Veteran Missionary, Ruth Elton Passes on at 91

 

Nigeria has just lost one of its most enduring missionaries. Ruth Elton, daughter of the late revival pioneer Rev. Sydney Granville “Pa” Elton, has passed on to glory at the age of 91. She died peacefully on Saturday, August 30, in Ilesa, Osun State, where she had lived and laboured for decades. Her remains have been deposited at the mortuary, while funeral arrangements are to be announced.

Born on 7 September 1933 in the United Kingdom, Ruth was only three years old when she arrived in Nigeria with her mother, Hannah, to join her father in Ilesa. While Pa Elton went on to shape Nigeria’s Pentecostal revival through prophetic ministry and mentoring of young ministers, young Ruth quickly embraced the land as her home.

By her teens and early adult years she was fluent in Yoruba and Ebira, and had settled in Okene among the Ebira people. Over the following decades, she took the Gospel deep into Kogi, Ondo, Oyo, and Osun States—villages, towns, and rural outposts where few others were willing to go. Her simple life, steady witness, and compassion earned her the local nickname “Ometere” or “Omotere”—“the one who does good.”

Gospel and compassion hand in hand

Miss Elton never confined her work to preaching alone. In Okene, she became an advocate for women and children, challenging harmful practices such as force-feeding infants. She taught basic hygiene and maternal health, and many communities testify that infant mortality rates dropped because of her intervention. “The Gospel must walk on two feet—truth and love,” she once explained in her teaching.

A radical identification

In the 1970s, at a time when Nigeria did not permit dual citizenship, Ruth Elton took a radical step. She renounced her British passport to fully naturalise as a Nigerian, insisting that her life and ministry belonged entirely to the nation God had called her to. For her, it was not just a legal decision but a spiritual vow: to live and die Nigerian.

Though she lived simply, Miss Elton wrote and published works that reflected her lifelong message:

The Gospel of the Kingdom; Your Citizenship: Hell or the Kingdom?; The Kingdom Has Come. Each emphasised authentic discipleship, the reality of God’s kingdom here and now, and the eternal consequences of faith.

A daughter who became a mother

Unlike many in her generation, Ruth never married and bore no biological children. But her spiritual children number in the tens of thousands—disciples, pastors, missionaries, and communities transformed by her ministry. She embodied her father’s famous vision that Nigeria would move from reproach to righteousness, holding fast to that hope until her final days.

In her later years, despite frailty from a robbery attack and the natural toll of age, she continued to be celebrated. Her 87th birthday in 2021 and her 90th in 2024 drew tributes from church leaders, scholars, and the Christian press, who hailed her for consistency, humility, and sacrificial service. She remained soft-spoken, Scripture-saturated, and quietly steadfast to the end.

Legacy

Miss Elton is survived not by a nuclear family but by a wide spiritual family across Nigeria and beyond. From the Ebira villages where she once taught mothers, to the university fellowships her father helped inspire, to the pastors and missionaries she discipled, her impact is incalculable.

Her passing marks the close of a remarkable chapter in Nigeria’s Christian history—the last living link to the household of Pa Elton, the British missionary whose 50 years in Ilesa left an indelible prophetic imprint. With Ruth’s homegoing, that family’s torch has now been fully handed to the Nigerian church.