Auca Five

Life and Ministry

Five young American evangelical missionaries — all in their late twenties or early thirties, four of them Wheaton College graduates, all married with young children — undertook a coordinated mission to make peaceable contact with the Waorani people (then known to outsiders by the pejorative Quechua term "Auca," meaning savages) of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Nate Saint was the pilot and senior aviator of the Mission Aviation Fellowship in Ecuador. Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, and Ed McCully were missionaries with the Plymouth Brethren-affiliated Christian Missions in Many Lands. Roger Youderian was with the Gospel Missionary Union. The Waorani had been entirely uncontacted, surrounded by hostile neighbors who had reason to keep the outside world from them, and were known to spear any stranger who entered their territory. The five spent two years studying the language and the surrounding villages, dropping gifts from Saint's Piper plane, and in late 1955 made aerial contact with three Waorani — a man, his wife, and her younger sister — and concluded the moment had come to land.

Circumstances of Death

On January 3, 1956, Saint landed his Piper on a sandbar of the Curaray River that the missionaries had named Palm Beach. Over the next four days they made what they thought were friendly contacts, including a flight in the plane offered to one young Waorani man. On the morning of January 8, a war-party of ten Waorani warriors approached the camp. The missionaries, who had agreed in advance not to use their firearms even in self-defense, fired warning shots into the air and called out the few Waorani phrases they had learned. Saint sent his last radio message at 12:30 p.m.; when the camp did not check in at 4:30, Marj Saint at the mission base in Shell Mera initiated the search. The bodies of all five were found speared and floating in the river over the following days. Roger Youderian's body was the last to be recovered. The full account, including the Waorani perspective, was assembled by Elisabeth Elliot (Jim's widow) and by Steve Saint (Nate's son) in the decades that followed.

Legacy

Within two years of the killings, Elisabeth Elliot — Jim's widow — and Rachel Saint — Nate's sister — were living in the Waorani village among the very men who had killed their husband and brother. Elisabeth wrote Through Gates of Splendor (1957) and The Savage My Kinsman (1961) about her experience there. Most of the Waorani converted to Christianity over the next decade through the witness of the missionary widows and through the work of indigenous Waorani Christians; the man who threw the spear that killed Nate Saint, Mincaye, became Steve Saint's adoptive father and a Christian elder among his people. Jim Elliot's journal had recorded years before the trip the line that became the most quoted single sentence in twentieth-century evangelical missionary literature: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."