Elliott Tepper was born in Chicago in 1946. His father was born to Russian-Germanic Jewish immigrants to America who passed through Ellis Island.  His mother was one of 11 children. She was born to English-Scottish tobacco and cotton farmers in South Carolina.  She and her other 5 sisters all became nurses.  Elliott’s father grew up as an only child, and he was a prodigy in mathematics. He entered Northwestern University to study mathematics at 16 years of age.  His parents met during the second World War. His mother was a nurse and his father was an officer and instructor teaching officers mathematics.

Elliott’s mother and father married at the end of the Second World War.  All his mother’s family were Christians, but she converted to Judaism to marry his father. Consequently, Elliott was raised in a Jewish home and attended Synagogue all throughout his youth.  It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that he grew up in an intense intellectual and professional environment.  How did he become a wrestler and an athlete?

Elliott’s Russian-German Jewish grandfather, Louis Tepper, was a great athlete and a great champion.  He was the Triple Jump Champion of Illinois in his youth and also a handball champion in Chicago.  He began working at the Chicago Athletics Club and went on to become one of the directors.  From the earliest days, he was Elliott’s coach and mentor.  He bought Elliott’s first set of weights when he was 8 years old and disciplined and trained him. At 8 years of age he was able to do the complete Olympic floor exercise of a forward flip into a round off directly into a back flip without hands.  

New York State Champion, 1964 

On a March afternoon in 1964, a 127-pound wrestler from Alfred G. Berner High School in Massapequa stood at the center of the mat as New York State champion. The year before, at the same tournament, he had finished third. He had gone back to the room, and he had fixed it.  That is the shortest possible summary of Elliott Tepper's life, and everything that follows is a variation on it.

The Wrestler

Elliott Tepper wrestled for Massapequa High School and then for Berner High School on Long Island, graduating in 1964. His tournament record is the part that survives: Section 8 champion in 1961; Nassau County champion in 1961, 1963, and 1964; third place in the New York State Championships in 1963; and, in 1964, the New York State title at 127 pounds. His dual-meet record has been lost to time — the current Massapequa coaching staff reports those books no longer exist. The tournament results are enough.

Nassau County wrestling in the early 1960s was not a soft place to learn the sport. It produced state champions and Division I starters in quantity, and a boy who won the county title three times out of four had been tested against the best New York had. What the 1963 State results tells you is more useful than the 1964 one. Third place is the loss that most young athletes accept and explain. Elliott came back the following season and did not lose.

Lehigh, Class of 1968

Elliott entered Lehigh University in the fall of 1964 and graduated with the Class of 1968. In that era freshmen were ineligible for varsity competition, which gave him three varsity seasons on the mat.   He placed at the EIWA Championships in all three: third in 1966, third in 1967, and second in 1968. To place three consecutive years at the EIWA — arguably one of the toughest conference tournaments in the country, both then and now — is a durable achievement, and the trajectory of those finishes says what the raw numbers do not. He got better every year he was there. He finished his career on the rise.  Lehigh wrestling is a demanding culture. It rewards the man who shows up when nobody is watching and punishes the one who does not. Elliott did not merely survive it; he improved inside it; three years running, and he left with the habits it teaches. Those habits — the willingness to be uncomfortable, the refusal to accept a result as final, the understanding that preparation is the whole of the thing — turned out to be the only qualifications he would ever really need.

Cambridge, Harvard, and the Turn

What followed was, on paper, a straight line to a comfortable American life. In 1969 Elliott studied and completed the Second Part of the Economics Tripos at the University of Cambridge.  In 1971 he had degrees from Harvard Business School, Economics at Lehigh, Economics at Cambridge,: the résumé of a man on his way to a corner office.

However, it did not happen.  At Harvard, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Elliott encountered a generation asking whether the corner office was worth having, and he found he agreed with the question while rejecting most of the era's answers to it.  He was looking for something the credentials could not supply. After he crashed through a plate glass window and wound up in the local emergency room, he had a religious awakening.  He found faith, and it reorganized everything.

It is fair to say that nothing in his education pointed toward what he did next. That is precisely the point. A Harvard MBA is an instrument, but Elliott chose what to build with it.

In 1973 he married Mary Prevatt of Wilmington, North Carolina — a UNC graduate and a school counselor by training, and by every account the equal partner in everything that came next.  Afterward they attended Elim Bible College, preparing for a life neither of their diplomas had anticipated.

Mexico

From 1978 to 1982 Elliott and Mary served as independent missionaries in Puebla, Mexico, supported by Myrtle Grove Presbyterian Church of Wilmington and by friends who believed in them.  They went with young sons and no institutional safety net.  In Puebla, Mexico  Elliott also became a professor of Economica at the Universidad de Las Americas in Puebla.   Four years in, the results on recruiting students were modest.  Wrestlers know what to do with a result like that, and in 1983 they joined WEC as missionaries. 

Spain, and the Worst Possible Timing

In 1983 the Teppers joined WEC International and were sent to Spain.  They arrived in Madrid with Mary and their four young boys in the middle of the worst heroin and AIDS epidemic Europe had ever seen, and their neighborhood — San Blas — was the epicenter of it.   Spain in the 1980s was not interested in missionaries.  It was prosperous, secular, and entirely uninterested in what an American couple had to say about God.   Elliott and Mary preached and were ignored — with one exception.  There was one group of people in Madrid who were interested, because they were desperate: the yonkis, the young heroin addicts dying in the doorways of San Blas.

So the Teppers went to the addicts.   In 1985, together with fellow missionaries Lindsay and Myk McKenzie, they began inviting heroin addicts into their own apartment— their family flat, with four boys in it — and driving them to and from detox. It was not a program.  It was a couple, a car, a spare room, and a decision. When the number of addicts outgrew the apartment, they found more room. They have been finding more room for the last forty years.

Betel

That apartment became Betel.  Today Betel International operates residences, rehabilitation communities, and churches in more than 100 cities across 18 nations, on five continents.  More than 200,000 people have entered its free residential programs.  Nobody has ever been charged a peseta, a euro, or a dollar.

The economics of it are where the Harvard MBA finally shows up. Roughly 5 percent of Betel's funding comes from churches and donors.  The other 95 percent is earned — by the residents themselves, through businesses Betel owns and runs: moving companies, furniture restoration, coffee shops, restaurants, painting crews, dental clinics, farms, and auto repair shops.   A man arrives with nothing and works his way back. The dignity is not incidental to the model; it is the model.  Elliott is its architect.

He has never taken a salary. Neither have the directors of any Betel facility.  There is no retirement plan. He buys his own car and pays his own insurance and lives on the missionary offerings received from friends and supporters through WEC (Worldwide Evangelism For Christ).

He is the International Director of Betel and the Lead Pastor of Iglesia Betel de Madrid, and he has been paid nothing for either, for forty years.

The cost has not been only financial. Their youngest son Timothy died as a boy.  Mary — co-founder, co-director, the other half of all of it — died in Madrid on July 10, 2012, after thirty-nine years of marriage and mission.  Elliott kept going.

 Outstanding American

A year ago Elliott suffered a stroke.  He is roughly eighty percent recovered, still running Betel International and developing new leaders.   His sons will tell you that in his prime he could climb three flights of stairs on his hands and do thirty one-handed push-ups.  At nearly eighty years old, and a year past a stroke, the family's estimate is that he can still manage about ten.

The wrestler who lost in 1963 and came back to win in 1964 has been doing the same thing ever since — with a heroin and AIDS epidemic, with a country that would not listen, with the death of a son, with the death of his wife, and now with his own body.  He goes back to the room.  He fixes it. He is still on his feet.

Wrestling did not make Elliott Tepper a good man. But it taught an eigh-year-old with a barbell what to do with a bad result, and he has spent sixty years teaching that same lesson to people the world had already written off.

Note from Elliott:

For those interested in the work that Betel does, every year Betel publishes a 40 page Annual Report that is available to the public at "Betel.org". 

I highly recommend to all who would like to know more about Betel to take a tour of Betel’s communities, churches, income generating activities and sundry projects that self-finance Betel’s free residential program in the nations.  The report is illustrated with photographs.    Betel worldwide welcomes visitors.  It is a joy and a blessing to offer hospitality to friends and inquirers.  

Elliott Tepper

Note from his sponsor:  If anyone wants to learn more about the life growing up in a missionaries home there is an outstanding memoir written by Jonathan Tepper, his son, called “Shooting Up” available on Amazon.  It’s available in hardback and a Kindle version.  An inspiring story that gives more detail on why I thought he was an Outstanding American.   “Powerfully moving...an extraordinary memoir." —George Stephanopoulos, Good Morning America and ABC Sunday News