The documents in this collection were put into folders labeled and arranged by the archivist. Materials were foldered by types of the material. Mrs. Wismer originally kept these material in notebooks and several of the documents are still in the plastic sheets she put them in. The archivist removed them from these plastic sheets if it was necessary to read both sides of a document.

Most of the collection consists of transcripts of the Gateway to Joy radio program, which had with the intended audience of Christian women in the United States (folders 1-5 through 2-3). These were mostly downloaded by Mrs. Wismer from the Back to the Bible website in 2010, but there are a couple of earlier downloads. They consists mainly of Elliot’s comments on a wide variety of questions and problems in the Christian faith, especially but not exclusively those of concern to women. Topics concern child-raising, family life, male/female relations, dating, marriage, motherhood, Christian sexuality, suffering, knowing God’s will and obedience to it, prayer, devotion readings, and hymns. Elliot also often read letters from viewers in which they talked about problems and events in their own Christian faith. There several transcripts dedicated to Christian people significant in Elliot’s life and thought, either through personal contact or her readings, including her parents Katherine and Philip Howard, her husband Lars Gren, her daughter Valerie Shepard, Gladys Aylward, Corrie ten Boom, Amy Carmichael , Shirley Dobson and Isobel Kuhn, among others.

There are also several friendly, brief letters and notes that Elliot or her husband Lars Gren wrote to Wismer over the years (folder 1-2), discussing Elliot’s activities and concerns. Some of these letters also touch briefly on topics related to living one’s Christian faith, such as other folders have items that Wismer gathered as a result of or as a resource for her work on the radio program, such as articles about Elliot (folders 1-1, 2-4), copies of the program’s newsletters (folder 1-3), and an annual report from the program’s early days (folder 1-4).

There are also a few items not directly related to the program. One such set of documents are the transcripts of talks that Elliot gave to a retreat for Christian women in Pine Mountain, Georgia in 1987 (folder 2-5 through 2-7), covering topics such as obedience to God’s will and the Christian view of sexuality (see the May 18, 2001 letter in folder 1-2). Another are the several audio recordings of a program entitled The Auca Story. These were produced and broadcasted by HCJB Radio in Quito, Ecuador from about 1959 and told the then ongoing story of the killing of Elliot’s husband Jim and four other men in 1956 when they were trying to begin a Christian ministry among the Waorani people of Ecuador (called “Auca” by their enemies) and the later efforts of Elliot, Rachel Saint, and others to continue that work. For more information on these recordings, see the collection inventory.