This week on Fresh Ground Theology’s The Weekend Cup, the airplane finally comes down. In January 1956, Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming, and Roger Youderian establish a camp on a sandbar along Ecuador’s Curaray River they call “Palm Beach.” After months of exchanging gifts from the air, three Waorani visitors emerge from the jungle. The encounter is peaceful—even joyful—and Nate takes one of the visitors for a ride in his airplane. It appears that the seemingly impossible barrier between the missionaries and Waorani has finally begun to fall. (Mission Aviation Fellowship)

Two days later, everything changes. On January 8, all five missionaries are killed on Palm Beach. We follow the final days of Operation Auca while carefully distinguishing what Nate and the missionaries actually knew from details learned later through Waorani testimony. What looked like a promising beginning suddenly appeared to have ended in complete failure. But the story of Palm Beach was far from finished. (Mission Aviation Fellowship)

Listen to Episode 1: Called to the Sky: Nate Saint Part 1 – Fresh Ground Theology

Listen to Episode 2: The Jungle Pilot: Nate Saint Part 2 – Fresh Ground Theology

Sources

• Elisabeth Elliot, Through Gates of Splendor
• Russell T. Hitt, Jungle Pilot
• Kathryn T. Long, God in the Rainforest
• Wheaton College Archives & Special Collections, To Carry the Light Further
• Wheaton College’s archival “Operation Auca” film footage and photographs
• Mission Aviation Fellowship, “The Story of Operation Auca”
• Later Waorani testimony preserved in missionary archives and examined in modern historical scholarship

Music: Adventure Beyond by Alexander Nakarada (https://creatorchords.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0