2 Corinthians 4:6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.
I had been very concerned that my children were not picking up the vision for missions by which my wife and I had lived our own lives, as well as our parents preceding us. After writing a considerable work on the history of our families with Wycliffe Bible Translators, I wanted to find a single tome which would bring front and center, the vitality of the Christian church in missions.
Elisabeth Elliot had written such a volume, which is in my mind as fresh today as it was in 1961 when my mother handed it to me to read. I was just eight years old! The Aucas (as they were called then) were a fearsome and fearfilled tribe in Ecuador, with several murders to their dubious credit, but a tribe to which the five missionary men and their families felt called in 1956. I was just three and already dreaming of a land of jungles and stone-age indians.
Planting themselves in a rustic headquarters a couple of rivers over from where the men finally found the group, the young visionaries attempted to contact the elusive members. It was only three days from the first contact that all five were killed without a fight on a sandbar, next to the plane which had plied a number of times ferrying the young Bible School graduates into the thick green rainforest.
The brutal deaths of the men both shocked the world and inspired thousands of other men and women to seek service with young Christian organizations all over the globe, including my parents. The book which chronicled the weeks before and after their murders, "Through Gates of Splendor" both thrilled and scared me! I couldn't put the riveting words down! Already called of the Lord in dreams as a toddler, I knew that that's where God was sending us and bugged my parents until they left the comparative safety of western Kansas for Wycliffe Bible Translators in 1964, just eight years after the Elliots and Saints first made camp beneath the stands of forest.
Will my kids be the next to carry the light? I don't know, but I know they have have been given the message of that light which drew my clan and the family of my wife to South America, just a few hours flight by bush plane from where the Aucas lived in their huts, by then evangelized by Elisabeth Elliot! The X and Y generations are the light now. Will they shine?
Lord, I know not the future of missions, a light in a very grave darkness, but with nearly 2 billion people still without a single word of the Bible in more than a thousand tribes, the church needs a fresh vision for unreached peoples!
