Jim Elliot

Philip James Elliot was born on October 8, 1927, in Portland, Oregon, the third of four children of itinerant Plymouth Brethren preacher Fred Elliot and homemaker Clara Luginbuhl. Raised in a household marked by daily Bible reading and missionary visitors, he committed himself to overseas missions during high school. He attended Wheaton College in Illinois, where he wrestled competitively, joined the Foreign Missions Fellowship, and graduated with high honors in Greek in 1949.

After Wheaton, Elliot trained in linguistics at the University of Oklahoma's Summer Institute of Linguistics and corresponded with Wheaton classmate Elisabeth Howard, whom he had known since college. Convinced he was called to reach the Quichua and the unevangelized Auca (Huaorani) peoples of eastern Ecuador, he sailed to South America in February 1952 and worked at the Shandia mission station among Quichua-speaking villagers, learning the language and helping to translate Scripture.

Jim and Elisabeth married in Quito on October 8, 1953, his twenty-sixth birthday, and their daughter Valerie was born in 1955. With four colleagues — Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, and Pete Fleming — Elliot launched Operation Auca to make peaceful contact with the Huaorani. The team made airdrops of gifts before landing on a Curaray River sandbar they named Palm Beach. On January 8, 1956, all five missionaries were speared to death by a Huaorani party. Elliot was twenty-eight.

His widow Elisabeth and Nate Saint's sister Rachel later returned to live among the same group, and many Huaorani became Christians. Elisabeth's books Through Gates of Splendor (1957) and Shadow of the Almighty (1958), drawn from his journals, made his line he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose widely known.

The name Jim is a familiar form of James, from the Hebrew Yaakov meaning supplanter. A solidly masculine nickname favored by twentieth-century American men, it fits a young missionary whose name became a byword for sacrificial conviction.