January 8 1956

January 8, 1956. Does that date speak to you? I dare so most of us aren’t aware that it has significance. It’s certainly not like July 4, 1776, December 7, 1941, or September 11, 2001. We haven’t committed it to memory like so many others.

Some in the evangelical church recognize the name of Jim Elliot. Fewer know the names of Nate Saint, Roger Youderian, Pete Fleming, or Ed McCully.  But once upon a time, these men represented what it meant to be a missionary.

Name Recognition

I read Being Elisabeth Elliot by Ellen Vaughn last year. While discussing books with some younger friends, I mentioned reading this volume, and was surprised, maybe shocked, to see blank looks cross their faces. They had no idea who Elisabeth Elliot was, nor did they know of the martyrdom of her first husband.

I was a teenager when I read Through Gates of Splendor, Elisabeth Elliot’s first book. It is the account of the deaths of 5 young missionaries. They died in Ecuador on January 8, 1956.

January 8, 2024, marked the 68^th anniversary of their deaths. And there aren’t many of us who stopped to remember.

January 8, 1956: 68 years later

68 years is a lifetime to most of us. And those years have been fraught with change in the evangelical church. Like the world around us, we have seen our values change. America is more diverse than ever, and the church seems to have less influence than ever before. Our friends and neighbors question our motives and methods, too often with good reason.  This is why January 8 1956 still matters.

The Story Unfolds

January 8 1956 was a Sunday. Most in the United States went to church on Sundays and rested the rest of the day. Few stores were open on Sunday. Life was slower then.

No one knew of the drama unfolding in Ecuador, and in the days before cell phones and a 24-hour news cycle, it would be a while before anyone in the US would know.

The five men were young, adventurous, and dedicated Christians. They ranged in age from 27 to 33. They were all married, all fathers but one. Between them, they had 9 young children.

A Common Passion

They were all drawn to pioneer missions and desired to take the gospel to the world. In Ecuador, they worked with a variety of tribes. But one tribe – seemingly unreachable- captured the attention of all five men. They were called the Aucas in 1956, named by the Quechuas. It is an unflattering word, meaning “naked savages.” They call themselves the Waodoni, and that is the name I will use.

A dangerous mission

This was a small warrior tribe. Every contact they had with Westerners had ended with the outsiders dead. Nate Saint and his family lived on a station abandoned by Shell Oil Company called Shell Mera. The corporation had left Ecuador partly because of the high mortality rate. The Waodoni had speared too many of their engineers.

Each missionary had responsibilities assigned by their various agencies.   But they took the Great Commission seriously. They preached the gospel daily, but like Paul, longed to go where no one else had preached.

Ingenuity in action

Nate Saint was a gifted pilot known for his ingenuity and attention to detail.

He left nothing to chance. And he had perfected a technique where he could lower a bucket from his Piper Cub by spiraling the plane over a clearing. When an airstrip was unavailable to land the small plane, this allowed him to safely transfer supplies and medications to missionaries on the ground.

An aerial gift exchange

When he located a settlement of Waodani deep in the Amazon jungle, the missionaries decided to initiate contact using this technique. They lowered gifts such as machetes and cooking pots and were excited when the Waodoni reciprocated with a live parrot.

Moving toward January 8, 1956

After much prayer, the group decided that January of 1956 would be the ideal time to attempt an in person contact. In preparation for this venture, they made frequent trips to the jungle clearing, exchanging gifts with the tribe, sending photos of themselves, and a model of the plane. Cross-cultural communication is challenging even when there’s a common language. When there isn’t, the learning curve is steep.

Learning and unlearning language

They contacted a Waodoni woman who had left the tribe years earlier for help with some simple phrases in the language. The Waodoni language is incredibly difficult to learn and there are no known cognates. Dayuma, their language helper had lived with the Quechua tribe for quite some time. She had lived with the Quechua long enough to forget much of her first language, and the phrases that she helped teach may not have been that recognizable to her fellow tribespeople.

The five families decided that the full moon in January 1956 would be when they attempted to make a beachhead in Waodani territory. No one outside their group knew anything about the plans. They didn’t want anyone to interfere or try to stop them.

Building a tree house

On January 3, the group landed on the sandy beach of the Curaray River bringing with them a prefabricated tree house that they felt would provide some protection in the jungle. Jim, Ed, and Roger would remain in the tree house while Nate and Pete would ferry back and forth between what they dubbed “Palm Beach” and Shell Mera. Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) Nate’s mission organization only had 2 aircraft, and Nate would not risk leaving one parked in such a precarious place overnight.

On Friday, 3 Waodoni slipped out of the jungle and greeted the men.  They shared hamburgers and smiles. Nate took the man whom he dubbed “George” up in the plane. I can’t imagine what must have been going through his mind as he soared high above his village.

January 8, 1956: Silence at 4:30

On Sunday as Nate and Pete flew into Palm Beach they saw a party of warriors headed in the same direction. Nate radioed his wife Marge at Shell Mera that they were going to have “visitors” and he would radio again at 4:30.

Marge Saint waited in vain for her husband to check-in. He used an alarm on his watch to ensure that he was always on time and always made his radio checks. But not this time. The hands of his watch stopped at 3:12 PM

What was left

The men had been dead for several days before a party made up of local believers, missionaries, and volunteers from the Ecuadorian army hiked into the remote location, gathered identifying tokens, and hastily buried them in a mass grave.

Were you to return to the spot where they died 68 years ago, there is little evidence they were ever there. No granite monolith marks the spot of their grave. The rescue party was too frightened and miserable to do more than say a few words over the dead and get out as quickly as possible.

Do memorials even matter

There are memorials to their life and sacrifice. Wheaton College recently updated a plaque dedicated to the incident. Many have told the story in books and magazines.  Bible Colleges and schools of ministry and mission have been named in their honor. But I think these would mean little to these men.

A call to tell the story

In the wake of the telling and retelling of their story, hundreds of young men and women have been moved to surrender their lives to missions, to tell the story that “God so loved the world.” Indeed, it can be argued that their story launched the third wave of modern missions. Only God knows the number of people groups who have the gospel because of January 8, 1956.

Waodoni Lives changed on January 8, 1956

But the greatest memorial was written on the heart of the Waodoni themselves. At the time of the massacre, the homicide rate among the Waodoni was thought to be around 60%, and outsiders who crossed paths with the warriors fared even worse. Now around 40% claim to be Christians.

But the success or failure of the mission

to reach the Waodani cannot be decided in numbers. None of the five men ever led a single Waodoni to Christ. Their success was in their obedience.

They took the gospel to the world, and died trying to take it even further. “And they overcame him [Satan] because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even when faced with death.” (Revelation 12:11 NASB1995)

Not superhuman

When I first read the stories January 8, 1956, I imagined these men to be somehow superhuman, not like me. But that’s not true. I can overcome the same way that they did.  So can you.

Jim Elliot was a college sophomore when he penned these words in his Journal. “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

That is a decision he made every day of his life until January 8, 1956. I want to make the same choice.