The Shaping of a Christian Family

How My Parents Nurtured My Faith

Elisabeth Elliot

• Publisher: Revell
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780800731021
• eBook ISBN: 9781493434527

Elisabeth Elliot is one of the most loved and respected communicators of present-day Christianity. In this repackaged edition of The Shaping of a Christian Family, Elliot tells the story of her childhood to share valuable insights on raising godly children. She talks candidly on parental expectations, emphasizes daily Bible reading and prayer, and shows the benefits of practicing such scriptural principles as trust, discipline, courtesy, and teaching by example.

Complete with eight pages of treasured Elliot family photos, The Shaping of a Christian Family is a wonderful book of ideas and inspiration for new parents, experienced parents, and all who have come to trust Elliot's wisdom.

1

A VICTORIAN HOME

“Get your clothes on quickly, Tom. There’s a surprise for you downstairs.”

Uncle Tom was about ninety years old when he told us, his nieces and nephews, about that memorable morning in June 1899 when Granny Marshall, the old nurse, came in to wake him up.

The bicycle! Surely it would be the bicycle he had longed for. Almost everything he had was secondhand, well used by his older brother Frank. If only he could have just one wonderful, new, shiny thing.

He threw on shirt, knickers, black stockings, high-buttoned shoes (no time to button them), and raced downstairs. Was ever an eight-year-old more desperately disappointed? Not a shiny bike but a small bundle in his mother’s arms, a red squalling infant, of whose coming he had not been given even an inkling.

“Your baby sister, Tom,” said his mother. “Her name is Katharine.”

Katharine, my mother, was born to Frank and Ida Keen Gillingham on Clarkson Avenue in Germantown, a section of Philadelphia where her father was in the lumber business. Their large and comfortable house was one-half of what was then called a “double” house, sharing one wall with the next-door neighbors. The first photograph of baby Katharine is one of those old blue-toned ones. It shows a lavishly upholstered wicker carriage with high wheels and a folded parasol. Surrounded by cushions and afghans sits a beautifully befrilled and bonneted child with a round face and bright eyes.

Her autobiography tells the story:

Dr. Thomas Carmichael, father of the now well-known Leonard Carmichael [for many years head of the Smithsonian Institution], ushered my two brothers and me into the world in the house my father and mother moved into right after they were married.

Granny Marshall, the nurse, is one of the first people I remember.

The widow of a sailor lost at sea, Granny spent a good deal of time making “handy sewing kits for seamen.” When Katharine was three or four years old, the old lady broke her leg. It was badly set and remained permanently stiff. “When she came to visit us, as she frequently did, it became my duty to help her put on her black high-buttoned shoes and button them up with a button hook, a duty I never cared for!”

Another woman the little girl learned to love early was her nanny, Sarah Ann Hackley, who always wore a black dress with white collar and cuffs, a white apron, and a white cap. “The world came to an end (for a time) the day she left when I was about six. I remember sitting at the top of the long straight stairs and watching her go. I could not imagine life without her.”

The house had an iron picket fence in front and a big porch with cane rocking chairs. In the front yard was “a small spinny of evergreen trees and in one of them was an arrangement of boughs that formed a nice place to sit. It was my own special hideout and I loved it.”

When you entered the front door, you passed through a vestibule into a spacious front hall, then into the parlor on the right, which held a huge, fat-legged player piano with paper music rolls. Pictures of this room show lamps with immense fringed shades, spindle-legged tables with tasseled velvet or lace covers, and ornate chairs covered with fringed plush, scattered about in what seems, a century later, a haphazard fashion that has little to do with present-day notions of comfort, convenience, or symmetry. Heavy gilt frames on the walls hold paintings of lovely ladies. On the mantel are cut glass vases, a chiming clock, candelabra with crystal prisms, the same things that later adorned the mantel I remember in our house. Back of this room was the den where the little girl would watch herself in a great pier glass as she danced to the music of the player piano. Then came the dining room with a swinging door into the kitchen where the cooking was done on a coal stove, which had a hot water boiler attached. It was here that a tragedy took place when Katharine was about four.

Mother was gay and full of fun. However, I believe she never fully recovered from the tragedy . . . Her sister, after being widowed, had decided to build a cottage at Belmar, New Jersey, to get away from the heat of the city in the summers. She had gone there to oversee the work and left her two little girls with Mother. I think they were ten and seven. Betty was the younger. We had just finished lunch and Mother wanted to go to the kitchen to speak to the maid. She told us three little girls to go upstairs. Betty, who was devoted to her, followed her out to the kitchen. Suddenly there was a terrific explosion. The boiler had exploded by the stove. A piece of metal struck Betty killing her instantly. Helen and I didn’t know what had happened but we were herded quickly over to the house next door where we were put into the parlor and left there for what seemed hours.

Upstairs was the sitting room. Here along with the horsehair sofa and plush stuffed armchairs were Ida’s beautiful Governor Winthrop desk (now in my guest room), a tall telephone on the mantelpiece with its bells mounted on the wall above, and a “speaking tube,” a sort of intercom into which one could blow to attract the cook’s attention in the kitchen. Her father’s smoking stand afforded the little girl pleasure, as he kept his cards and cribbage set there with its chips and little brass pins.

The parents’ bedroom was at the front, with Katharine’s next to it. On the third floor were the brothers’ bedroom and sitting room, a maid’s room, and a storeroom.

Housecleaning in those days was a formidable affair. Rugs had to be taken out in the backyard and a man hired to BEAT them with strong sticks, one in each hand, and if he had a proper sense of rhythm, it was fun to hear him. To prepare for summer, linen carpets were put down on top of the other carpets and all the furniture was swathed in huge linen covers, and the pictures covered with cheesecloth.

In the broad backyard were a sandbox, a trellis covered with grapevines, and a wonderful cherry tree from which Katharine was allowed only a few cherries at a time, as they were not considered “good for little girls.” The pens for Tom’s chickens and Frank’s pigeons were at the back of the yard. Neighborhood cats were interested in the penned chickens and pigeons, so Teddy, Katharine’s “bulldog of sorts,” was taught to chase them. “This caused me much heartache later on when I used to bring beautiful ‘coon’ cats home from Maine, hoping Teddy would learn to like them. He never did, and their nine lives were quickly used up under his attentions. One shake was all it took!”

Katharine and her beloved Teddy, born at about the same time, were inseparable. He felt as she did about many things, including the Fourth of July. Together they would retreat trembling under the bed to get away from the big “cannon crackers” Tom and Frank set off.

Once I was sitting on the front porch in my little rocking bench. My mother had given me a small handful of shelled peanuts (another thing that little girls must not have too many of). Teddy came and sat in front of me drooling. He loved peanuts too. Suddenly I dropped one, and before I could get it, Teddy had swallowed it whole. I was beside myself. I was going to get it back or know the reason why. I stuck my hand into his mouth and tried to get it down his throat, all the while screaming loudly. Our postman was coming along on the other side of the street, and seeing me in that position dropped his bag and came running to my assistance, thinking poor Teddy was chewing my arm up.

Teddy hated the iceman and made his life miserable growling and barking fiercely as he would come staggering into the back shed, lugging a huge block of perhaps fifty pounds of ice with his tongs. The icebox, “a coffin-shaped affair,” had a large ice compartment with a hole in the bottom to allow the water to drip into a pan below. “Woe betide the maid who forgot to empty it once or twice a day! A trickle of water would announce the overflow of the pan.” Katharine was always glad to see the iceman, however, for while the patient horse waited out front, she was allowed to jump onto the back of his wagon and scoop up the ice shavings he had left after cutting the blocks with his pick.

There were few diversions for children in the early twentieth century, and one gets the distinct impression that they were happier because of it. Simple things that cost nothing provided sufficient entertainment, and the mischief Katharine and her friend Dorothy got into was fairly innocuous.

Next door lived old Mrs. Manship, a matriarch who had contrived to keep all of her grown children grouped around her—Horace, a stiff bachelor, and three spinster sisters, Dovey, Wheaty, and Browny, remote and unapproachable, all of them. Katharine and Dorothy, determined somehow to breach the silence, threw sand from the sandbox over the back fence into the Manship yard. There is no record of the consequences of the diversion this must have furnished the Manships. Perhaps they needed an interruption in their quiet life now and then.

Across the way was the big Wistar Estate, another impregnable citadel. “We were never allowed to go there, though I remember trying to sneak in and pick a few violets from under their trees in the spring.”

The Wistar farm was at the dead-end of the street and Old Billy, with his head bent forward in a permanent crook (someone said he had fallen off a hay wagon and broken his neck many years before) used to deliver milk from the farm. I remember being pop-eyed one winter day when he came into the kitchen and stood leaning his hand casually on the hot stove.

One morning I found on waking up that the Wistar barn had burned down during the night. I was furious that I had slept through all the excitement as the fire engines pulled by three horses galloped past our house and no one had wakened me.

On hot summer days the dust was thick in the street. We could look for the watering cart to come along to lay the dust for a brief time. This consisted of a sort of tank cart with a kind of sprinkler system turned on or off at the will of the driver.

One of the sounds I recall hearing was the cheerful tinkling of the little bell the scissors grinder used to let people know he was in the neighborhood. Then one could take him all the knives and scissors needing sharpening and watch him whirl his grindstone and see the sparks fly.

2

A GOODLY HERITAGE

My brother Frank tells a story about our grandfather (Frank Clemens Gillingham), which he insists is true. Grandfather was an officer in the Union army. When Lincoln was killed, his body was shipped by train to Springfield, Illinois. Grandfather was in charge of the funeral train, which made its slow, sad way west, stopping at almost every town on the way, in order that the people could have a last look at the great man. It fell to Grandfather’s lot to see that the cinders from the engine were carefully brushed off Lincoln’s face at each stop.

I remember in 1913 when my grandfather returned from attending the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. This occasion was attended by veterans of both armies, the Confederate and the Union. He told us that one day while there, he was walking along the road and saw an old man sitting by the side of the road and stopped to chat with him. The man asked him what regiment he had been in and when he was told he said to my grandfather, “Sir, I was your drummer boy.”

He also told us how beautifully the battlefield had been fixed up. My father spoke up and asked him if he had ever seen the battlefield of Antietam—that he thought it very beautiful. My grandfather replied very quietly, “I fought there.” I have read that it was the bloodiest battle of the bloodiest of wars.

Katharine’s father was Frank Morris Gillingham, eldest son of this grandfather. He entered his father’s lumber business while still in his teens.

Every morning, year in and year out, Dad would have the same breakfast—coffee, toast (I guess), and two boiled eggs opened into a big bowl with hashed brown potatoes put on top of them, which he mixed up in a jiffy for he was in a hurry to get his train on the Reading Railroad at Wistar Station, which was at the foot of a long hill on Wistar Street. Down the hill in the morning when he was fresh and rested, up the hill in the evening when he was hot and weary from a long day in the lumberyard. It must have been trying, but he came home to a cheerful, pretty little wife, five feet tall, Ida Keen. She was the youngest of four children of Alfred Keen. She had a brother Harry who was killed in a railroad accident, another brother, Uncle Will, whom I vaguely remember as a tall handsome man suffering from what I suppose was arthritis. Her sister, christened for some obscure reason Lizzie, whom some of you knew as Nana, was next in line, and then Mother, who I can sort of imagine was the pet of the family.

My only recollection of my grandpa Keen is of him sitting in a big rocking chair at Aunt Lizzie’s house where he lived, and sending Helen, Aunt Lizzie’s oldest daughter, around to the store to get him CHEWING Tobacco!

My grandfather and grandmother Gillingham lived in a beautiful big house on the corner of Wayne Avenue and Coulter Street in Germantown. Living with them were her mother, my great-grandmother Tacy Shoemaker Morris, and Great-Grandmother’s sister Mattie, a maiden lady of uncertain age and NOT very beautiful, as I recall. Great-Grandmother dressed in black with ruching at the neck and cuffs (see “ruche” in the dictionary). A small cap sat on her head and a little bang of false hair adorned her forehead. She sat on a low rocker by the window that looked out on Coulter Street and made those beautiful silk patchwork quilts that Bets has and also I think I gave one to Phyllis. You should study the infinite number of different kinds of stitching on them.

Grandmother (Tacy Morris Gillingham) died when I was quite small and I just barely remember her. One thing, though—when we were invited there for Sunday dinner, we almost always had HOMINY GRITS, the big kind! I’m sure we had other good things, but as I didn’t LIKE those big grits they are the one thing I remember! After she died her place was always set for dinner as though she were expected. This puzzled me very much.

For a short time we had a horse named Old Tom. He was about as broad as he was long and always shied at manholes, to the embarrassment of the occupants of the carriage. I remember two big buffalo robes and have a vague mental picture of being in a sleigh, tucked in with those huge things around me.

On hot summer days horses that pulled heavy carts and wagons were often fitted out with straw hats with holes in them for their ears to stick through, giving them a comical appearance. At intervals along the streets and out in the country were placed big tubs full of water to give the horses a drink. When it was time to feed them, their driver would fasten a “feed bag” containing oats over their noses.

The first auto I remember belonged to our family doctor, Dr. Carmichael. It looked just like a buggy, big wheels and hard tires, no steering wheel but a sort of bar that crossed the lap of the driver. I have no idea what make it was. Maybe it was run by electricity.

My father bought a car, a Columbia, about 1904, I think. There were no doors, one just stepped in from a running board. The driver sat on the right side (a hangover from horse-and-buggy days, no doubt) with the wheel set at right angles to him and a horn with a rubber bulb that one squeezed. I don’t remember whether or not those early models had curtains to be put on by hand in case of rain. One day I was riding up front with my father—it must have been the Fourth of July for I had an American flag that I was waving gaily. Unfortunately I waved it in my father’s face thus obstructing his view and we ended up against a streetlight or telephone pole. My father was not happy—neither was I!

It did seem we often ended our trips in a ditch, the roads then having very deep ditches on either side. In order to avoid another vehicle, one had to pull over a bit too far for comfort, and if the road was slippery, the car gently slid into the ditch, making it very difficult to get out unless someone with a horse came along. Then we were subjected to the humiliation of hearing the bystanders sing out, “Honk, honk! Get a horse!”

For traveling in the open cars of the early nineteen hundreds, DUSTERS, GOGGLES, AND SCARVES were a must. A duster was a long linen affair that reached nearly to the ankles. My father had a linen cap and goggles—huge things that covered the top half of his face. Ladies wore large hats with heavy veils draped over them, brought down over our ears and fastened in the back. They blew out in the wind as we whizzed along at a thumping fifteen or twenty miles an hour! At the end of the day’s run when we removed the goggles, we were an odd sight, the lower part of our faces sunburned and windburned and covered with dust, while the goggles had created an owlish effect around the eyes!

One of the delights of summertime when I was a child was to ride in the OPEN trolley car. These were put on about May, I think. The seats were wooden and ran across the width of the trolley. There was a long step that ran the length of the car, and to collect the fare the con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Books by Elisabeth Elliot
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Preface
• 1. A Victorian Home
• 2. A Goodly Heritage
• 3. A Beautiful New House
• 4. The Cottage, the Schottische, the Church
• 5. Brave for Daddy Dear
• 6. Light and Life
• 7. Sit Still, My Daughter
• 8. A Man of Decision
• 9. A Christian Home Is Born
• 10. The New Missionaries
• 11. He Lived What He Taught Us
• 12. Frugality, Hospitality, and Heroes
• 13. The Lord’s Day
• 14. A Habit of Order
• 15. More Babies
• 16. A Father’s Tenderness
• 17. A Mother Is a Chalice
• 18. Sacrificial Authority
• 19. Trust
• 20. Love Is Patient and Kind
• 21. Rules
• 22. Enforcement: A Mission for Redemption
• 23. Encouragement
• 24. Franconia
• 25. Work and Play
• 26. Courtesy
• 27. A Mother’s Devotion
• 28. Letting Us Grow
• 29. Letting Us Go
• 30. The Matter of Marriage
• 31. The Family Letters
• Afterword
• About the Author
• Back Ads
• Back Cover