Southern Baptists are once again grieving over the loss of missionaries who have paid the ultimate cost of serving God in hostile lands. Five American missionaries were shot in Northern Iraq yesterday in a drive-by shooting near Mosul. Four of the group were killed, and the fifth, critically wounded.
The Southern Baptist missionaries, who were working on a water purification project, were reportedly traveling in one car when they were attacked. Two Germans working on another water supply project south of Bagdad were shot Tuesday, bringing the number of foreign civilians killed in drive-by shootings in Iraq to half a dozen within the same 24 hours.
The American victims have been identified as 60-year-old Larry T. Elliott and his wife, 58-year-old Jean Dover Elliott of Cary, North Carolina; 38-year-old Karen Watson of Bakersfield, California; and 28-year-old David McDonnall of Rowlett, Texas. McDonnall's wife, Carrie Taylor McDonnall, 26, remains in critical condition at a U.S. military hospital in Mosul.
According to Associated Press reports, the car in which the five missionaries were traveling when they came under attack was found by an off-duty Iraqi policeman not long after the late Monday afternoon attack. Three of the missionaries were found dead. The two that were still alive on the scene, the McDonnalls, were taken to an Iraqi hospital and later moved to a combat support hospital. U.S. military surgeons worked for six hours to save the life of David McDonnall, but he died Tuesday morning on a helicopter en route to a military hospital in Baghdad.
Eric Bridges is a spokesman for the Virginia-based Southern Baptist International Mission Board. "We're heartbroken," he says, "obviously, and we're in shock, although all of our people are aware of the dangers of working in Iraq and some other countries these days."
Bridges points out that the missionaries were working in Iraq not in an effort to convert the people there, but simply to help them recover from the devastating effects of the war. "The intent is to express the love of Christ by serving people who are in great need," he says.
Prior to coming to Iraq, Larry and Jean Elliott had spent more than two decades as Baptist missionaries in Honduras. A friend from the Elliotts' home church says they were in Iraq scouting the best location for a water purification project. Karen Watson had arrived the country earlier this month to help the other missionaries look into the optimal allocation of the mission board's humanitarian efforts.
Baptist deacon Larry Kingsley spoke to AP about the slain missionaries, noting that they understood that "they couldn't really share their Christian faith unless somebody asked them," and that their service in Iraq was "a humanitarian situation." Nevertheless, Kingsley says, the missionaries went willingly into the violence-ridden region because they were "people who just had a great heart for helping out."
At least four other Southern Baptist Missionaries have died violent deaths in the last year and a half -- three in Yemen and one in the Philippines.
© 2004 Agape Press. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
