The Gundrys and Me, by Ruth Tucker

Stan and Pat Smith Gundry. Where would my life be today without them? This little series began with A. B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Last week, I continued with Elisabeth Elliot’s influence on my life. Like Simpson and Elliot, Stan and Pat have left very large footprints on the evangelical world and on my life in particular. Where would I be today had Pat not written Woman Be Free! and had Stan not been fired from Moody Bible Institute? Forced to leave his teaching position in Chicago, he would spend the next decades at Zondervan Publishing House in Grand Rapids, and that is where I first encountered him.

In last week’s post I recalled how I was flying by the seat of my pants developing college-level courses on subjects I didn’t know anything about. But I successfully turned a History of Missions course away from mind-numbing facts into a biographical history.  It made the subject matter interesting and stirred up class discussion. After teaching it a second year, I put together a proposal and sent it to Stan at Zondervan. I told him that, having taught the course for years (I didn’t say it was only two), I had discovered that it was best taught through biography. He got back to me confessing that History of Missions had been the most boring course he had taken in seminary and that he would be interested in seeing chapters—chapters that would become my text, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya.

Stan passed me on to a good editor, Mark Hunt, and through him (with Stan’s encouragement), I was connected with Walt Kaiser, academic dean at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where I would teach part-time for seventeen years, flying back and forth from Grand Rapids. It was there where I became acquainted with Scot, so the line of influence comes right up to this post.

But back to my first teaching job at Grand Rapids School of the Bible and Music. Another course that fell into my lap because the regular teacher wanted out was Women in Ministry. The previous teacher had taught how to be a proper pastor’s wife and hostess as well as how to put together a mother-daughter banquet and an assortment of other practical tips. Although I had been a pastor’s wife for six years, I did not shine in that arena. Much of my time had been devoted to writing a doctoral dissertation. So again I was trying to figure out how to teach a course. And then I laid my hands on a book published a year earlier in 1977, Woman Be Free!  My life would never be the same.

I learned from Pat and then from others that a woman could do much more in ministry than be a pastor’s wife. So, I would feature strong women of the Bible and in church history and we would dig into passages that had been wrongly interpreted to keep women out of ministry. The students were startled by my course material, but I was getting the information from actual books so it must be true. Fortunately, the president of the school seemed to have no problem with my budding feminism, having known women preachers, including his Methodist grandmother. Just don’t start teaching Calvinism, he warned me.

After having taught this course several times, utilizing my training as a historian, it was a natural step to begin team-teaching a course at Trinity on women in ministry with Walt Liefeld, a New Testament expert. Then together we pitched a book proposal to Stan—a volume that would become Daughters of the Church.

Again, Pat’s foundational research was critical. And I realized how much I resonated with her personal perspective. Responding to an interviewer, she answered:

I had always been a feminist and egalitarian, before I knew those terms. I’d been raised to be an independent thinker, confident in my ability to do and be whatever I set out to do or be. It came as a shock to me as an older child to realize that some people would want to limit my opportunities solely because I was female.

We were both raised on farms, Arkansas and Wisconsin, though Pat’s family moved to California when she was young. She gravitated to the domestic side of life, whereas I preferred driving a tractor or milking cows—anything but the kitchen where Pat was a natural. In fact, once when Pat and Stan had been hosting Moody students in their home, two young men on noticing her shelves of cookbooks were surprised that a feminist would be handy in the kitchen. Indeed, she has since published a cookbook of her own. But it was Woman Be Free! and subsequent books, including Heirs Together, that would shape the conversation for Christian Feminism. Also decisive was her role in founding Christians for Biblical Equality (and her naming the CBE journal, The Priscilla Papers, contributing some of the early articles).

As a Moody professor’s wife, she had considerable freedom, and during that time was actively involved in the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment into law. Hers was hardly a radical stance. There was bipartisan support in both Houses of Congress as well as from Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter. It would go on to be ratified by 35 states, only three states short of the necessary 38. But that is when STOP ERA was bringing out its big guns—that of trashing ERA supporters, or, in this case, the husband of a supporter. Opponents “wrote letters to Moody administrators denouncing me, and my husband,” writes Pat. “The letters were full of distortions and downright lies, which Moody administrators said they knew were fabrications.” But as the volume of letters increased so did the fear that the school would lose financial support. Thus, the decision to fire a fine professor, a brilliant scholar and writer.

Before teaching at Moody, Stan had been a Baptist minister as had his father. Women’s roles in the home and in ministry were simply assumed to be secondary to those of men. Stan’s father, in fact, kept a stash of John R. Rice’s Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives and Women Preachers, giving away copies to fellow travelers. During his college and seminary years, and even after marriage to Pat, Stan held the traditional view with no inclination to defend bossy wives or women preachers. But it was in the following years as the children were growing that Pat had begun studying the Bible to see if Rice and others had actually interpreted passages correctly. Her questions and further study led to long discussions with Stan, and he credits her for his slow change of mind.

Responding to a request for an article in Priscilla Papers, Stan wrote:

I have agreed to tell my story for two fundamental reasons. 1) I want to give tribute to the person who opened my eyes to a new paradigm through which to view Scripture and who did not allow me to be satisfied with the easy answers. These were answers that had been drilled into my head as a youth and were assumed throughout my college and seminary training. 2) Arguments alone often do not convince. This is especially so with theological and exegetical arguments on this subject that for many has so much emotional baggage associated with it. So, when people come to me asking questions and searching for answers on the “women’s issue,” I often just tell them my story—where I have come from, where I have landed, and how and why I got there.

Stan tells how in the early 1970s be began seeing the Bible more holistically. He “began to see that the passages that were barriers to . . . moving to a fully egalitarian position needed to be understood in terms of the big picture.” It is the big picture “that establishes the context for understanding the difficult passages.” His position slowly changed. “By 1974 in my lectures and discussions with students at Moody Bible Institute, I was affirming a view that was essentially egalitarian.”

Stan goes on to say far more than can be recounted here, but I take three critical things from him: He was willing to learn from a woman (even as Apollos had learned from Priscilla); he looked at the big picture of Scripture; and he recognized emotional baggage. This final point should stop all of us in our tracks. Whenever we hear someone pontificating on their precise exegesis and hermeneutical expertise related to a particular passage, we do well to wonder what kind of emotional baggage is hiding inside their heads.

My connections with Stan have continued over the years and I was privileged to contribute an article for a Festschrift in 2017 honoring him on his 80^th birthday and his decades of ministry at Zondervan where he continues to serve today. My relationship with Pat has continued as well. I love her wry sense of humor, as when she related to an interviewer her baptism at thirteen:

Unlike most Baptists, though, I was immersed twice. Just as I was catching my breath, the pastor dipped me under again. Later, he explained that he’d not immersed some part of me completely, and he knew there would be objections if he didn’t do it again. I don’t know what kind of Baptist that makes me, maybe a DuoBaptist.

That sense of humor, along with her wise counsel, helped me survive two very difficult times in my life—after escaping a violent marriage in 1987 and again nearly two decades later after I had been terminated from Calvin Seminary.

Thank you, Pat and Stan, for your generosity of spirit in all the ways you have profoundly influenced my life.

Postscript

I “borrowed” these photos from Pat’s Facebook. Neither she nor Stan have known of my intentions to post any of this on Jesus Creed.

What a little beauty is Pat Smith. I would have loved to have had her as my BFF when I was growing up. She looks like she’s ready to take on the world. Below, daughter Ann is kissing her Mom, who sure doesn’t look like some sort of radical women’s libber to me.

Where would I be today were it not for Elisabeth Elliot? Last week it was A. B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance whose large worldwide footprint was indelibly stamped on a northern Wisconsin farming community and inside the doors of a white clapboard church. My life in the 1950s and early sixties revolved around that little church. After many twists and turns in the following decades, Elliot’s footprint also profoundly influenced my life.

I began my teaching career in 1978 at Grand Rapids School of the Bible and Music utterly unprepared. I couldn’t teach music, though I had been a fine French horn player, nor Bible, despite a long list of undergraduate Bible courses and two years of Greek. I was a historian. The good news was that another professor wanted out of the history of mission class he was teaching. “It’s an important course,” he told me, “but unfortunately, the subject matter is so boring.” I knew nothing about the history of missions—not even that it was boring. But that was the way a lot of us started teaching in higher education back in the day. Start from scratch and show up in class.

I was a part-timer with two assigned courses: first semester, Creative Writing. My only qualification was that I had co-authored How to Set Up Your Own Preschool. It was, therefore, assumed I must be the perfect person for the course. I purchased copies of William Zinsser’s On Writing Well (1976) and E. B. Whites, Elements of Style (with William Strunk) and I was off and running. Whether or not students learned much from those writing courses I would teach, there is no question that I did. The same with the second semester’s History of Missions course.

Here is where Elisabeth Elliot comes in. What if she had not written Through Gates of Splendor? That book inspired the course I was teaching and the whole course of my life. I would abandon the old texts of facts and figures: hundreds of names, dates, countries, mission agencies—around the world in mind-numbing forgettable chapters. I would turn the class into a biographical history of missions. I wrote summaries of the best biographies I could find and assigned my own typed 3-ring binder as the text. The supplemental text was Through Gates of Splendor, Elliot’s story of the deaths of five missionaries, including her husband Jim. The young men were killed after they entered the territory of a remote Ecuadorian tribe then known as the Aucas. I was left with more questions than answers, but no single volume, apart from the Bible, has ever had a more profound impact on me.

What direction would my life have taken, I ask myself, were it not for the powerful pen of Elisabeth Elliot? Whether writing of the Auca tragedy or of the struggles of single female missionaries, she had a way with words and a knack for irony that inspired my own writing. From that standpoint she was a role model—though certainly not on gender issues. Elliot was a hardliner in her opposition to women’s equality in marriage and ministry. In many ways that is strange because she was such a strong, independent woman herself, and she wrote about such women in memoir and fiction.

But what I love most about her writing is her forcing people to think—sometimes so far out of the box that she seriously offended other Christians. In her novel, No Graven Image, the main character is Margaret Sparhawk. The very name connotes strength. Sparhawk has traded an American middle-class life for missionary privation and loneliness in a remote area of Ecuador. Soon after she arrives, she becomes acquainted with Rosa and her children. Here Elliot tells a hilarious tale about a missionary trying to learn the native language. How utterly ignorant Sparhawk appears to Rosa. But when Pedro, Rosa’s husband, injures his leg, her life is upended. She gives him a shot of penicillin, certain this would cure his infection. Instead he dies. Convinced he would have survived but for her intervention, we can hear the anguish of her haunting prayer:

O ineffable, sardonic God who toys with our sacrifices and smashes to earth the humble, hopeful altars we have built for a place to put Your name! Do you mock me? Why did You let him die? Why did You let me kill him? O God! I came to bring him life—Your life—and I destroyed him in Your name.

If readers were hoping to find resolution at the end of the book they would have been disappointed. Sparhawk remained in Ecuador but her once secure faith and calling were shaken to the core—as was true of some readers. In fact, the book was so controversial that some Christian booksellers refused to display it on their bookshelves.

In many respects the fictional Sparhawk Elliot herself. They both served in South America as single women and struggled with loneliness. Equally troubling, women were not taken as seriously as were the missionary men. This was particularly true when all the missionaries gathered once or twice a year for field meetings. The women, both single and married, were essentially ignored, though Elliot is able to put a humorous spin on it.

In her memoir, These Strange Ashes, Elliot tells how she was one of four single missionaries stationed together among the Colorado Indians, each hoping to escape their plight through marriage—preferably to a single male missionary. But boredom is their biggest enemy. Elliot recounts her “dimestore dreams”—the longing to just wander the aisles and look, maybe make a little purchase. At the same time, she is distracted with little household tasks just to avoid the hard work of language learning. Long days drag into weeks and months.

Boredom is only interrupted by tragedy. “If God had spared Maruja’s life,” Elliot writes, “the whole . . . tribe might have been delivered from spiritual death. In my heart I could not escape the thought that it was God who had failed.” Later when Macario, her faithful and indispensable language informant was murdered, she questioned her calling: “Had I come here, leaving so much behind, on a fool’s errand? . . . How was I to reconcile His permitting such a thing with my own understanding of the missionary task?”

“If these incidents pulled the very rug of divinity out from under Elizabeth,” I write in Extraordinary Women of Christian History, “the worst was yet to come. Her escape from her life among the Colorado Indians came with her marriage to Jim Elliot. . . . They might have carried on with their work in the jungles of Ecuador for decades, like most missionaries unknown to the outside world, but for Operation Auca.”

I have written about “Operation Auca” here on Jesus Creed (Nov. 28, 2018), so I won’t go over the details and my own criticism again. But the whole story and its aftermath is complicated and controversial. Elisabeth certainly realized that herself. “For those who saw it as a great Christian martyr story,” she later reflected, “the outcome was beautifully predictable.  All puzzles would be solved.  God would vindicate Himself.  Aucas would be converted and we could all ‘feel good’ about our faith.”  However, that is not the way it happened.  “The truth is that not by any means did all subsequent events work out as hoped.  There were negative effects of the missionaries’ entrance into Auca territory.  There were arguments and misunderstandings and a few really terrible things, along with the answers to prayer.”

Elliot was a courageous writer, a strong, independent woman. I will never understand, however, why she would want to curtail other women in ministry and marriage. Elliot’s guiding principle was obedience—obedience to God and to a husband. But today Complementarians do not support single women missionaries like her who, obeying God’s call, teach and preach the Bible. She broke all the rules, and in doing so she aimed a spotlight on missionary life like few other individuals have done. Sadly, her agile mind and cunning pen were stilled by Alzheimer’s in her later years.

What if her sense of being on “a fool’s errand” had prevailed and she had returned to the States soon after she had arrived? What if? Where would I be today without the writings of Elisabeth Elliot? The question is surely not to place myself as the center of her story. But actually, we should all position ourselves in the center of the story as we contemplate men and women who have shaped our lives.