I had been volunteering on the board of directors for the Christian organization "Inner City Youth Express," helping impoverished children
on the near West side of Chicago.
Someone I met at a neighborhood picnic put on
by another board member convinced me to go with him to a Wednesday night Bible
study held at this little tiny church on the very edge of Chicago (near Harlem
Avenue and Irving Park Road).
Little did I know that not only was the preacher of this seemingly
remote ministry outlet a world authority on the Bible with his own
international school (Grace School of the Bible), but that the church’s
original leader, J.C. O’Hair, when it was located in Chicago’s Uptown
neighborhood (Wilson Avenue and Sheridan Road) and called North Shore Church,
was one of America’s great fundamentalist preachers in the ‘40s and ‘50s.
*****
The second biggest thing that ever happened to me, if you
ask me, was in 1969 when I was not even six years old and my dad very suddenly
decided to close his booming private medical practice and sell our family home
in the old Fairlawn Heights neighborhood of Akron, Ohio, to become a missionary
doctor on the edge of the Amazon jungles in Ecuador.
Little did I know that this grassroots missionary outfit,
made up of only five other missionary families at the time, was famous throughout
the world for the savage murders of five American Christian missionary men who
were speared to death by an indigenous Indian tribe they were trying to
befriend and bring to Christ (1956). The mainstream movie, Edge of the Spear, recounting the legendary story, was released in 2005.
*****
At the Soldier’s Training Conference a year ago this weekend,
sponsored by my church, I sat down at breakfast with a woman I’ve known since I
first started attending Shorewood. I informed her that I had moved back home
temporarily to Akron, Ohio to help my mom through a difficult time. I said, “I
think about you because I know how you went home to Napoleon (Ohio) for a
period to care for your ailing parents.”
She briefly told me about her experience, stressing how
being reunited with so many different people she grew up with made the
situation actually a wonderful time for her.
I told her I was having somewhat of the opposite experience
because I didn’t have any people I knew from my youth to do anything with. Part
of the problem, I explained, was that when I was not even six years old, my dad
decided to became a missionary doctor in Ecuador, taking the whole family along.
“Where in Ecuador?” she responded. When I answered, “A tiny
town on the edge of the Amazon Jungles called Shell-Mera,” she exclaimed, “You
were in Shell?! That’s Jim Elliot’s outfit!”
She then told me how, as a college student at Wheaton
College in the ‘60s, she was deeply impacted by the story of the four
missionaries. Pilot Jim Elliot, as well as slain pilot Nate Saint, were, in
fact, Wheaton graduates. She recalled how, as someone who had just finished
studying Swahili at Milwaukee Bible College and intended to teach native
children in the Congo upon graduation from Wheaton, reading the best-selling
book by Elliot’s wife, Elizabeth, when it first came out gave her profound
personal inspiration.
Listening to her go on so excitedly, I thought to myself, “Wow!
I didn’t realize people every remembered this story!” Then I had to admit to
her that no one in my family barely ever mentioned our Ecuador experience and I
never even understood until watching the movie what exactly it was all about.
The thing is, my parents never talked much at all about what we did during our almost
two years in Shell.
*****
One Sunday morning recently I was listening to Jordan’s
radio show (“Riches of Grace,” WYLL 1160 AM at 8:30 a.m. and 1 p.m.) and he
mentioned off-hand in a study on “the fallacy of modern-day prayer theology”
how, “Preachers and missionaries, you see, they’ve got to have their ‘story.’
If you go sell Amway or some product like that, multi-level marketing, they
tell you to develop your story because, as they say, ‘Nobody can argue with
your story.’
“And preachers all have to have their story; their special
thing God did for them and you sit there and think, ‘Oh, if I was just as holy
and wonderful as them, God might do that for me.’ When they tell you those
stories, it’s to tell you, ‘Well, God blesses me; too bad he didn’t do it for
you. If you were like me He would.’ ”
*****
The hard, cold reality of my dad’s missionary “story,” is he
NEVER told it!!! It was something he never passed down to his children and,
even though I was there to actually live it with him, I’ve had to play catch-up
in my adult years to get any details about why we went there, what happened
while we were there and why did we all pack up and leave so suddenly—no explanation
given.
As I write this, I admit I am scared to go on. This “story”
is not a pretty one and my mom has been very reluctant to tell me anything
about it, even saying, “You’re not going to write about any of this are you?!”
(To be continued . . . )
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