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Amy Carmichael
The Winning of Souls
Go ye.” She heard the words audibly, as clearly as a human voice. And then again, “Go ye,” the command crashing through her subconscious like a lightning strike. It was, without question, the voice of God, calling Amy Wilson Carmichael to pursue mission work. And so, one year later, on March 3, 1893, Amy Carmichael leaned against the deck rail of the Valetta as it slowly steamed away from the shores of Tilbury, England. Her friends and family sang hymns to her from the wharf as the Japan-bound ship faded into the horizon. Little did she know at the time that she would spend the remainder of her eighty-three years as a missionary overseas.
No More Fit for a Missionary Than a Puppy
Even at a young age, service was an integral part of Amy’s life. After her father died when she was seventeen, Amy, the oldest of seven children, helped her mother raise her siblings in their tiny village of Millisle, Ireland. She also dedicated herself to various good works, first launching a Bible study in Belfast with a small group of mill girls called the “shawlies” (named for the shawls they wore as head coverings because they were too poor to buy proper hats), and later beginning a similar ministry with factory workers in Manchester, England.
It was during her time in England that Amy met Keswick Convention co-founder and Quaker Robert Wilson, whom she affectionately called the D.O.M. (“Dear Old Man”). Wilson, whose name Amy adopted as part of her own before she left for her first missionary trip to Japan, filled the role of both spiritual advisor and father figure for Amy.
Amy was chosen as the Keswick Convention’s first missionary. Fifty years later she would declare that she was “no more fit to be a Keswick missionary than a Skye terrier puppy,”1 yet Amy never let her inexperience deter her from what she considered her God-given calling. Initially she served in Japan for fifteen months and then for a very brief period in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), but it wasn’t until she applied to and was accepted by the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society that she found what was to become her lifelong mission. She sailed for India in 1895. Once Amy set foot on Indian soil, she never returned home.
“The Winning of Souls”
Amy was challenged and sometimes even frustrated by missionary work in India. Not only did she find the native language, Tamil, daunting, she was also exasperated by what she called the nominal Christianity that had resulted from the great conversion sweep of the early nineteenth century. Furthermore, she discovered that the Indian caste system was virtually impenetrable. Those in the lower castes “lived in a sort of twilight, far from the true Gospel light,”2 while the elite upper castes—the Brahmans, the Vellalas, and the trade guilds—barred from their homes anyone they considered unclean, including foreigners and especially missionaries. Despite the formidable obstacles, Amy was relentless, traveling to and camping in villages, reading the Gospels aloud, praying with women, and endeavoring to convert Indians to Christianity one soul at a time.
She poured every ounce of her personal energy and faith into her calling, and nothing irritated Amy more than lackadaisical missionary work. “O to be delivered from half-hearted missionaries! Don’t come if you mean to turn aside for anything. . . . Don’t come if you haven’t made up your mind to live for one thing—the winning of souls,” she wrote to one young woman.3 On the other hand, she also made it clear that even the most dedicated missionaries were not above the rest of the human race in nobility or purity: “Don’t imagine that by crossing the sea and landing on a foreign shore and learning a foreign lingo you ‘burst the bonds of outer sin and hatch yourself a cherubim.’”4 Amy knew that missionary or not, she was as flawed as any other human being.
She was also disdainful of any attempt to entice potential converts to Christianity with anything but pure Scripture. On one occasion, for instance, her Indian assistant Saral suggested they teach women to knit with a bit of pink wool while talking about Jesus and the Gospels at the same time. Amy refused; the pure Gospel was more than enough and certainly didn’t need to be prettied up or made more tantalizing than it already was. As her biographer Elisabeth Elliot wrote, “To try to help God with pink fancywork was, she felt, plain unbelief.”5
A Crack Opens Right at Her Feet
In early March 1901, Amy experienced a life-altering event that rooted her to India for life.
A Christian woman by the name of Servant of Jesus came upon a seven-year-old girl named Preena who stood alone outside a church in the village of Pannaivilai, not far from a Hindu temple where her mother had abandoned her as a devotion to the gods. The next morning, Servant of Jesus delivered Preena, who had run away from the temple, to Amy. From this child, Amy learned about the lives of these temple girls and women, known as devadasis—details that turned her life upside down. After hearing firsthand about the prostitution these girls endured, often at a shockingly young age, Amy knew instantly that her life had taken a dramatic turn: “Sometimes the broad smooth levels of life are crossed by a black-edged jagged crack, rent, as it seems, by an outburst of the fiery force below,” she wrote later. “We find ourselves suddenly close upon it; it opens right at our feet.”6
Three months after Preena’s arrival, Amy had already become known as Amma (from the Tamil word ammal, meaning “mother”) to four more orphans. By 1916 the single, dilapidated bungalow that had housed a handful of orphans, many of them temple children, had grown into the Dohnavur Fellowship, with twelve nurseries and dozens of infants, toddlers, and young children. In 1918 the Fellowship rescued its first young boy, and by 1926 between seventy and eighty boys had also been adopted by what Amy came to call the Family.
A Different Drummer
Amy intended that life at her mission would be different. As Elisabeth Elliot noted, “Amy Carmichael was marching to a different drummer. . . . She had a vision of holy living. She would not deviate from that no matter how well-established, rational, and practical the ways of older missions seemed to be.”7 Amy’s vision for life at the mission was based entirely on two principles: love, which she called the Gold Cord, and prayer.
In her early days at Dohnavur, Amy was a thorn in the side of other missionaries and Indian Christians, who considered her practices too radical. She didn’t accept nominal Christianity; she insisted on blending in with the Indians by wearing saris and doing work that many considered beneath her; and she refused to ask outright for funds that were desperately needed, relying instead on prayer and God’s will. “We do not tell when we are in need unless definitely asked, and even then not always,” Amy wrote. “We rely upon the verses which assure us that our Father knows our needs, and we take it that with such a Father, to know is to supply.”8 Time and time again, Dohnavur was provided with exactly the resources needed at exactly the right time, from the funds necessary to expand the compound in the early years to the resources to construct the hospital that continues to serve thousands of Christians, Muslims, and Hindus living in the countryside surrounding Dohnavur today.
Amy’s nontraditional missionary style extended to worship as well. Although she was officially a member of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, she didn’t exactly adhere to Anglican doctrine. When a Dohnavur boy was once asked if he was Church of England, Wesleyan, or Baptist, he simply answered, “I am Christian.” Amy practiced and taught her children to practice nondenominational Christianity, which she interpreted as the literal New Testament. In 1925 the Dohnavur group severed all ties in an amicable split with the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society and other England-based missionaries. It was simply best for each to go its separate way.
Knowing that life in Dohnavur was intense and difficult, Amy prayed relentlessly that God himself would send missionaries to join her, and she encouraged young missionaries to pray long and hard about the decision. She wrote detailed letters to those considering mission work at Dohnavur, urging them to spend as much time reading Scripture as possible to prepare themselves for the battlefield that lay ahead. “We follow a stripped and crucified Savior,” she said to a group of newcomers. “Those words go very deep. They touch everything—motives, purposes, decisions, everything. Let them be with you as you prepare your spirit for the new life.”9
Amy never shied from telling the straight truth about missionary life, no matter how harsh. When she wrote matter-of-factly in Things as They Are about the atrocities perpetrated against temple children, her publisher returned the manuscript, citing it as too negative and discouraging. When asked to edit the material to make it more palatable, she refused, and even when the book was finally published several years later in 1903, the public was disappointed. They yearned for success stories of hope and redemption, not the hard, unsweetened truth as Amy presented it.
“Do Anything, Lord”
On the morning of October 24, 1931, Amy prayed a very specific prayer: “Do anything, Lord, that will fit me to serve Thee and to help my beloveds.”10 Later that same afternoon, on a trip to inspect property that had been offered to the Dohnavur Fellowship to rent, she stumbled into a shallow hole, breaking her leg, dislocating her ankle, and twisting her spine. She never anticipated that the “anything” she had prayed for earlier that morning would manifest itself in the life of an invalid for her remaining twenty years. The woman who had spent sixty-three years in a blur of ceaseless activity for the benefit of others was now confined to bed, immobile, in constant pain, and almost entirely reliant upon the help of others.
God, however, was not done with Amy yet. As it turned out, she could accomplish a great deal even from bed. And what he desired most of all was for her to tell her story.
Initially she resisted. Amy was not interested in telling her personal story. She had always avoided the limelight, even going so far as to prohibit anyone from ever taking photographs of her (only a handful of images of Amy exist today), so she was certainly reluctant to bare her soul on paper for the public to read. But God’s will prevailed. Amy completed Gold Cord, an account of the establishment of the Dohnavur Fellowship, and went on to write thirteen more books during her confinement, for a total of thirty-five books over her lifetime. She also wrote hundreds of songs and poems and thousands of letters, both to prospective missionaries and to her “beloveds,” the Dohnavur children. Before she died in 1951, Amy wrote a letter to each member of the Family, in which she conveyed encouragement, hope, thanksgiving to God, and, above all, love.
Five simple questions guided Amy’s writing: Is it true? Is it helpful? Is it kind? Is it necessary? Does it have the “seed of Eternity” in it? For Amy, it was imperative that she tell the truth, no matter how difficult or harsh. “There is a false suavity about most that is written from this land now,” she wrote. “We are so afraid to offend, so afraid of stark truth, that we write delicately, not honestly.” Delicacy, Amy felt, was dangerous. “Our smoothness glides over souls,” she said. “It does not spur them to action.”11 And for Amy—even a bedridden, immobile Amy—action was everything.
The Face of Jesus
When biographer Elisabeth Elliot interviewed members of the Family after Amy’s death, she found most of them would not acknowledge any flaws in their leader. “She was perfect,” said one. “She must have been a sinner—the Bible says we all are—but I never saw it,” said another.12 Amy, of course, would have been appalled by this. She knew she was far from perfect—her flaws ranged from stubbornness, occasional self-righteousness, and a controlling nature to the tendency to complain about her ill health. Yet these flaws were generously overshadowed by her enormous gifts: loyalty, humility, courage, faith, obedience, trust, and a tremendous zeal for serving others.
The Dohnavur Fellowship thrives today and has ministered to thousands of needy children—a living testament to Amy Carmichael’s unwavering commitment to God and his people. As one young missionary stated after she was taken to meet the elderly Amy for the first time, “I have seen the Lord Jesus.”13 The same could be said about Amy. It’s clear from her life and legacy that Amy Carmichael saw Jesus when she looked into the face of each and every person she encountered during her eighty-three years on earth.14