I grew up on missionary stories. My bookshelf was full of them, and they inspired my dreams that, one day, I would follow in the footsteps of these godly heroes. Foreign mission work was a rare avenue open to women in my conservative Christian world, and I had no doubt God had called me to full-time service. But missing from my bookshelf was a story published in 1968 called A Leopard Tamed by Eleanor “Van” Vandevort. Given that Van became best friends with Elisabeth Elliot in college and both embarked on their missions around the same time, it might seem odd that Elisabeth was on my bookshelf while Van was not.
What I didn’t know was that Christian bookstores treated A Leopard Tamed differently than Elliot’s book Through the Gates of Splendor. Van’s book was uncomfortably honest about hard questions. Churchgoers preferred glorified missionary tales. But despite the initial chilly reception, Van’s book is making a comeback, thanks to recent biographies on Elisabeth Elliot (see here and here). The biographies refer to Van, bringing her into the limelight. Maybe now the Christian world is ready to hear her wisdom? Evangelical publisher Hendrickson bet on greater receptivity when it published a 50th anniversary edition of her book in 2018.
So, who is Eleanor Vandevort who often went by the name “Van”? Born in 1925 in Pennsylvania, Van was raised in a Christian home with two siblings. She developed a love of languages in high school and decided to major in classical Greek at Wheaton College, where she was a student from 1945-1949. Van decided to become a Bible translator and spent thirteen years in Nasir, South Sudan, among the Nuer people. She embarked on her journey in the fall of 1949 at the age of 24. Her book, A Leopard Tamed recounts stories from those years as a missionary.
The way Van writes about her experiences demonstrates her respect for the Nuer tribe: she centers them in her storytelling. Unlike many missionary stories that focus on the missionary, we don’t learn as much about Van in this book as we do the Nuer. While I wished to see more of her in the text (because I want to know her), I suspect Van purposely took a more ethnographic approach, seeking to objectively describe the scenery, rituals, and daily life of the people she came to love. Van wants us to see and understand the Nuer experience.
Van’s Friend and Co-Worker Kuac
Van describes various Nuer individuals she encounters, including Kuac the first pastor in the tribe. He helps Van with the Nuer language and Bible translation. They spend many hours, days, and years working closely together. Both of them experience similar spiritual questions and struggles as a result of the tribe’s lack of interest in Christianity. They wonder if their labor is in vain. If the “harvest is plentiful,” why didn’t the Spirit seem to be helping more of the Nuer understand the gospel?
Van and Kuac also recognized shortcomings in Western missionary methods. At the time, missionary work often involved projecting Western cultural expectations on religious conversion. As a pastor, Kuac began wearing Western clothes, adopting Western housing and furniture, and came to rely on “money,” in a tribe that often didn’t see a need for clothing at all and relied on a very different economic system. As a result, Kuac was viewed as “foreign” by his own people.
To make matters worse, the United Presbyterian Church of North America that trained and appointed Kuac pulled its funding because it expected Kuac to become self-sufficient. But the Nuer tribe’s economic realities were not conducive for supporting a pastor. The financial strain caused stress and disillusionment for Kuac who needed to provide for his own family.
Cross-Cultural Understanding
Van initially found herself exasperated by Nuer rituals and practices. But as she spent time among this people, she began to realize that what initially seemed senseless had logic within the Nuer system of things. Van does a great job of bringing readers along as she moves from exasperation to cross-cultural understanding.
Presenting the gospel within a different culture caused Van to rethink certain things. For example, Kuac could not comply with the Scriptural principle of marrying a Christian wife because there were so few Christians in the tribe. Similarly, the mission organization wrestled with how to respond to polygamy. Western influences discouraged the practice. But Van noted that monogamy created problems for women in a world where singleness did not make sense, “If women were not to be wives and mothers, what alternative reason for being was a pastor to suggest to them in a land where there were no careers to offer as possible solutions” (96). Wouldn’t forced monogamy in that culture result in suffering for women and cause its own problems as a result? Polygamy gave women a place to belong in a society where single, childless women did not have a place.
Van was reluctant to place judgment on polygamy because of the systemic social realities in that culture. After Van left the Sudan, she received a letter from Kuac indicating he was stripped of his pastoral role for marrying a second wife. He reassured Van that his faith was still strong and asked her wisdom on the matter. In a 1974 epilogue Van wrote, she doesn’t report her response.
But in a 2003 interview, Van said she replied to Kuac with understanding: “I had written telling I understood why he needed another wife and thought nothing more of it. He, of course, was under scrutiny from fellow pastors etc. and was pushed aside, I think. But I wasn’t there, so I don’t really know. I do know we were way ahead of ourselves in attempting to direct the way a Christian should behave in marriage.”
Bible Translation and Inerrancy
Van quickly realized that it was difficult to translate certain concepts from Scripture for the Nuer tribe. How should one “translate the word disciple, meaning learner. The culture had no place for the adult learner” (92). Translating the Bible word for word was impossible if the goal was to make Scripture accessible and comprehensible. Van quickly realized, “The many problems of translation exploded my theories of Bible translating, and precluded the possibility of producing an exact and therefore inerrant—as Evangelicals used the term—translation of the Scriptures” (95).
Van worked on a dynamic equivalent translation that required intimate knowledge of the culture to convey Scriptural concepts that were, in some way, understandable in the Nuer language and worldview. Today, her translation work is available to the public, having been donated to Indiana University (see the online database).
The Gospel
One thing Van noticed is how the gospel became entangled with white man’s privileges. She writes, “To attain to a status like the white man’s, or at least to have what he had—money, clothes, greatness, power, and so forth—it was logical that a [Nuer] boy should not only accept the reading, writing, and arithmetic [of the mission school], but the Bible talk too, since who was to know just where the secret of white man’s success lay” (21). Many Nuer people were baptized not because of an understanding or acceptance of Christianity, but because it meant access to certain assets.
This kind of entanglement was also evident in the medical care that missionaries provided. Van writes, “[W]e were faced with how to help the Nuer distinguish between what we were trying to do for the body and for the soul” (114). The Nuer saw the white missionary doctors as practicing magic. The doctors had a special relationship with God and were sometimes viewed as divine themselves. If the medicine worked God was pleased; if it didn’t work, God was punishing them. It was challenging to convey the distinction between scientific and spiritual realities, and the idea that something bad can happen to the body without it being an act of God.
Van came to realize that her initial hope of evangelizing the Nuer was not what she expected: “I was full of excitement . . . with the hope of helping these people . . . It never crossed my mind then that my definition of their need was meaningless to them, that for all practical purposes I would have to invent a need in order to validate the message I had come to give.” (26). The Nuer had basic needs in the here and now—how a barren woman might become pregnant or how to save a person’s life after a snake bite.
But the missionaries were focused on eternal salvation, which often seemed irrelevant to the people. What mattered was the material and day to day life. What mattered was what God was doing now in seemingly killing a child or saving a child. God was perceived as a source of magical intervention for daily trouble. The gospel, as it was portrayed by the missionaries, simply didn’t make sense to the Neur.
Was It All in Vain? The Meaning of It All
Van wrestled with the purpose of her time in the Sudan. Few people came to Christ. The people weren’t hungry for the Word in the way she had been taught people around the world were hungry for answers. And yet, the Nuer were afraid of death to the point that they avoided touching a dead body (only family members touched a body to bury it). Common across cultures is a fear of death, and that is what Van eventually saw as her evangelistic work—freeing people from that fear to live in peace.
Theodicy is also an important theme in the book. The Nuer, as with modern Americans, wrestled with their image of God in light of suffering. It’s common, even across very different cultures, to believe that bad things happen because God is angry or that good things happen because we’ve earned God’s favor. Van and Kuac wrestled with the lack of success in their work, the death of Kuac’s first child, and other tragedies in the lives of the tribe. How was it that God is good when expected deliverance didn’t happen?
Van found some solace in science in a way the Nuer could not. She knew the reason a doctor could not save someone was not because God was angry but because a blood transfusion was necessary and supplies were low. Not everything that happens is because God is making it happen. Van also kept turning back to spiritual realities. Despite the decay of the body and the hardships of life, the physical realm is not all there is. God can give us spiritual peace amid the storm. And someday all will be well. Van said that “is what keeps me anchored to hope. Not hope that everything will be all right, but hope that all will be made right someday” (133).
Expulsion from the Sudan
In December 1962, amid civil unrest in the region, Van and several other missionaries received a letter from the Sudanese government ordering them to leave the country. Not long before, Elisabeth Elliot’s husband had been killed in Ecuador, and she was encountering her own trouble in the mission work there. Van traveled to Ecuador to be with Elisabeth and eventually both returned to the U.S. where they spent the rest of their lives. Van never saw Kuac or the land of the Nuer again. At the end of her book, Van says she found comfort in Isaiah:
“’Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen that ye may know, and believe me, and understand that I am he.’ This is what He wanted of me. This is what was needful. Not the salvation of the Nuer people. Not the translation. No, it was something even greater than these. It was the severest test of faith I knew: to believe Him, not for what He would do . . . but for who He is” (205).
In the same way, Kuac, continued to face hardship, suffering imprisonment, as the Sudan descended into war. He wrote a letter to Van saying, “Yet in spite of all this, God had not failed me” and his daily prayer was “Lord, keep me faithful and make me all that I can be in Jesus” (207).
In the Afterword of the book (written by friend Trudy Summers), we learn that eventually, Kuac’s daughter, Sarah, along with many other Nuer refugees, came to America, and Van was astonished to discover that the gospel seeds sown years before had sprouted. Thirty-five years after living among them in the Sudan, the Nuer were now planting churches in the American Midwest. It’s a hopeful new ending to the book.
And yet, it’s also that desire for a happy ending that can tempt us to miss Van’s insights. Not everything in life can be wrapped up in a nice bow. Jesus taught, “Do not rejoice that the spirits obey you; rejoice that your name is written heaven” (Luke 10:20). In other words, don’t base your contentment on success, which we can’t always control, base it on the fact that you belong to God. Van realized that when life falls apart or seems senseless, one thing is certain, God is still faithful and true. As Julian of Norwich said, “All will be well, and all will be well and all manner of things will be well.”
Note: The beautiful cover art, as well as other illustrations in the book are the work of Jim Howard, the brother of Elisabeth Elliot.