On January 8, 1956, 28-year-old American missionary Jim Elliot was martyred, along with four missionary partners and friends. He was survived by his wife, Elisabeth, and their 10-month-old daughter Valerie.
Phillip James (“Jim”) Elliot was born in Portland, Oregon, on October 8, 1927. He enrolled at Wheaton College in the fall of 1945 and graduated four years later as a Bible major with highest honors.
The fall of 1949 was a heady season for neo-evangelicalism, seeking to differentiate itself from the fundamentalism of the past, revive the church, win the lost, and gain respect from the culture. 30-year-old Billy Graham—who had graduated from Wheaton six years before Jim Elliot—held his very first crusade, as over 6,000 people came to hear him preach at the Civic Auditorium in Grand Rapids, Michigan (September 13-21). After that he was off to Los Angeles for a two-month campaign that would catapult him to national fame. That December, the first gathering of the Evangelical Theological Society convened, as sixty Bible and theology professors met in Cincinnati to hear an address by Carl Henry, who had published The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism just two years earlier.
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