Ed McCully had a bright future ahead of him: a gifted speaker, an athlete, and class president at Wheaton College, he was on track for a career as a lawyer in the United States. Few would have expected that one day he would trade it all for the Amazon jungle.
Born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1927, he grew up in Milwaukee, the son of a bakery executive who was also a church leader among the Plymouth Brethren. He graduated in business administration and economics from Wheaton, where he became friends with another student, Jim Elliot.
Enrolled at Marquette University Law School, he seemed destined for a career in law. Working as a night hotel receptionist, however, he reread the book of Nehemiah and exchanged letters with Elliot, who was already preparing to go to Ecuador.
On the eve of his second year of law school, on September 22, 1950, he announced that he would not be returning to classes. He wrote to Elliot that he had only one desire: to live a life of complete abandonment to the Lord, pouring all his energy into it.
He married Marilou Hobolth on June 29, 1951, and around the same time studied the basics of dentistry and obstetrics at the School of Missionary Medicine in Los Angeles, to meet basic needs on the mission field. In December 1952, he set sail with his wife and young son for Ecuador.
The family served among the Quichua people at the Shandia and Arajuno mission stations, in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. There he faced isolation, tropical diseases, and the rebuilding of the Shandia station after a flood, hardships common to missionary life of that era.
In 1955, he joined Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Pete Fleming, and Roger Youderian in a plan for peaceful contact with the Huaorani, an isolated people feared for their violence. The group carried pistols but had agreed not to use them to kill, even under attack. The operation went ahead in secrecy and without formal approval from the agencies supporting the missionaries, who already knew the risk: ten years earlier, the Huaorani had killed other missionaries who tried to approach them. This decision to risk their lives, leaving behind wives and young children, still divides opinion today among those who examine the episode.
On January 8, 1956, McCully and the other four were speared to death on the banks of the Curaray River. Marilou, pregnant with the couple’s third child, was left a widow with two small boys. The group’s story, told by Elisabeth Elliot in Through Gates of Splendor, continues to stir young people around the world to leave everything behind for peoples who have not yet heard of Christ.
