence that the missionaries were capable of defending themselves and chose not to, were a major factor in the Huaorani men agreeing to allow Aunt Rachel and

Elisabeth Elliot to come live with them. They had to know the answer: why would the cowodi let themselves be killed rather than kill, as any normal Huaorani would have done? This question dogged Gikita until he heard the full story of why the men wanted to make contact and about another man, Jesus, who freely allowed his own death to benefit all people.

Forty years ago, Gikita was an unusually old man in a tribe that killed friends and relatives with the same zeal and greater frequency than they did their enemies. Now he is nearing 80 years of age and has seen his grandchildren and great-grandchildren grow up without the constant fear of spearings. He has repeatedly asserted that all he wants to do is go to heaven and live peacefully with the five men who came to tell him about Wangongi, creator God.

My father and his four friends were not given the privilege of watching their children and grandchildren grow up. I’ve often wished I could have known my dad as an adult, for Mom and Aunt Rachel have often said our thought process and mannerisms are much alike. I have trouble distinguishing what I actually “remember” of him and what I have been told. But I do know that he left me a legacy, and the challenge now is for me to pass it on to my children. Dad strove to find out what life really is. He found identity, purpose, and fulfillment in being obedient to God’s call. He tried it, tested it, and committed himself to it. I know that the risk he took, which resulted in his death and consequently his separation from his family, he took not to satisfy his own need for adventure or fame, but in obedience to what he believed was God’s directive to him. I suppose he is best known because he died for his faith, but the legacy he left his children was his willingness first to live for his faith.

God took five common young men of uncommon commitment and used them for his own glory. They never had the privilege they so enthusiastically pursued to tell the Huaorani of the God they loved and served. But for every Huaorani who today follows God’s trail through the efforts of others, there are a thousand cowodi who follow God’s trail more resolutely because of their example. This success withheld from them in life God multiplied and continues to multiply as a memorial to their obedience and his faithfulness.

Steve Saint moved in 1995 to Ecuador with his wife and children to work with the Huaorani people to build an airport and a hospital. This article appears as a chapter in Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith, edited by Susan Bergman (Harper San Francisco).

Copyright© 1996, Christianity Today, Inc./Christianity Today Magazine