The Martyrs of the Ecuador Mission

8 January 1956

In the dense rain-forests of Ecuador, on the Pacific side of the Andes Mountains, lives a tribe of Indians who call themselves the Huaorani ("people" in their language, Huao), but whose neighbors have called them the Aucas ("savages" in Quechua). For many generations they have been completely isolated from the outside world, disposed to kill any stranger on sight, and feared even by their head-hunting neighbors, the Jivaro tribe.

In 1955, four missionaries from the United States who were working with the Quechas, Jivaros, and other Indians of the interior of Ecuador became persuaded that they were being called to preach the Gospel to the Huaorani as well.

Nate Saint was 32 years old (born 1923), and devoted to flying. He had taken flying lessons in high school and served in the Air Force in WWII. After the war, he enrolled in Wheaton College to prepare for foreign mission work but dropped out to join the Missionary Aviation Fellowship. With his wife, Marjorie Farris, he established a base at Shell Mera (an abandoned oil exploration camp in Ecuador) in September 1948, and flew short hops to keep missionaries supplied with medicines, mail, etc. Once his plane crashed, but a few weeks later he returned to work in a cast from his neck to his thighs.

The other three, Ed McCully, Jim Elliot, and Peter Fleming, all Plymouth Brethren, came to Ecuador in 1952 to work for CMML (Christian Missions in Many Lands).

Ed McCully was 28 years old (born 1927). He had been a football and track star at Wheaton College and president of his senior class. After Wheaton, he enrolled at Marquette to study law, but dropped out to go to Ecuador. He and his wife, Marilou Hobolth, worked with the Quechuas at Arajuno, a base near the Huaorani. Half a dozen Quechuas had been killed at the base by Huaorani in the previous year.

Jim Elliot was 28 years old (born 1927) and an honors graduate of Wheaton College, where he had been a debater, public speaker, and champion wrestler. In Ecuador, he married Elisabeth Howard. They did paramedic work, tending broken arms, malaria, snakebite. They taught sanitation, wrote books in Quechua, and taught literacy.

Peter Fleming was 27 years old (born 1928), from the University of Washington, an honor student, and a linguist. With his wife, Olive Ainslie, he ran a literacy program among the Quechuas.

Nate and Ed found a Huaorani settlement from the air in late September 1955. Nate made four more flights on Thursday, 29 September, and found a settlement only fifteen minutes from their station. They told Jim and Pete, and the four planned their strategy.

They would keep the project secret from everyone but their wives, to avoid being joined by adventurers and the press, with the chance that someone not dedicated to the mission would start shooting at the first sign of real or imagined danger, and destroy the project.

They had one language resource, a Huaorani girl, Dayuma, who had fled from her tribe years earlier after her family was killed in a dispute. Dayuma, who spoke both Huao and Quechua, was now living with Nate's sister Rachel. From her the missionaries learned enough of the language to get started.

They would fly over the village every Thursday and drop gifts as a means of making contact and establishing a friendly relationship. Eventually they would try for closer contact. Nate had discovered that, if he lowered a bucket on a line from the plane, and flew in tight circles, the bucket remained almost stationary, and could be used to lower objects to the ground. He had devised a mechanism to release the bucket when it touched down.

On Thursday, 6 October, one week after locating the village, they dropped an aluminum kettle into an apparently deserted village. On the next flight, several Huaorani were waiting, and the missionaries dropped a machete. On the third flight, they dropped another machete to a considerably larger crowd. Beginning with the fourth flight, they used a loudspeaker system to call out friendly messages in Huao.

Soon the Huaorani were responding with gifts of their own tied to the line: a woven headband, carved wooden combs, two live parrots, cooked fish, parcels of peanuts, a piece of smoked monkey tail.... They cleared a space near their village and built platforms to make the exchanges easier.

After three months of air-to-ground contact, during which they made far more progress than they had hoped, the missionaries decided that it was time for ground contact. They feared that they could not keep their activities secret much longer, and that delay risked a hostile encounter between the Huaorani and some third party.

They decided that the expedition needed a fifth man, so they brought in Roger Youderian, a 31-year-old (born 1924) former paratrooper who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge (a major German offensive in Belgium in the last stages of WWII) and had been in General Eisenhower's honor guard. Roger and his wife, Barbara Orton, were working with the Jivaros, and Roger was thoroughly at home in the jungle, accustomed to living like the Jivaros and blessed with acute survival instincts.

They located a beach that would serve as a landing strip, about four miles from the village, and decided to go in on Tuesday, 3 January 1956. After some discussion, they decided to carry guns, having heard that the Huaorani never attacked anyone who was carrying a gun, and having resolved that they would, as a last resort, fire the guns into the air to ward off an attack, but would shoot no one, even to save their own lives.

On Tuesday they flew in and made camp, then flew over the village to invite the Huaorani to visit them. The first visitors showed up on Friday: a man, a woman, and a teen-aged girl. They stayed for several hours in apparent friendliness, then left abruptly. On Saturday, no one showed, and when the plane flew over the village, the Huaorani seemed frightened at first, but lost their fright when presents were dropped. On Sunday afternoon, 8 January 1956, at about 3 PM, all five missionaries were speared to death at their camp. A search party the next day found no signs of a struggle, and the lookout who was to be stationed in a tree-house overlooking the camp at ground level had come down, so it appeared that the meeting had originally seemed friendly, and that the attack had been a surprise. Ed McCully's body was seen and identified, but was swept away by the river and not recovered. The other four, at the request of their wives, were buried at the site of the camp where they had died. Besides their wives, they left behind a total of nine children.

The effort to reach the Huaorani was not abandoned but rather intensified. Within three weeks, Johnny Keenan, another pilot of the Ecuador Mission, was continuing the flights over the Huaorani village. More than twenty fliers from the United States promptly applied to take Nate's place. More than 1000 college students volunteered for foreign missions in direct response to the story of the Five Martyrs. In Ecuador, Indian attendance at mission schools and church services reached record levels, and the number of conversions skyrocketed. A Jivaro undertook to go at once to another Jivaro tribe that had been at war with his own tribe for years, bearing the Christian message, and his visit brought peace between the two tribes. Truly, as Tertullian said 1800 years ago, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

In less than three years, Rachel Saint (sister of Nate Saint) and Elisabeth Elliot (widow of Jim Elliot) had not only renewed contact but had established permanent residence in a Huaorani settlement, where they practiced basic medicine and began the process of developing a written form of the language.

Nine years after the murder of the five missionaries, two of those who had killed Nate Saint and his companions baptized two of Nate's children, Kathy and Stephen Saint. In June 1995, at the request of the Huaorani, Nate's son Stephen moved to the settlement with his wife, Ginny, and their four children, to assist the Huaorani in developing greater internal leadership for a church committed to meeting the medical, economic, and social needs of their own people as a means of showing them God's love and his desire to provide for their eternal needs as well.

Why did the Huaorani suddenly turn hostile? Much later, one of the Huaorani who had helped to kill the five martyrs explained that the tribe, who had had almost no contact with outsiders that did not involve killing or attempted killing on one side or another, wondered why the whites wanted to make contact with them; and while they wanted to believe that their visitors were friendly, they feared a trap. After the killings, they realized their mistake. When they were attacked, one of the missionaries fired two shots as warnings, and one shot grazed a Huaorani who was hiding in the brush, unknown to the missionaries. It was therefore clear that the visitors had weapons, were capable of killing, and had chosen not to do so. Thus, the Huaorani realized that the visitors were indeed their friends, willing to die for them if necessary. When in subsequent months they heard the message that the Son of God had come down from heaven to reconcile men with God, and to die in order to bring about that reconciliation, they recognized that the message of the missionaries was the basis of what they had seen enacted in the lives of the missionaries. They believed the Gospel preached because they had seen the Gospel lived.

Source: http://elvis.rowan.edu/~kilroy/JEK/01/08.html

Nate Saint (1923-1956)

His air-service ministry to isolated missionaries would eventually put him on a path of destiny that would end with four missionary friends in the jungles of Ecuador.

Nate Saint was an ex US Airforce pilot who was involved with the Mission Aviation Fellowship almost from it's start. In 1948 he and his wife went to Ecuador and operated a small aeroplane from a base at Shell Mera.

Nate provided an essential service to those missionaries in the mission stations deep in the jungle. was an ex US Airforce pilot who was involved with the Mission Aviation Fellowship almost from it's start. In 1948 he and his wife went to Ecuador and operated a small aeroplane from a base at Shell Mera.

Jim Elliot and Peter Fleming arrived in Ecuador in 1952. They decided to take the gospel to the Auca indians and started working with Nate to establish a mission station. What happened next is described as Jim Elliot's story.

Jim Elliot (1927-1956)

Success for a missionary is not taking the Gospel to new lands and establishing the Christian church there. That is what God does, and He does it in His way and in His timing. Success for a missionary, as for any Christian, is being obedient to God's will.

Jim Elliot always wanted to be a missionary. He grew up in a family which read the Bible daily and lived a Christian lifestyle. He went to college with his focus on those activities which would help him to be a missionary.

After he graduated, Elliot had the opportunity to go to Equador to work amongst the Quichuas peoples and he went there in 1952 with Peter Fleming. For more than three years they worked amongst the people establishing a missionary post and an airstrip. Of course they had the task of understanding the language of the Quichua people as well. Jim Elliot married to Elisabeth Howard in 1953.

In 1955 they began their attempts to get to know the mysterious Auca tribe. They decided to drop gifts to the Auca tribe from Nate Saint's aeroplane. Eventually they agreed that the time was right for them to go into Auca territory. They flew in and established a base. They made initial contact with some members of the tribe and contacted the missionary post by radio to tell them that things were going well. That was the last time that contact was made.

The five men were Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Nate Saint, Roger Youderin and Peter Fleming. Their bodies were recovered and their equipment and personal property was brought back.

To many people it would seem that Jim Elliot's dream and the aspirations of the other men had ended in failure. But they had done what was expected of them and it was now time for God to continue with His plan. Amongst the personal possessions was a camera and amongst the pictures taken were some of the Auca Indians who had initially made contact with the missionaries. The people in the photographs were recognized by an exiled Auca woman who had helped the missionaries learn the language. They were relatives that she thought were dead!

She made contact with them and before long Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint (Nate's sister) were living amongst the tribe. They established a church and many of the Aucas became Christians. Elisabeth returned home to America after several years but Rachel stayed with the Aucas for many years.

The story of Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Nate Saint, Roger Youderin and Peter Fleming has become one of the great missionary tales throughout the world. Many, many people have been inspired by these men. They have also been inspired by the the wives, and sister, of these men. Marilou McCully set up a school for missionary children in Quito. Barbara Youderin went to work with another tribe. Elisabeth Elliot has produced many books, including an excellent on the Christian principles on raising children.

Source: http://www.christianheroes.com/mi/mi010.asp

Nathanael (Nate) Saint 1923-1956

Nate Saint was born into a family with strict biblical principles and a heart for missions. He was raised in the Philadelphia area of Pennsylvania.

As a child, Nate had an unusually inventive mind and a great desire to fly. At the age of 13 he accepted the Lord as his Saviour.

Nate hoped that some day he would be a commercial airline pilot. As a teenager he suffered from an attack of osteomyelitis. At the age of 20, a complication from this ailment was used of the Lord to change his focus and direction in life. He began to think seriously about using his skills as a pilot in service to the Lord. He answered the call for help from an infant organization known as Missionary Aviation Fellowship. He went to Mexico to accomplish the feat of reconstructing one of their airplanes that had crashed — a monumental task! After six months’ time he had the airplane ready to fly again. He then went back to the States and enrolled in Wheaton College where he attended for a year.

Nate briefly courted Marjorie Farris, a graduate of the University of Southern California. On February 14, 1948 he and Marj were married. In September of the same year they left for missionary work in Ecuador under MAF. He began the task of building a house and establishing MAF headquarters near Shell Mera on the edge of the eastern jungle. In January of 1949, while Nate was hospitalized from a plane crash, Marj gave birth to a baby girl.

MAF was founded in 1947 by Christians in Great Britain who had seen the devastation caused by planes during WWII. They wanted to use airplanes redemptively in service to the Lord and His missionaries — creating a vital supply link for missionaries and nationals in remote jungle and mountainous regions, thus saving them valuable time.

A pioneer in missionary aviation, Saint put his inventive mind to good use for the cause of the Gospel. Greatly concerned about safety in the skies, Nate invented an alternate fuel system, thus decreasing the possibility of crashes. Time and effort needed to provide supplies for missionaries were another concern; therefore, he invented a ‘bucket drop’ whereby regular supplies, messages, or medicines could be lowered from the air in the bucket. Those on the ground could also send messages back by the same method since the bucket was momentarily stationary due to an airplane stall technique. Nate invented a parachute system to drop large supplies of canned goods, etc. into an area. He also perfected a harness sling which he used to supply the missionaries with aluminum sheeting used for roofing — a much welcomed commodity in the rainy jungle. His inventions are still used as standard procedures in missionary aviation.

Nate’s most beneficial discovery for eternity took place in 1955. While flying, he located an Indian village from the air. The tribe, now known as the Waoranis, were then called the Auca Indians. The word Auca means ‘savage.’ The Aucas were reported to have killed outsiders. They were to live up to their name.

Burdened for the souls of the Aucas, Saint, along with two other men, Jim Elliot and Ed McCully, spent twelve weeks making flights over the village area dropping gifts, etc., to the Indians using Nate’s bucket drop. In January of 1956 missionaries Pete Fleming and Roger Youderian also joined the effort of reaching the Aucas with the Gospel — dubbed ‘Operation Aucas.’ Each man and his wife knew the dangers involved in this mission and the fact that the men might not return alive. For the sake of the Gospel, they were all agreed to proceed with the plan. It was agreed that they would fly into the area to meet the Aucas face-to-face. After landing, the men established a base camp on the beach of the Curaray River near the Auca village. During their short time there, they made contact with three ‘friendly’ Aucas. It was Friday, January 6.

On Sunday, January 8, the five missionaries had a worship service together. Later, Nate observed ten Aucas on their way to the beach encampment. Around noon he radioed his wife about the expected meeting. He said he would radio again at 4:30 p.m. Four-thirty came and went — but no word. A rescue team of missionaries, Quichua Indians, and U.S. military personnel from Panama were sent to the area. Days later the bodies of four of the men were found (Ed McCully’s body was not recovered) on the beach having been killed by wooden spears and machetes. It was noted that Nate Saint’s watch had stopped at 3:12 p.m. The rescue team buried the bodies on the beach.

After the news of their deaths reached the rest of the world, many committed their lives to the Lord as missionary pilots. Several years later Jim Elliot’s wife, Elisabeth, and her little daughter, Natalie, and Nate’s sister, Rachel, were invited to live with the Aucas. As a result, the Aucas have been reached with the Gospel. Certainly the sacrifice of the five men was not in vain.

Nate Saint — one of the most skilled and innovative pilot-mechanics in the history of missionary aviation — a ‘grease monkey’ for the Lord who had a ministry of great value in the kingdom of God. Gail L. Emerson

The deaths of these men, a personal tragedy for their families, has become a world-wide testimony of faith in Christ and dedication to the work of God, which is much, much bigger than the conversion of a jungle tribe to Christianity.

 Source: http://www.bright.net/~lockport/domy151-160.htm

Incident on a Sandbar

The small plane sat on the beach all alone now. What was left of its yellow cloth covering-- after Auca machetes hacked most of it off--flapped crazily in the wind and rain. It was January 8, 1956, MAF pilot Nate Saint and four other missionaries--Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, and Roger Youderian--paid the ultimate price for their faith. They were martyred while trying to take the Gospel to a savage tribe in Ecuador.

A week later, a search party comprised of military and missionaries recovered the spear-pierced bodies from downstream. As they were burying them on the site where they fell, one man said that the sky thundered and lightning flashed “like the day the Lord died.”

At the time, in a special ten-page feature, Life magazine said, “It is the story of five men who poignantly subscribed to the words which one of them, James Elliot, wrote in a diary five years ago: ‘When it comes time to die, make sure all you have to do is die.’ ”

True, they were dead, but only in a temporal sense. Not only were they alive and well with the Lord, but their dream of reaching the Aucas-- described as “the fiercest people on earth” --would live on.

By 1958, Nate’s sister, Rachel, and Jim Elliot’s widow, Elisabeth, successfully reached the Aucas (now known as Waorani). Rachel lived with the tribe for most of the remaining 41 years of her life. Today, the Waorani have the New Testament in their language as well as tape players with cassettes of key Bible books. Fully one-fourth of the tribe has come to the Lord--including seven-out- of-nine members of the original spearing party!

The teenage brother and sister stood silently waist deep in the river as people on the beach sang. Steve and Kathy Saint were on the spot where their father had died ten years earlier--about to be baptized by two of his killers, now “Born Again” Christians. The ripples in the water round about them showed that God’s forgiveness had come full-circle along this bloodied beach in the Amazon.

Today, Steve is founder and president of I-TEC, dedicated to assisting the Waorani Church in its journey toward independence under the lordship of Jesus Christ. To this end, I-TEC focuses on enabling it--and other indigenous churches worldwide--to overcome technological and educational barriers blocking their way.

Two such innovations to accomplish this are a portable dental lab and solar-powered radio transmitters.

Source: http://www.maf.org/news/stories/sandbar.html

Chapman show's high note is salute to reconciliation

By Brian Mansfield , Special for USA TODAY

The climactic point of Christian singer Steven Curtis Chapman's concerts on his current tour doesn't come during one of his songs. It doesn't even come when Chapman brings out Steve Saint, the son of a murdered missionary. It comes when Saint introduces Mincaye, the Ecuadorian Indian who killed his father — and the two embrace.

Saint's and Mincaye's lives have intertwined in a tale of redemption and forgiveness with a horrifying beginning and an unlikely end. In early 1956, six men from a tribe known as the Auca killed Saint's father, Nate Saint, and four other missionaries. Steve was 5 years old. The murders made international headlines.

Two years later, Nate Saint's sister, Rachel Saint, went to live with the tribe, converting many of them to Christianity. Steve lived with them for a year and a half after Rachel's death in 1994. Today, the tribe calls itself Waodani, which translates as "True People." The three living men from the group that ambushed Nate Saint's party serve as church elders. Steve's children learned to call Mincaye "grandfather."

"People ask me all the time, 'How did you forgive these people?' " says Saint, 51. "The truth of the matter is I never did. My first recollection of any of this was my mother taking me into her bedroom and telling me that my dad was never coming to live with us.

"She didn't tell me as though somebody had done something terrible, she just told me. When I couldn't understand it, she simply told me, 'We all want to go live with Jesus.' That didn't seem strange at all. She said, 'Daddy has gone to live with Jesus.'

"Then Aunt Rachel would bring me pictures. She was always talking about the Waodani. Honestly, my earliest recollection was that these people were our special friends. These people were our family."

Chapman and Steve Saint first connected a year and a half ago when Chapman e-mailed Saint after reading Through Gates Of Splendor, a 1957 book about the killings. Chapman's latest album, Declaration, includes two songs inspired by the Waodani story: God Follower (the term Christian Waodani call themselves, and No Greater Love, which features Mincaye chanting one of his songs of worship in his tongue, Wao Tededo.

During Chapman's concerts, Saint and Mincaye tell their story, with Saint translating for Mincaye. Then Mincaye and Chapman sing together. As Chapman sings his song My Redeemer Is Faithful and True, Mincaye accompanies him with a rhythmic chant.

"When Mincaye comes out, there's an audible gasp in the crowd," Chapman says. "To see them together, arms around each other, it's almost unreal.

"It's more than just 'I forgive you, I can live with the pain that you've inflicted on me.' It's 20 steps beyond that to say, 'I'll call you dad.' "

Saint has founded the Indigenous People's Technology & Education Center (www.i-tecusa.org), an organization dedicated to teaching tribes such as the Waodani self-sustaining technology that will minimize their dependence on outside welfare. He took Chapman to visit the tribe in January.

Mincaye has spent almost two months in the USA and will return to Ecuador soon. Chapman's tour ends Saturday in Dallas.

"I didn't want to ask him to stay that long," Saint says, "but he made it clear, 'God told me to do this because the foreigners, too, are living angry and hating. If the foreigners are living how we used to, I can tell them that's how we used to live but, now, following God's trail, we live happily and in peace.' "

Source: http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/2002/2002-04-18-chapman.htm

The following articles were all sourced from http://www.flhost.com/itec/articles.htm, by Steve Saint, son of Nate Saint, and founder of The Indigenous People's Technology & Education Center  Ocala, Florida and Nemompade, Ecuador

To the Ends of the Earth

By Stephen Saint, Ocala, FL

For years I’d thought Timbuktu was just a made-up name for "the ends of the earth." When I found out it was a real place in Africa, I developed an inexplicable fascination for it. It was in 1986 on a fact-finding trip to West Africa for Mission Aviation Fellowship that this fascination became an irresistible urge. Timbuktu wasn’t on my itinerary, but I knew I had to go there. Once I arrived, however, I discovered I was in trouble.

I’d hitched a ride from Bamako, Mali, 500 miles away, on the only seat left on a Navajo six-seater airplane chartered by UNICEF. Two of their doctors were in Timbuktu and might fly back on the return flight, which meant I’d be bumped, but I decided to take the chance.

Now here I was, standing by the plane on the windswept outskirts of the famous Berber outpost. There was not a spot of true green anywhere in the desolate brown Sahara landscape. Dust blew across the sky, blotting out the sun as I squinted in the 110-Degree heat, trying to make out the mud-walled buildings of the village of 20,000.

The pilot approached me as I started for town. He reported that the doctors were on their way and I’d have to find another ride to Bamako. "Try the marketplace. Someone there might have a truck. But be careful," he said. "Westerners don’t last long in the desert if the truck breaks down, which often happens."

I didn’t relish the thought of being stranded, but perhaps it was fitting that I should wind up like this, surrounded by the Sahara. Since I arrived in Africa the strain of the harsh environment and severe suffering of the starving peoples had left me feeling lost in a spiritual and emotional desert.

The open-air marketplace in the center of town was crowded. Men and women wore flowing robes and turbans as protection against the sun. Most of the Berbers’ robes were dark blue, with 30 feet of material in their turbans alone. The men were well-armed with scimitars and knives. I felt that eyes were watching me suspiciously.

Suspicion was understandable in Timbuktu. Nothing could be trusted here. These people had once been prosperous and self-sufficient. Now even their land had turned against them. Drought had turned rich grasslands to desert. Unrelenting sun and windstorms had nearly annihilated all animal life. People were dying by the thousands.

I went from person to person trying to find someone who spoke English, until I finally came across a local gendarme who understood my broken French.

"I need a truck," I said, "I need to go to Bamako."

Eyes widened in his shaded face. "No truck," he shrugged. Then he added, "No road. Only sand."

By now, my presence was causing a sensation in the marketplace. I was surrounded by at least a dozen small children, jumping and dancing, begging for coins and souvenirs. The situation was extreme, I knew. I tried to think calmly. What am I to do?

Suddenly I had a powerful desire to talk to my father. Certainly he had known what it was like to be a foreigner in a strange land. But my father, Nate Saint, was dead. He was one of five missionary men killed by Auca Indians in the jungles of Ecuador in 1956. I was a month shy of my fifth birthday at the time, and my memories of him were almost like movie clips: a lanky, intense man with a serious goal and a quick wit. He was a dedicated jungle pilot, flying missionaries and medical personnel in his Piper Family Cruiser. Even after his death he was a presence in my life.

I’d felt the need to talk with my father before, especially since I’d married and become a father myself. But in recent weeks this need had become urgent. For one thing, I was new to relief work. But it was more than that. I needed Dad to help answer my new questions of faith.

In Male, for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who didn’t share my faith, who were, in fact, hostile to the Christian faith-locals and Western relief workers alike. In a way it was a parallel to the situation Dad had faced in Ecuador. How often I’d said the same thing Dad would have said among the Indians who killed him: "My God is real. He’s a personal God who lives inside me, with whom I have a very special, one-on-one relationship."

And yet the question lingered in my mind: Did my father have to die?

All my life, people had spoken of Dad with respect: he was a man willing to die for his faith. But at the time I couldn’t help but think the murders were capricious, and accident of bad timing. Dad and his colleagues landed just as a small band of Auca men were in a bad mood for reasons that had nothing to do with faith of Americans. If Dad’s plane had landed one day later, the massacre may not have happened.

Couldn’t there have been another way? It made little impact on the Aucas that I could see. To them it was just one more killing in a history of killings.

Thirty years later it still had an impact on me. And now, for the first time, I felt threatened because of who I was and what I believed. "God," I found myself praying as I looked around the marketplace, "I’m in trouble here. Please keep me safe and show me a way to get back. Please reveal Yourself and Your love to me the way you did to my father."

No bolt of lightning came from the blue. Surely there was a telecommunications office here somewhere; I could wire Bamako to send another plane. It would be costly, but I could see no other way of getting out. "Where’s the telecommunications office?" I asked another gendarme. He gave me instructions, then said, "Telegraph transmits only. If station in Bamako has machine on, message goes through. If not…" he shrugged. "No answer ever comes. You only hope message received."

Now what? The sun was crossing toward the horizon. If I didn’t have arrangements made by nightfall, what would happen to me? This was truly the last outpost of the world. More than a few Westerners had disappeared in the desert without a trace.

The I remembered that just before I’d started for Timbukto, a fellow worker had said, ""here'’ a famous mosque in Timbuktu. I was built from mud in the 1500’s. Many Islamic pilgrims visit it every year. But there’s also a tiny Christian church, which virtually no one visits. Look it up if you get the chance."

I asked the children, "Where is L’eglise Evangelique Chrestienne?" The youngsters were willing to help, though there were obviously confused about what I was looking for. Several times elderly men and women scolded them harshly as we passed, but they persisted. Finally we arrived, not at the church, but at the open doorway of a tiny mud-brick house. No one was home, but on the wall opposite the door was a poster showing a cross covered by wounded hands. The French subscript said, "and by His stripes we are healed."

Within minutes, my army of waifs pointed out a young mand approaching us in the dirt alleyway. Then the children melted back into the labyrinth of the walled alleys and compounds of Tumbuktu.

The young man was handsome, with dark skin and flowing robes. But there was something inexplicably different about him. His name was Nouh Ag Infa Yatara: that much I understood. Nouh signaled he knew someone who could translate for us. He led me to a compound on the edge of town where an American missionary lived. I was glad to meet the missionary, but from the moment I’d seen Nouh I’d had the feeling that we shared something in common.

"How did you come to have faith?" I asked him.

The missionary translated as Nouh answered. "This compound has always had a beautiful garden. One day when I was a small boy, a friend and I decided to steal some carrots. It was a dangerous task: We’d been told that Toubabs (white men) eat nomadic children. Despite our agility and considerable experience, I was caught by the former missionary here. Mr. Marshall didn’t eat me; instead he gave me the carrots and some cards that had God’s promises from the Bible written on them. He said if I learned them, he’d give me an ink pen."

"You learned them?" I asked.

"Oh, yes! Only government men and the headmaster of the school had a Bic pen! But when I showed off my pen at school, the teacher knew I must have spoken with a Toubab, which is strictly forbidden. He severely beat me."

When Nouh’s parents found out he hasd protions of such a despised book defiling their house, they threw him out and forbade anyone to take him in; nor was he allowed in school. But something had happened; Nouh had come to believe what the Bible said was true.

Nouh’s mother became desperate. Her own standing, as well as her family’s, was in jeopardy. Finally she decided to kill her son. She obtained poison from a sorcerer and poisoned Nouh’s food at a family feast. Nouh ate the food and wasn’t affected. His brother, who unwittingly stole a morsel of meat from the deadly dish, became violently ill and remains partially paralyzed. Seeing God’s intervention, the family and townspeople were afraid to make further attempts on his life, but condemned him as an outcast.

After sitting a moment, I asked Nouh the question that only hours earlier I’d wanted to ask my father: "Why is your faith so important to you that you’re wiling to give up everything, perhaps even you life?"

"I know God loves me and I’ll live with Him forever. I know it! Now I have peace where I used to be full of fear and uncertainty. Who wouldn’t give up everything for this peace and security?"

"It can’t have been easy for you as a teenager to take a stand that made you despised by the whole community," I said. "Where did your courage come from?"

"Mr. Marshall couldn’t take me in without putting my life in jeopardy. So he game me some books about other Christians who’d suffered for their faith. My favorite was about five young men who willingly risked their lives to take God’s good news to stone age Indians in the jungles of South America." His eyes widened. "I’ve lived all my life in the desert. How frightening the jungle must be! The book said these let themselves be speared to death, even though they had guns and could have killed their attackers!"

The missionary said, "I remember the story. As a matter of fact, one of those men had your last name."

"Yes," I said quietly, "the pilot was my father."

"Your father?" Nouh cried. "The story is true!"

"Yes," I said, "it’s true."

The missionary and Nouh and I talked through the afternoon. When they accompanied me back to the airfield that night, we found that the doctors weren’t able to leave Timbuktu after all, and there was room for me on the UNICEF plane.

As Nouh and I hugged each other, it seemed incredible that God loved us so much that He’d arranged for us to meet "at the ends of the earth." Nouh and I had gifts for each other that no one else could give. I game him the assurance that the story that had given him courage was true. He gave me the assurance that God had used Dad’s death for good. Dad, by dying, had helped give Nouh a faith worth dying for. And Nouh, in return, had helped give Dad’s faith back to me.

Looking at Missions from Their Side, Not Ours

by Steve Saint

I hate to ever put my car on a lift! It exposes the underside which is dirty and greasy, and not intended for public display. I guess that is why I have avoided the Jiffy Lube trend. You take your car and drive right over someone’s head. Under the guise of changing your oil, this stranger begins to call out a grocery list of repairs that need attention.

As the car’s owner I am forced to discredit this stranger’s recommendations. "Sure the c.v. Boot is torn; if I put on another one, it will tear too. So what if the exhaust pipe is about to fall off; it has probably been that way for years, and it can surely hang on a bit longer." Once in a while, however, the mechanic will make an observation that I don’t dare to ignore; something like, "your tie rod ends are badly worn, and you could lose control of your steering any time now."

I have grown up in missions. I thought I had been pretty well exposed to all of its aspects over the years. I have known many very committed and effective missionaries. I have also seen the inevitable impostors. I’ve watched the battles between the conservative groups and the more charismatic newcomers. I’ve done my time on furlough display. I’ve spent years supporting missions financially as a business man. I’ve tried to raise interest in this largely unfinished mandate. My wife, four children and I have also had the wonderful opportunity to serve as missionaries for short periods of time in South America and Africa.

In spite of all of this exposure, I was oblivious to the major limitation in my missionary experiences. I had always looked at the missionary movement from the missionary side of the fence. I’m not sure I even considered that there was another side; but there is! It is a lot like evaluating our car’s mechanical condition by evaluating its paint condition and the cleanliness of its interior.

Those things have value, but they will never tell us that our ball joints are shot, jeopardizing our directional control.

My chance to look at missions from the other side of the fence came as a total surprise to me. My Aunt Rachel, who has lived with the Huaorani tribe since shortly after they killed my father, Nate, and four of his friends, died in 1994. I went down to help the Huaorani bury her. Some of the Huao that I had known since I was a boy asked me to bring my family to come live with them. I declined. They persisted. I made excuses. They insisted. This small tribe has been lavished with attention for forty years. I couldn’t imagine that I could do anything for them that other, more capable missionaries hadn’t already done. When I tried to explain this to them diplomatically, they became exasperated with me. Old grandmother Dawa shook her finger in my face and announced to everyone present that I wasn’t listening. Then she addressed me in a scolding manner that only grandmothers can get away with, (without being speared in the old days) and informed me that they were not asking me to be a missionary to them. They just wanted me to come and live with them; to be part of them. Without realizing it, I was taking my first look at the missionary vehicle from the underside. I was beginning what has become a long and painful journey to "the other side of the fence" that separates the missionary’s perspective from that of the indigenous people.

I don’t want to carry the analogy too far, but allow me to continue this far: there is a lot of dirt and grime hanging on this "mission machine" that we don’t see from the topside! Some of the areas that first became evident as needing attention were things like discrimination against the indigenous people because of their lower technical know-how, segregation between the mission and indigenous community based on financial and personal habits, and a definite class structure based on cultural conformity to a predominantly upper class western norm.

These problems are a perpetual challenge that have taxed generations of missionaries. They need attention, but aren’t life threatening in themselves. As I become accustomed to looking at missions from the underside, (there’s not nearly as many shiny surfaces down here, but some ingenious mechanisms) I saw one area that makes this vehicle "unsafe at any speed": Dependency.

Dependency can’t vie with some of the other blemishes that dot the face of missions today. Open bigotry and bias is certainly nastier and more obvious. I stood in a hanger one day with several foreigners, a couple of Ecuadorian nationals, and one Huaorani elder. A late first-term missionary stopped in to see what we were doing. In good Ecuadorian fashion, he made a round of the hanger shaking hands and greeting all present; all but one that is. When he got to the Huaorani elder, this young missionary reached right across him to shake the hand of one of the last expatriates present. He never even acknowledged this brother’s presence. Worse still, none of the nationals or missionaries present seemed to notice. Two visitors on their first missions excursion were the only ones to take offense, and later questioned me on what, to them, was open and flagrant discrimination. I was humiliated, embarrassed, and even a bit angry. But those of us who were offended, including my Huaorani brother, recovered.

By contrast, let’s take a look at a less emotional issue with much more serious implications, one that doesn’t fire the emotions like discrimination does, but creates the much more deadly outcome of dependaecy. For years, all Huaorani school houses and the other few public buildings have been built by "low-tech" contractors from outside the tribe. Looking for ways for the Huaorani to be able to make money so they can afford machetes, axes, salt, medicines, and other imported goods, (without having to leave home to work for oil companies, with numerous negative implications) it occurred to us to ask for the contracts to build the schools and other public buildings.

I thought we had a foot in the door because a veteran missionary in our area controls much of the school funding and carried a good bit of influence where he doesn’t have unilateral say. When I approached him about it, he informed me that the Huaorani were incapable of making boards or building houses with them. (He didn’t realize that they had just helped me build my rustic but very functional jungle home. He surely didn’t know that they had gone on to build a clinic with little help from me. Then several of the men got together and built a complete home with no input at all from me; all built with boards cut freehand with a chainsaw I had loaned them, but which they operated and maintained.)

Before I had a chance to point out that they had already proved that they could do this type of work, he dug the hole deeper. "Not only can’t they build board structures, but they won’t even take care of what we build for them." He went on to point out that the floor of the church building in the village where Aunt Rachel lived was rotting, and "the people" (Huaorani means "the people") wouldn’t even fix it. I told him I would ask "the people" about it and get back to him.

When I asked the Huaorani in Tonampade why they didn’t fix the church floor, they looked at me perplexed. "We don’t have permission to work on the cowodie’s (foreigner’s) church. What if we fix it, they might get angry?" From their perspective, this church building funded, designed and built by "outsiders," belonged to the outsiders who built it. If they weren’t trusted to make boards and build it, surely they wouldn’t be deemed capable of making the boards to repair it. This incident was not as emotionally charged as that of open discrimination, but the people involved won’t get over this one by forgiving and forgetting! To the best of my knowledge, the only "God’s house" (church building) that any of the twenty-odd Huaorani villages built over the last decade (since outsiders built their board-walled and tin-roofed cathedral in Tonampade) was one temporary leaf shelter built in Tiwaeno for the introduction of the Huaorani New Testament.

Nothing we do in missions should preclude indigenous believers from shouldering their responsibility to be God’s ambassadors in their Jerusalem.

I have to admit that when Ginny and I started living with the Huaorani, I already had a lifetime of experience observing indigenous dependency. My problem was that I hadn’t noticed what I was seeing with rare exceptions. When we became subject to that dependency, however, living with the Huao as one of them, I began to notice it in a hurry. When I have raised the subject and my growing conviction that this is a spiritually deadly mistake, I didn’t expect my missionary friends to agree en mass. I did expect that I could at least open an honest debate on the subject. It seems naive, in hindsight, that I would have expected others to suddenly become aware of something that I had so long overlooked while considering myself to be sensitive and informed.

It makes me think of a book I read in college. The author, as I recall, was writing about discrimination against the Black community in North America. His observations were challenged by a member of the Black community. When the author offered his credentials, the Black man commented, "you’ll never understand what it’s like until you are ‘Black Like Me.’" The author took the man’s challenge and took medication that made his skin very dark. In that new condition he revisited the places and experiences that had formed his opinions. His book revealed that it does look different from the other side of the fence!

It is impossible that every missionary will have a unique opportunity as I have, to live as much a part of an indigenous culture as I have these last years. When the tribe was trying to define what my role should be, one old man spoke up and declared, "Your father is buried in our territory, your aunt is buried here and I say we should bury you here too." The other piquianani (old ones) heartily agreed. In Huao culture, one has standing where his ancestors, especially a father, is buried. I personally would have been more enthusiastic if "the people" had been a little more time specific about when they thought I should be buried out there.

This is my observation. You can’t know how helpless, hopeless and useless it feels to have to depend on others to do what the Holy Spirit is motivating you to do, until you have experienced it yourself!

There is only One Mission for the church of Jesus Christ. That is to be the organism through which Christ manifests Himself on earth and the entity through which His free gift of eternal life is made known to every nation, tribe, tongue and people group. "Missions" is only one aspect of our church’s one mission. The purpose of missions, is simply and only, to plant the Church of Christ where there is none. It isn’t to be the church, or to control the church, or to serve the church; only to plant the church and nurture it until it is able to propagate, govern and support itself.

The greatest weakness I see in our North-American missionary effort today is that we are taking our role too far in too few places!

Missions are not unique in creating dependency out here in the Ecuadorian jungle. What is unique about missions, is that the oil companies, individuals and even the government have a great deal to gain from having people like the Huaorani depend on them. Missions have nothing of value to gain and everything to lose. We hear a great deal these days about the millions of people in the "10-40 Window" that have no Christian witness amongst themselves. The plea is being made that more workers are needed for the harvest. Without distracting at all from that, I would suggest that we must consider moving workers from places where their appropriate role was over, or should have been over, long ago.

I am going to step on toes whose owners I really don’t want to offend, (including my dear Auntie Rachel’s) but I believe this matter is worth the risk even if it only helps to get this critical issue on the table. When I came to live with the Huaorani after almost 40 years of missionary discipleship, they didn’t even identify any tribal believers as elders. There were several men that the tribe more clearly identified as elders when I was in my mid teens than there were in my mid forties. This is a complex issue that won’t be exhaustively covered here. It does little good to point out the problem without recommending solutions either. One of the greatest needs I see in missions today is to clarify not only what we are mandated to do, but also the limits to our mandate.

There is a great need in missions today to equip national / indigenous believers with the tools they need (training, technology, industry, and a cheering squad) so they can take their rightful place of responsibility in building the churches that missions plant!

Unreached peoples like the Huaorani are struggling to maintain their culture and a sense of dignity against great odds. They need to know that we stand with them in their desire to reach the rest of their tribe with the Good News that has transformed their lives.

But we need to get out of their way and give them the chance to prove that they have the capability and the will to get the job done. Hidden peoples from "Jerusalem to Irian Jaya" are waiting to fulfill their role in God’s Great Commission. If we could grasp the vision of what the Holy Spirit could do through them, we could move on to the hundreds of places where there are no indigenous believers, and missionaries are truly needed. Together, I believe we could break the bonds of dependence that the enemy has so capably used to keep indigenous believers passive and outsiders bogged down.

Fighting Dependency Among the "Aucas"
An Interview with Steve Saint

by Rick Wood

In 1956, Nate Saint, father of Steve Saint, and four other young missionaries (Jim Elliott, Pete Fleming, Ed McCulley, and Roger Youderian) were speared to death while trying to reach the "Auca" Indians (more properly called Huaorani) in the jungles of Ecuador. Today, Steve Saint is helping them to break free from the stifling dependency created by outsiders which threatens their survival as a people. I talked with him recently.

MF: When did you first realize that there was a problem with dependency that was being created by missionaries bringing the Gospel to the Huaorani?

Steve: It was a growing awareness, but it really hit me in 1995 when we went to live with the Huaorani. It became reality in a new way, because then we were living with them and we felt it too. After being a businessman for years and used to being independent, to suddenly need other people to the point where they realized, too, that we were depending on them was very uncomfortable.

After Aunt Rachel died in 1994, the Huaorani asked me to bring my family and come live with them. I saw the dependency problem even then. That was one of the main reasons why I didn’t want to go. I could see how many people had been paying attention to them because of "The Auca Story." In spite of this, I think their experience with dependency is fairly typical of other peoples which makes them a good case study.

MF: What was it that helped you see that these people had become dependant?

Steve: What struck me was when I asked the people why they wanted me to come. They named three things. First they said, "Help us get medicine." I responded, "There is a hospital and you can go there to get medicine." They said, "Yes, but how do we get there? And when our people get there, they can take care of the body, but nobody can explain to them God’s trail. But if we take care of them here, we can teach our people how to follow God’s trail." They wanted to use medicine as a means to evangelize. That’s where mission medicine started out, not as an end in itself, but as a means.

Their second request was, "Help teach us." As we got down there, we learned that they wanted me to teach them how to deal with the outside world, because they trusted me. They realized that they needed to know how things work in the outside world so they could deal with outsiders without always being taken advantage of. And that led into their third request.

They said, "Help protect us." I thought they were needing protection mostly from insensitive government agencies and oil companies who were exploiting their land. This is painful and hard to say because there are many people who have committed years of their lives to helping the Huaorani, but their need for protection from the overbearing, over-indulging outside Christian community was as great a need for protection as anything else. This is from the standpoint of the Huaorani believers.

MF: In a recent article in Christianity Today, you mentioned that the Huaorani Church you encountered in the 1990’s was less functional than the one you saw in the early 1960’s. What led you to this conclusion?

Steve: Let me give you a couple of illustrations. About three years after Aunt Rachel started living with the Huaorani, before the very first Gospel of Mark was presented to them, I remember the Huaorani leaving the church services and talking to each other about what Aunt Rachel and her friend, Dayuma, had taught them of God’s Word.

Shortly after that, Inihua, a friend that I was baptized with in Huao territory by some of the Huao elders, went with a couple of his friends to kill a witchdoctor who they thought had put a curse on someone. When they got there, the witchdoctor wasn’t around so they speared his son. The son begged them to call the Mission Aviation Fellowship plane to take him to a doctor, but they just left him to die.

Then the elders, or the more mature believers, got together to discuss what they should do. But they just couldn’t decide. One of the men who had sons that had gone with Inihua said, "We’ve got to go kill them, because if we don’t, then this thing will spread, and even the believers will start living badly." Someone else said, "No, we can’t kill them because God’s Carvings say we shouldn’t kill. We’ve left that behind. We can’t start all that again." Finally, their decision was to pray and ask God to discipline them.

A couple of days after they began to pray, Inihua died under very mysterious circumstances. He was afraid to come back to the village so he and a couple of friends stayed over on the Curaray River, where Dad and his friends were killed. That night as they were cooking their evening meal, Inihua who was up on a bank over the river, jumped backwards down onto the beach, right by the river. The other kids thought he was just toying with them but when he didn’t come back up the bank, they went down and discovered Inihua in the process of having a seizure. He was foaming at the mouth and died later.

When Aunt Rachel found out about it, she called the symptoms in to the doctor at the hospital. She was worried that this might be the beginning of some kind of epidemic. But the symptoms didn’t fit anything and nobody else got sick. For the Huaorani elders, they had their answer. God had disciplined Inihua. And it brought the fear of God on people, both believers and non-believers. Now that’s the kind of thing that I saw when I was an early teenager.

When I went down in my mid-forties, thirty years later, I checked around to see what was going on. When the Huaorani would say, "Help us do this," I would ask, "What are you doing about it?" But they weren’t doing anything. They had become spectators. I realized that instead of having Bible conferences, where the ones who knew the Scriptures could teach others, they were just waiting because every once in a while, whenever they felt like it, outsiders would come in and hold a conference. The outsiders would bring rice and sugar, and it would be a big festive occasion. But the Huaorani couldn’t afford rice and they couldn’t get sugar, so they figured this is something that the outsiders do. So they never have a Bible conference of their own.

A work team came down and built them a nice church (by Huaorani standards) in the village where Aunt Rachel lived, with concrete posts for a foundation, a board floor and walls with a tin roof. From the time that they built that (probably nineteen years ago) the Huaorani, to my knowledge, have never built another building to be used for a place of worship. When I asked them why, they said, "Oh, the outsiders build churches." And I said, "But, in Tiwaeno you built the church" They replied, "But we can only build like the ancient ones did," meaning with thatch. So I said, "God would be happy with thatch. He lived in a tent with the Children of Israel." That was a new thought to them. They assumed the outsiders didn’t think what they were doing was adequate, so the outsiders came in and showed them what to do. So they thought, "We can’t build like that, so we should leave that for the outsiders to do."

It’s that kind of thing. They were not intentionally creating dependency, but people come in with good intentions to do things, not understanding the context in which they’re doing them. This undermines the churches and the initiative of the people.

MF: What other examples can you give us where well-meaning missionaries have created dependency among the Huaorani?

Steve: There was one situation in Nemompade, where the Huaorani built a centrally located little center with an airstrip so they could build a clinic. We are working towards getting a radio station there so they can broadcast in the Huao language. They have no mail service, no regular courier or message service, and there is no broadcasting in their language. In building this little center they were concerned about educating their children. The education is dominated by temporary teachers who come in from the outside. Most of them are non-believers who look down on the Huaorani. They don’t know the Huao culture or the Huao language. They come in to do a couple years of rural practice to get their credentials and then they teach outside.

The Huaorani said, "If we are going to do these things, we need to have our children taught by Huaoranis. How can we do that?" I said, "If you’re going to control the education, the first thing is to build a school and support it yourself." They had no economy, but they replied, "You tell us how we can make money and we will work. We’ll do it." We soon had the school up and running with Huao teachers. They started doing tours as the way to support things like this.

One day I was out at the airstrip when I saw a young outsider who works under the auspices of a North American missionary. I was surprised to see him, because I had no idea that he was going to be in our area. He jumped on an MAF plane that had just brought in some folks and took off.

I asked the Huaorani, "What was he doing here?" They said, "Oh, he came by trail and went into school and was getting the kids to write a message on a piece of paper." I said, "But class was in session." They said, "Yes." But he just came in, stopped school and said to the kids who were signed up with a child sponsorship program, "All of you kids that are signed up, you have to copy this message." He went to the blackboard, erased what the teacher had written, wrote the message and said, "Okay, copy this quickly, because the airplane is coming." The kids that didn’t belong felt left out. There’s no distinction in the economic background or ability of the parents of these kids. Some were signed up, and some of them were not, even though none of them were orphans or hungry.

So the kids who were part of this started madly trying to copy this thank-you letter that somebody had dictated for them on the board. They got about two-thirds done when the plane came and the man said, "You were too slow. You’re going to have to write it and then bring it up to Tonampade," which is a full day’s walk by trail. And he ran out and got on the plane.

By the time I got to the Huaorani, they were so angry and frustrated they didn’t know what to do because the kids who weren’t part of this "deal" had it pointed out to them, "Hey, you guys are second-class citizens. Come Christmas you’re not going to get any presents because you haven’t signed up." So I asked them what they thought about this and they said, "We say it isn’t good for our children to get things from outsiders that we, ourselves, can’t give them." One of the things they pointed out was, "At Christmas, these chosen kids will all get a new blanket, but their parents won’t have any, and these other kids won’t have any blankets either." They were saying that this was going to create jealousy.

Finally when the toys and blankets came, they were delivered to our house. The people said to me, "We don’t want them, because it will make people angry."

Those brand new blankets that they would have loved to have had just sat there for months. Nobody touched them. You can’t imagine the tension of people coming into a house seeing a whole stack of new blankets and knowing that they’re designated only for certain ones. That’s the situation that I had to live with for months, as those blankets sat there and gathered dust and mildew. They just couldn’t think of an equitable way to distribute them.

It got to the point where the Huaorani finally asked this individual not to come into the community. They wanted to have and support their own school and they didn’t want these certain kids participating in things that created jealousy and animosity.

A couple of weeks later, letters came addressed to all these kids, asking them to tell their parents that if they continued to go to the Huaorani school that they would never qualify for scholarships, go to camp, or be able to leave the territory and explore the big, wide wonderful world.

Somebody was writing to the kids, having them tell their parents that they had to go back to the highly subsidized and controlled schools. Can you imagine?

That is just the tip of the iceberg of the things I saw there. I had to help pick up the pieces and live through the agony with them.

MF: Are there certain factors over those thirty years that you can point to that was key in the process of creating dependency?

Steve: I think there are a number of keys, not just one. It’s insidious. Look at what has happened with the Native Americans. If you read National Geographic Magazine, you see example after example of what happens when a more advanced culture with a superior education, technology, and economic ability comes in contact with another culture. In almost every case, the advanced culture ends up dominating, because the technologically inferior culture wants to emulate the more sophisticated culture, but they don’t have the tools that make them sophisticated.

Looking at a mission situation in a frontier area, the missionaries or outside Christians control the communications, transportation, medicine, and the purse strings, especially if there’s no economy inside. These are the primary elements that industrial nations are built on. Without expertise in these areas you can imagine how a frontier people will react. Not only is it humiliating for them, but they lose all motivation to do anything.

That’s what has happened to the Huaorani. They have become spectators because they see that these outsiders can do it much better. But the lie is that the outsiders don’t do it much better. They just have more of the tools to do it. But the tools are just the means. The goal is to get the message to the people in an understandable form. And that’s something that outsiders can never do as well as the Huaorani believers.

MF: How can missionaries working with indigenous peoples like the Huaorani help prepare them for contact with the outside world and not bring in their own culture as a result?

Steve: Whenever missionaries come in, the people already have contact with the outside world. My conclusion is that it’s impossible, except in very rare cases, for anybody to completely strip themselves of one culture in order to enter into another one. Whenever anybody comes in "missionaries, anyone" a process of change in the culture is already begun.

Looking at it realistically and practically, cultures are always changing. The question is not does it change, but how does it change, and how fast does it change? Even more important, who is in charge of that change? Is it outsiders who comes in to dominate, or is it the people themselves?

Here, I think, it’s critical that we keep sight of what the purpose of missions is. Missions is not to go in and create and control a church for other people nor be the church for them. It’s not our job to insure that it functions. It is simply and only to plant the church in every people group and nurture it until it is able to propagate, govern and support itself.

When missions go beyond that, then they are imposing themselves in the area of responsibility that belongs to the indigenous people and then everything gets out of whack.

I don’t get this from books on missiology, but just from the Scriptures. In Matt. 28, Jesus said, "All authority has been given to Me. You go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations."

He was talking to eleven uneducated, unprepared men, sending them out to make disciples, who would teach other people to follow Him on their own, observing all that He had commanded them.

This means that the Huaorani believers need to be discipled so that they can make disciples also. But if they’re not given the chance to do that, if other people dominate them and keep doing the things that the Huaorani should do, then they never grow up.

MF: What changes do you think should be made now in order to foster a self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating church movement among the Huaorani?

Steve: Let’s break those three down. In almost every place that I have ever been, the easiest one for the indigenous peoples to get hold of is to become self-propagating of their faith.

The self-propagating initiative took root among the Huaorani people before any real outsider ever went in. It started with Dayuma sharing the Gospel with Dawa who picked it up and she shared it with her husband.

For some peoples, self-government often comes fairly easy if they live in a society where they have a form of government. For the Huaorani, that’s very difficult because they’re very egalitarian. They have no system of government at all. So for them, one of the major efforts of missions, besides giving them some of the tools "like the Gospel and literacy" was to teach them to govern.

But after forty years of having the Gospel, when I went in they couldn’t even identify elders which in the New Testament is the fundamental structure of the church. They don’t know how to govern, but they certainly could have learned something about it in forty years. They were, however, less able to govern themselves as believers when I went down in the mid-90s than they were in the early 60s when I was there. That’s a travesty.

MF: What needs to happen in order for that situation to change?

Steve: If I said, "You need to pick elders, and you need this thing," then I would be dominating the church again. But I took them to Scripture. Whenever they would ask me to say something in church, I would ask, "Do you want to read God’s Carving here and here?" They would read it and then discuss it.

I made it clear to them that I didn’t come as a missionary. They asked me to come down as part of the tribe. And that’s the way they treated me. I was dealing with men in the church who had baptized me. These were men that I looked up to spiritually.

So I said, "I won’t do things for you, but rather will work under you. You tell me what to do and I will do it." That was really an awkward dance. Both sides were waiting for the other one to lead. But as I forced myself not to take initiative, little by little they began to take it. They began to see that they had to make decisions. When they said, "Who should make the decisions?" I took them to the Scriptures where it talks about elders, and eldership. Then they started picking people for elders. When they asked, "Who should be elders?" I again took them back to the Scriptures. They realized on their own that one of the men that they had picked to be an elder, who is a very fervent, dependable believer, wasn’t qualified because he had two wives, so they dismissed him and identified their six elders.

I was so excited that they had done this. I went out to tell outsiders who had dealings with this tribe that this monumental decision had been made. They didn’t care. Not only were they not excited, nobody paid any attention. In the last three years that I have been down there, I have yet to hear one person "missionary or Ecuadorian believer from outside" ever acknowledge that the Huaorani have a group of elders for their church. They never address them or talk about them. Nobody knows who they are. I’ve told them and they just ignore it. It’s unbelievable!

MF: That is incredible! So the people on the outside don’t even appreciate the steps they do make, not to mention encouraging them towards self-reliance?

Steve: That’s right. And then on the self-supporting end, they have no economy. To the best of my knowledge, the only way that anybody in this tribe has ever made any money is to go and work for the oil company. They go out to the oil camps, and find there’s prostitution and other things going on. The believers refuse to go and they encourage their people not to go.

But they need money for medicine and transportation by plane to their clinic. They would say, "How are we going to pay for the flight? When the mission plane comes, it always takes the patient out to the mission hospital, never to our clinic." I can understand that. The pilots want them to get good care. But that’s only physical attention.

So the people finally said, "Babae, (my nickname) we will do these things, but you tell us how to get money." So I agreed to help. A friend suggested that we consider doing tourism to start an economy. I thought, "The last thing that we need here is more people from the outside coming in." But then he pointed out a couple of things. Don’t bring them into a village, take them to some neutral place so that they’re not imposing on any village nor disrupting the school or clinic. That made sense to me.

The Huaorani and I talked about it and finally decided to start inviting people to come live with them for short periods of time to do a genuine experience tour. We couldn’t think of anything else that would work. Most, but not all, of the groups that have come in are Christian groups.

With the monies that the Huaorani have earned, they have built their own clinic and school. They support their teachers, buy their own medicines and stock a little pharmacy. They have started trading posts for the older people who can come and trade artifacts, handmade net bags, hammocks, blowguns, and the other things they make. They can hand it to a Huaorani, and they can take home medicines, batteries, salt and other needed items.

With the tour money they have also purchased and paid for their own airplane. It’s one from kits that we heavily modified and took down in suitcases and dufflebags, and built with the Huaorani.

It was all at their initiative. That plane represents more money than the tribe has ever earned in history as a corporate group. Every time I give them the money from a tour, I ask, "What do you want to do with your money?" They always say, "Babae, you take it and buy our airplane."

Their concern is for reaching their people. They’ve said to me, "We need to get the elders to the villages so they can teach in the places where there are no believers. If we go on the trail, when we get there, sometimes the people don’t want to hear what we have to say. But if we go with the airplane, then we can take medicine and the dental equipment. Then they will all welcome us. While we distribute the medicine, and fix their teeth, we will teach them God’s Carvings." Then they looked kind of sheepish and said, "When we’re fixing their teeth, we can teach them God’s Carvings, and they can’t say anything back." They thought that was pretty clever.

But then they asked, "How can we do this if we don’t have an airplane?" I replied, "Mission Aviation Fellowship flies for you." But they said, "Babae, they can only come when the weather is good, when they don’t have other flights to do and when we can get a message to them by radio. That doesn’t work."

So they said, "Babae, you get us a plane and we will work and then we will fly, and we will take the medicine, the dental equipment, the elders, and we will teach the people God’s Carvings ourselves."

The Huaorani have realized that they need the tools that the missionaries have in order to take over from where they left off in reaching their people.

Don’t misunderstand, they appreciate what the missionaries have done. But their primary concern is in reaching their young people.

The believers know that the new generation within the tribe has little interest in spiritual things. They’re consumed with posturing and are extremely materialistic. The believers realized that the Cowodie (missionaries) aren’t doing anything about it. So they asked me to come. And I said, "The Cowodie aren’t the people that God has called to reach these people. It’s you." And I took them to the Scriptures and showed them, "This is your Jerusalem, and the priority is, first in Jerusalem." They said, "Yes. We will do it with the tools you helped us get."

MF: That was my next question. How do you reach the next generation? You’re acting as the catalyst for their thinking rather than imposing anything on them.

Steve: I’m sure trying and I think it’s working. In an uncanny way, I see the Holy Spirit working through the tourism.

As the people from the outside have come in, they’re not interested in seeing the Huaorani young people standing around to show off their fake Nike tennis shoes. What they’re interested in is how the Huaorani used to live, but it’s only the old people who can show them that. The old people are the ones who know how to hunt with blowguns and spears, track animals, spear fish, climb trees with climbing vines, and all those things. That’s what impresses the outsiders.

This has raised the value of the old ways in the eyes of the young people, opening a way for the elders to share the Gospel with the next generation.

MF: In what other ways are you trying to help the Huaorani and other indigenous peoples to reach their own people?

Steve: I have realized that it isn’t enough just to point out the problems. I needed to be part of the solution. So after praying, wrestling and trying to figure out what I could do, I’ve gotten together with the Huaorani and with some friends and we have started "ITEC," Indigenous People’s Technology and Education Center. The purpose is to provide the tools, technology, and backup support to help peoples like the Huaorani reach their own people" something like JAARS is to Wycliffe. That’s something that is sadly lacking for indigenous peoples.

They can’t, in most cases, use the exact technology that missionaries use because they are unable to support, operate, and maintain it. But they nevertheless need similar tools. So it just needs to be an appropriate technology adapted to their situation. Then they need to be taught how to use it to spread the Word to the many non-believers.

MF: So through ITEC you’re trying to apply some of the technology from the outside to indigenous situations?

Steve: Yes, we’re currently using the dental equipment, solar powered radio transmitters, computers and the airplane. Veteran missionaries were scandalized when they realized that I was taking in dental equipment that the Huaorani were going to operate. They thought it was irresponsible. But those were people who had never been out there and seen people suffering when they’ve got a toothache, and then to have people just come and yank their teeth out. We’ve got teenagers that don’t have enough teeth to chew their food.

People come on almost a daily basis to get their teeth worked on there in Nemompade. Recently, two girls came over the trail wanting their teeth pulled. And the Huaorani scolded them and laughed at them, like they were ignorant. They said, "We don’t pull teeth. Here we fix teeth. And after we fix the teeth, then if they hurt, then we pull them." The girls had never had their teeth fixed in their life. They didn’t even know what was involved. They sat down and one of the people gave them novocaine, and the son of the first Huaorani Christian martyr, drilled and filled these girls’ teeth, and sent them happily on their way; opening the door to go to their village to share the Gospel with them.

It’s working. Some things they are very good at. They have great dexterity and have quickly learned how to drill and fill teeth. I availed myself of their services one time when I cracked a tooth.

But learning how to fly an airplane is a huge step. Trying to teach them how to navigate is a challenge. When I tried to teach one of them how to navigate, I kept trying to say, "Okay, you go straight from here over to there." But in the Huao language, they have no concept of straight. Trails aren’t straight. Rivers aren’t straight. Their houses aren’t straight. Nothing is straight. But the Huaorani want to do it and they have the vision for it.

MF: Is there some way that people can support what you are doing without creating dependency?

Steve: There was a lot of research and development that went into getting the airplane that they couldn’t afford. That is something that people could help us with financially. In the past, we have never asked for funds for ITEC, because I have been real careful "really scared" that it would open a Pandora’s Box of problems.

But now we are at the point where we have working and proven prototypes. Thanks to some dentists that have helped us, we now have a dental rig with the chair that also serves as a medical examining table with the drilling units the whole thing. Two Wal-Mart tire pumps serve as a compressor and a generator to make the drill go. The whole thing, including hand pieces, weighs about 25 pounds and costs $600. It’s fully capable of being transported in the Huaorani’s little airplane or on somebody’s back.

These are the kinds of tools that the indigenous peoples in frontier areas can use to create the credibility that they need to share the Gospel with their own people.

As Christians we must give them that privilege of reaching their own and end the devastating practices that have created dependency among the Huaorani and thousands of peoples like them all over the world.