As a female author and speaker, Elisabeth Elliot stands as one of the most well-known and influential evangelical women in the 20th century. It was after her service for a little over a decade in Ecuador when Elisabeth Elliot returned to the United States in 1963, to her family home in New England, to pursue her work as an author and missionary speaker.

Before her permanent move back to the United States, Elisabeth Elliot had written three books, the first about the five missionaries killed by the Waorani, Through Gates of Splendor, then her biography of her late husband, Jim Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot, and finally a follow-up book about her missionary work with the Waorani, The Savage, My Kinsman.

Upon returning to New England, she wrote her first and only novel, No Graven Image, and a biography about Kenneth Strachan, the founder of the Latin American Mission,  titled Who Shall Ascend: The Life of R. Kenneth Strachan of Costa Rica. Her 1968 book about her ten weeks in Israel right after the Six-Days War, Furnace of the Lord, sparked controversy, but as she would put it, she was only concerned about “telling the truth,” and letting consequences follow. She would eventually write several other books on various topics, and even becoming a contributor to the New International Version Bible translation project.

Her speaking career gave her opportunities to travel widely, appearing before church gatherings, college student meetings, and other settings where she was asked often to talk about her life as a missionary in Ecuador. Elisabeth Elliot could be quite harsh in her criticism of certain practices by some evangelical missionary agencies, such as the tendency to inflate the number of converts in distant lands in order to raise more money. On more than one occasion, she had conflict sharing the stage with insecure men, who were bothered with the idea of sharing a speaking platform with a woman. Nevertheless, her speaking engagements became a significant component for much of the rest of her life.

But perhaps the most important event in her life during this period was her marriage to a college and seminary professor, Addison Leitch, the focus of this second of a three part series reviewing her life through the lens of her biographers, primarily Lucy Austen and secondarily Ellen Vaughn.

Being Elisabeth Elliot, is the second volume of a two-book biography on the life of Elisabeth Elliot, by Ellen Vaughn. Ellen Vaughn serves on the board for International Cooperating Ministries, founded mainly by Dois Rosser, inspired by his well-loved Bible teacher, Dick Woodward. Vaughn also wrote the book Jesus Revolution, along with Greg Laurie, which became a popular movie in 2023

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“This is your friend, Elisabeth Elliot“….

If you could name just one woman as the most influential evangelical Protestant “saint” since World War 2, Elisabeth Elliot would probably be her.

Elisabeth Elliot was the wife of martyred missionary, Jim Elliot, who along with four other men, died in their attempt to share the Gospel with Ecuador’s reclusive Waorani tribe in the 1950s. After her husband’s death, heavily publicized by Henry Luce’s LIFE magazine, Elisabeth wrote the evangelical classics, Through Gates of Splendor (1957) and Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot (1958), catapulting her to be one of the most sought after authors and speakers in the evangelical publishing and speaking world.¹

One of the biographies by Ellen Vaughn, about Elisabeth Elliot, which I read for this Veracity blog post series. Becoming Elisabeth Elliot covers the early years of Elisabeth’s life.

Before she died in 2015, Elisabeth Elliot had been a regular speaker at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s national conferences. In fact, in the 1970s, she was the first woman to be highlighted as a plenary speaker at the Urbana Missions conference, which InterVarsity holds every three years for college students. Her 1984 Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under God’s Control influenced the courtship movement popularized particularly in the 1990’s. Elliot was also a staple in the world of evangelical radio, with her syndicated “Gateway to Joy” program, which ran for 13 years. Elliot was practically minded in her teaching, and yet an intellectual at the same time.

My wife still listens to daily reruns of “Gateway to Joy” on the Bible Broadcasting Network. The tag line in each episode is permanently etched in my mind: “This is your friend, Elisabeth Elliot.”

Fascinatingly complex, Elisabeth Elliot was both an inspirational and polarizing figure. She championed the cause of missionary work, a direct influence on me as I read Shadow of the Almighty back in my college days, a recollection of her first husband and missionary, Jim Elliot. I marveled at the courage and conviction of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, their mutual heart to reach lost people with the Good News of Jesus, and their willingness to do difficult things for the sake of following Christ.

One of Jim Elliot’s quotes was, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose,” from a journal entry Elisabeth preserved and shared to readers as an author of more than 30 books. She was a profound influence on the lives of many evangelical thought leaders, like Joni Eareckson Tada, and Timothy and Kathy Keller. In her later years, she regularly spoke at homeschooling conferences and Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles events. A young author, Josh Harris, wrote the 1990s evangelical blockbuster I Kissed Dating Goodbye, with a prominent endorsement given by Elliot, one of the primary texts in that decade promoting “purity culture.”

Elliot’s legacy is still revered in many evangelical circles, but this legacy has since come under scrutiny, particularly among younger and more disillusioned readers. Controversially, Josh Harris has since renounced his Christian faith and persuaded the publisher to stop selling copies of I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Harris had become convinced that Elliot’s theology, which promoted “purity culture,” was severely misguided. Bill Gothard, once a well-sought-out resource person for Christian homeschoolers, was forced to step down from Christian ministry, due to accusations about sexual harassment and grooming. Undoubtedly both attractive and controversial, Elisabeth Elliot’s life was anything but boring.

Elisabeth Elliot was a household name for about 50 years for many American Christians until her radio broadcast ended in the early 2000’s. Yet despite her influence, there are still many Christian young people growing up today who know nothing about Elisabeth Elliot.²

It is a complicated legacy, but one worth telling, acknowledging that Elisabeth Elliot was a remarkable, exemplary Christian figure, while still possessing very human faults.

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