The Cross and The Switchblade Author Elizabeth Sherrill Dead at 95

Jeff Crosby, president and CEO of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, noted that Chosen Books “dramatically elevated the profile and the impact of Christian publishing.”

“Elizabeth’s gifts as a manuscript stylist, editor, and publisher were enormous. She knew how to tell a story with power and with an economy of words, and the books she touched were brought to a mass market audience,” Crosby said in a statement.

“I was privileged to chair ECPA’s recognition committee the year it awarded her and, posthumously, John Sherrill with our Kenneth N. Taylor Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. And as a bookseller in the 1980s, I marveled at the way the books she touched and inspired readers toward belief.”

Sherrill, who was born on Feb. 14, 1928, was the author of more than 30 books, several with her husband, including God’s Smuggler with Brother Andrew, The Hiding Place with Corrie ten Boom and The Cross and The Switchblade with David Wilkerson.

According to The Christian Post, she also contributed over 2,000 articles to Guideposts, a Christian publication.

“It seems appropriate that she was born on Valentine’s Day because she exuded love. For her family, for her colleagues, for the subjects of the countless stories she wrote and edited, for Guideposts readers, for her faith community, for God’s beautiful world and the people in it,” Guideposts stated in an article in tribute to her life.

“A founding contributor, it’s hard to imagine how Guideposts would have ever happened without her; because of her contributions, it became a much-loved venue for true personal stories of faith in action,” the article added.

“She was the embodiment of hope and inspiration. Those of us who have worked for the organization and written for it all learned from Tib. In fact, she was not only a model of a compassionate storyteller but a wonderful teacher of writing.”

In one Guidepost article titled “Hope and Faith in Times of Sadness,” Sherrill explained how God helped her during her battle with clinical depression.

“I’d had such attacks as long as I could remember, and they were always as unaccountable as this one. I can still hear my father’s cry of bafflement the one and only time I tried to tell him how I was feeling,” Sherrill wrote.

“Not happy? With a loving family, good health, material comfort beyond anything he had dreamed of in his own childhood! He told me that as a boy he was sent each Saturday to the store, clutching the dime that was to buy Sunday’s meat for the family of nine,” she continued.

“How could a child who had been as fortunate as I fail to be happy? How could I, years later as a young wife and mother, be anything but content?”

She further noted that she managed to find healing through her relationship with God.

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Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for Christian Headlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.