I want to encourage you to watch this 7 minute video from Christian Missions in Many Lands, our missions organization, about the world-changing event that happened 70 years ago in Ecuador. In 1956, three CMML missionary families, including one who grew up in our Sunday school (Ed McCully), along with two other families, were working together in what they called “Operation Auca,” to evangelize the isolated, violent Waoroni tribe. During one of their in-person communication encounters, the 5 men were speared to death.
If you’ve heard or read the story (“Through Gates of Splendor“, “End of the Spear“, etc.), you may remember that this event inspired hundreds of missionaries from many denominations to go out into the world, and that the Waorani tribe in Ecuador was physically and spiritually saved. Today there are over 300 believers in the tribe, and the man who speared Pete Fleming became a missionary and elder in the church there. Pete’s brother Ken, who just recently passed away on Christmas Eve at the age of 98, is in the video. It shows a picture of him with his arm around his brother’s killer. Ken was a professor of several of us at Creekside who attended Emmaus University.
It’s an incredible story, and it’s a special legacy for us with our direct link to Ed McCully. I just want to share this to remind and encourage us to give our all for Christ this year. That kid in our Sunday School, Awana, or youth group, could be the next Ed McCully. Jim Elliot, one of the five, is known for his faith and famous quote, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
-Mark Kline