35. The DF Is Born
Chapter 35
The DF Is Born
One day a Dohnavur boy who was visiting Madras was asked whether he was Church of England, Wesleyan, Baptist, or what.
“I am a Christian,” he answered.
“But what sort of Christian?”
“I am just a Christian.”
Nobody had prepared him for such a question. Until 1925 Amy Carmichael had belonged to the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, but many who joined her in the work had other labels. Like those nicknamed “Plymouth Brethren” she wanted to practice as literally as possible whatever she found in the New Testament. She found no denominations there. “We can do far more for the Kingdom by being as we are,” she wrote to an Anglican priest who was thinking of joining her, “loving all, belonging to all who love our Lord Jesus in sincerity. . . . We have a welcome everywhere—all societies all over South India welcome anything we can give, for all know that we are not out to harm any.” When the mission in Ceylon had asked her to stay and join them she took Psalms 119:63: “I am a companion of all them that fear thee, and of them that keep thy precepts” as the word given to her then. She had held onto that ever since.
The boy’s reply, “I am a Christian,” was just what Amma would have wanted him to say. It was what Peter the Fisherman surely would have said, she thought, and who could improve on that? They belonged to the Household of God. Any who belonged to that belonged to Dohnavur. What else was needed? “The least intrusion of the ‘I and mine,’ an overemphasis on ‘my views/ would be like a pebble striking a pane of glass,” shattering the love that made them one. One way, wrote Amy, is shown to be eternally right—that of 1 Corinthians 1:10, “be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.” Any other way is eternally wrong.
For years the Family had attended the Church Missionary Society’s church next door to the compound, but things got too crowded (perhaps not only physically?) and the pastor asked that they arrange their own services. The arranging was according to Amy’s eclectic tastes, incorporating some of the silence of Quaker Meetings the D.O.M. has taught her to appreciate, some of the liturgy which she selected from the Anglican service, and some of the freedom of the Free Churches. In early years an ordained man was usually in charge. Later it was more often someone who had received only “the mighty Ordination of the Pierced Hands.”1
The break with the Anglican church was timely. When Stephen Neill went on to become the bishop of Tinnevelly, the thought of his being in a position to influence the children growing up under Amy’s care was distressing. She explained things later: “When the local bishop has been a friend whose coming we felt would help towards the spiritual life of our company, we have asked him to come to us from time to time, and when he was not we have not.” Had they been a part of the Anglican mission they would not have had that choice.
Among things that did not matter to Amy Carmichael were the method of baptism and the interpretation of certain Bible passages which scholars disagreed on. “Of one mind” need not mean identity of opinion, but “a community of sympathetic kindness.” Three things mattered: the verbal inspiration of Scripture, the power of God to deal with His enemy, and loyalty to one another.
The “living bond,” or gold cord which held the Family together was love. Always remembering that bleak walk along Japan’s coast in the fog and rain with one who seemed to take for granted the lack of love among missionaries, Amy never slackened in her efforts to see that Dohnavur was different. She succeeded. Not that all who lived there demonstrated what she called “Calvary love.” She herself, as her little book If so piercingly shows, felt sometimes that she knew nothing of that love. Some of the Family were openly rebellious. But Amy succeeded in creating a different climate in the place, odiously different to some. Did she think her way was the only way for Christians to live? No, she said, not at all. “We are sure it is the way meant for us,” because prayer “is the core of our day.”
Amy, at fifty-seven, in 1925.
It was a charitable effort, meant to thread its way delicately between condemnation of all other ways and the view that one way is as good as another. Where prayer is not the core, unity is not required—but of course Amy would not have called that Christian. There was no getting around it—“her” way was the only way that could be called Christian. “How can you pray—really pray, I mean—with one against whom you have a grudge or have been discussing critically with another? Try it. You will find it cannot be done.”
The committee of the CEZMS in London was responsible for the guidance of their missionaries. The board had asked questions she could not answer: How much did they plan to expand? What financial liabilities would they incur? “We soon passed the place where we could look to any for counsel except the One who was near enough to us to tell us what to do from hour to hour. It was His word which had caused the work to begin and only He (we write reverently) knew what we should do.” So it was obvious that London was simply too far away. Geographical distance made communication difficult. Other distances made it impossible. There was her temperament—mystical and impractical it must have seemed to the men trying to monitor her activities, her disclaimers notwithstanding. And there were the less definable spiritual differences, such as an amorphous ecclesiology and a do-it-yourself creed.
On July 6, 1925, the group in Dohnavur severed all ties with the societies to which they had belonged. They needed a new legal identity in order to hold property, so they were officially registered in 1927 as the Dohnavur Fellowship. The “Memorandum of Association” states its object: to save children in moral danger; to train them to serve others; to succour the desolate and the suffering; to do anything that may be shown to be the will of our Heavenly Father, in order to make His love known, especially to the people of India.
That the break was a friendly one is indicated by the Church Missionary Society’s having donated both the original bungalow and the guest house to the Dohnavur Family.
There remained the serious question of who was to be the leader. The constitution of the Dohnavur Fellowship made no bones about who was the supreme Authority. It was the Unseen Leader, the Lord Jesus Christ. The human leader, Amy Carmichael herself (who was not named), “seeks, in cooperation with the other members, to carry out the mind and will of the Divine.’’
They had been praying for years for a hospital, and for a leader for the boys. The arrival of the Neill family looked like the beginning of the answer to both prayers, so the disappointment was keen when they left. In 1924 a young missionary en route to China with the Children’s Special Service Mission, Godfrey Webb-Peploe, had visited Dohnavur. He was the grandson of one of the great Keswick speakers Amy had known, a strong point in his favor, and she could not help thinking of him as a possible leader on whom her mantle might fall. She wrote in the margin of her Daily Light, “Goodbye to G.W.P.—A broken day,” and added these lines from Alfred Noyes’ “The Torch Bearer”:
Let me not live in vain, let me not fall
Before I yield it to the appointed soul.
Some months later Godfrey’s older brother Murray, a physician, decided to go to China as a medical missionary. His widowed mother was to accompany him and wrote to Amy that they would like to stop in Dohnavur en route. That letter was “like the moss rosebud of old home gardens that is hardly to be recognized as a rosebud at all.” It was to blossom in unimagined blessing.
There were now seventy boys in Dohnavur. The thought of their training, education, and spiritual guidance had lain heavy on Amy’s mind for eight years. Questions tormented her: Where were the leaders they needed? What if they were never found? She took her questions to the Lord, and He asked her a few of His own. “Are you prepared to perish with Me, to be counted a fool and worse than a fool by your own world, your missionary world? May I deal with every shred of your reputation just as I choose, and will you be silent? Are you willing to obey in everything, every time, everywhere?”
Five years before this time Amy had stood in the sunset with eight of her fellow-workers, looking over the plain, wondering how to reach the many scattered villages where there was no Christian witness. The towns were shut to the Gospel. But if there were a hospital?
“It was as though there swam into our view a Place of Healing, furnished with all that was required for the help of the people, and we saw the work of the place led by one in whom were the instincts and convictions and the glad abandon of the spiritual pioneer.”2 They went home and wrote down their hope in the logbook and signed their names under the date, January 30, 1921.
Three years later the Neills came, and a doctor from Ireland named May Powell. When Murray Webb-Peploe came he threw his energies into the medical work with Dr. Powell, in makeshift rooms of the old buildings. Amy began to see the two brothers as the very men they needed, Godfrey as Saint Francis for the boys, Murray as Saint Luke for the hospital. She tried to banish the thought—those men were called elsewhere. For the first time in her life she understood the power of the temptation to covet. The command against coveting included “thy neighbor’s manservant.” These two servants were called not to India but to China.
On the night of October 8, 1926, Amy was sleeping on the sand at Cape Comorin when she had a vision. With a sense of light and joy she saw Godfrey and Murray at Dohnavur. But “dreams have no conscience,” she said, and she was not troubled by thoughts of China’s loss. Later, in spite of her wide-awake conscience, it seemed to Amy that God was telling her to pray that they might join the Dohnavur Fellowship. A discipline problem arose shortly after her vision which gave special urgency to the need for men. A boy had said “a very bad thing before the younger boys, too deadly to speak about to Helen, so they came to me.” After prayer for guidance, she shipped him off to Muppanthal, a place they had bought for people with special needs. She furnished him with paper and envelope on which he was to write to her when he had “got through this thing, seen its badness, and hated it.” Then and only then would he be allowed to come back.
“Poor little lad,” she wrote to Murray, “he sobbed as if his heart would break, but it had to be, and will do all the other boys good. All over five know this mire, and the Canaan ways of this land.” She emphasized the need for a “brother, strong and fine and jolly with them as their own. The older men are all married. Helen does all a woman can do.”
The impression that she was to ask for the Webb-Peploes was so strong as to be unmistakable. Yet—as usual, her mind wrestled with the question—might she be mistaken? What if the command were not divine at all, but the human in disguise? How could she ask for what would mean loss to others? Wasn’t such prayer treachery? Ask now was what she believed she had heard.
She asked. The prayer of faith was bombarded again. One day, alone in the woods, her courage collapsed. She waited, “drinking from wells of bitterness and fear.”3 Then “came a question, tender, poignant: ‘You fear to cause loss and hurt to your fellowservant; would I ask you to do so? You fear to intrude into the life of another; would I ask you to intrude? Have I been so long time with thee and yet has thou not known Me?”
Even then the fears did not entirely subside. Assurances alternated with doubts. “There is a place where the human fails, breaks down, turns to ashes. Hope has not a single foothold. In such an hour there is a perishing of everything unless the soul waits in silence for God only.”4
Silence. Amy was silent. God was silent. But He had heard. Godfrey was already on board ship, headed for India with his mother. He had rheumatic fever and needed a rest. Two weeks after the vision at the Cape, they reached Dohnavur, and a few days later he believed God called him to resign from the CSSM and join the Fellowship. Two months went by before he was free to reveal his decision to Amma.
She was overjoyed. Half of her prayer answered! She went on praying. Would not God bring Murray as well? It looked impossible. He had finished language study in Nanking and begun work in 1927 in a CMS hospital in Hangchow. Political events soon squeezed him and all British nationals out of the area. Soviet Russia offered to help Dr. Sun Yat-sen organize an expedition to crush the military governors of the north. An officers’ training school was established in Canton, an army was raised, and the British were ordered to evacuate. Murray spent a few months in Shanghai.
For Amy the battle went on . . . and on. “Unless the Lord and Master of us all, blessed Captain and Pilot, turned the helm this way, we don’t want you,” she wrote to Murray. “I cannot pretend that if He did turn the helm I should be sorry, wretch that I am!” Later she told Murray, “There was a day when I did not know how to bear it. The powers of darkness closed down upon me.” Two years after Stephen Neill left Dohnavur, Murray Webb-Peploe arrived. Those two years were to Amy “the age-long minute,” as she noted in her Daily Light. She expressed her prayer of that time in a poem:
Thou art the Lord who slept upon the pillow
Thou art the Lord who soothed the furious sea,
What matter beating wind and tossing billow
If only we are in the boat with Thee?
Hold us in quiet through the age-long minute
While Thou art silent and the wind is shrill:
Can the boat sink while Thou, dear Lord, art in it?
Can the heart faint that waiteth on Thy will?
Neither she nor Murray knew then that he was to stay, but Amy dared to go on hoping, and felt that God was giving her strong reason to hope. She sat up in bed that evening—it was May 31, 1927—and read Daily Light: “Blessed is she that believed; for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord. . . . For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us.”
On August 25 came the first gift for the building of a hospital—one hundred pounds.
1. F. W. H. Meyers, St. Paul.
2. Gold Cord, p. 279.
3. Ibid, p. 359.
4. Ibid, p. 360.