Jim Elliot’s Rebuke of Self-Reliant Youth Workers (Like Me)

Well, maybe not on youth workers specifically. But you’ll see what I mean:

“We have been very much encouraged–through reading a book that deals with examples of apostolic missionary methods–to believe again for some sort of New Testament pattern to be worked out among forest Quichuas*. How false and fleshly to reason that God will do a work here ‘because Pete, Ed, and Jim are trained, capable, young, and strong!’ I have been much impressed lately of the absolute necessity of God Himself rousing the conscience. I do not know how, nor even where, to begin to make a man think seriously about sin and judgment, and must look to the work of the Holy Spirit for the beginning move toward any hint of such a working.”

– Jim Elliot, in a letter to his future wife, Elisabeth, April, 1953, as recorded in Shadow of the Almighty. Emphasis his.

God has to do it. Let’s be less self-impressed, self-reliant, and technique-addicted. Let’s ask Him to change hearts.

More on this later.

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*The Quichuas were the South American Indians to whom Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, and Jim Elliot, et. al., were missionaries before they were martyred among the Aucas three years later.