Women in mission work: Strategic to God’s vision for the world (part 2 of 2)
27. See Bishop Handley Moule in the foreword of Ponnamal, V. focus on the Gospel and call people willing to die for it.28 The women who went as missionaries in the 19th century exercised an authority on missions that few men and women in our era can match.29 They were, and Amy was like this too, strategic to God’s vision for the world. Amy’s influence and impact on the work as a ‘Victorian lady missionary’ – characterised as ‘resourceful, self-sacrificing, dedicated and wilful’30 – makes clear why for decades her influence was felt in the country where she worked and also within the world of missions.
In the world today, we assume that mission is a ‘multidirectional enterprise in a global context’.31 In this enterprise, Amy’s holistic approach to mission work shows us the undeniable story of courage, equality and partnership that reflects the Gospel and the world’s desire to witness this. The work of Victorian women missionaries is often denigrated and dealt with a little giggle. I am sure we will see that this accusation does not hold with regard to Amy Carmichael and many of her contemporaries.32 We, in this 21st century, will find their lives, ideas and insights real contributions and of much relevance to the propagation of the Christian faith today.
Amy Carmichael’s work is described in several biographies in which she comes across as a real Amma, doing good and revealing the dark deeds in the Hindu religion of her time. Many authors portray this missionary hagiographically and I have to admit that for many of her biographers it was difficult to be objective and not to mention any point of criticism. My aim is to transcend the hagiographic images of Amy Carmichael and to give a wide-ranging account of the work of the DF under their ‘leader’ Amy Carmichael as they responded to the call of God.33
Frank Houghton’s34 Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, officially recognised biography of the DF, was published in 1953. More than 30 years later Elisabeth Elliot’s A Chance to Die (1987) appeared with nearly the same framework, but she allows herself to give some more critical remarks. Elliot, as a woman author and a well-known missionary too,35 gives details that are lacking in Houghton’s biography. Both Houghton and Elliot had access to some information that I have not had. For some of these details, to make Amy’s story complete I refer to them. Both authors preferred to be chroniclers rather than commentators;36 however, Elliot makes room for some reflection of what really impelled Amy Carmichael. A pity is that in both biographies little indication is given where the notes for the quotations can be found. A lengthy religious biography is not in vogue in our
28. ‘God sends us to the heathen for two purposes, to do them good, and to find a grave for a good self’, in Amy Carmichael, From Sunrise Land, 119. The deepest motivation for women to go the mission field was an act of faith. Griffiths says that of those who went, two out of four laid down their lives within a couple of years (V. Griffiths, Not Less than Everything (Oxford: Monarch Books, 2004), 323).
29. Cf. J. Kommers ‘A flame of sacred love: Mission involvement of woman in the 20th century,’ In Die Skriflig 47(1) (2013).
30. Kent, Converting Women, 103.
31. D. Robert, ed., Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers. Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 25.
32. The same is said of the CIM missionaries Hudson Taylor and Geraldine Guinness, who were accused of a ‘conspiracy of silence’ so that the truth was not to be told. Cf. G.W. Doyle’s review of Albyn’s The China Inland Mission and the Late Qing Society, 1832–1905, (“Mission round table,” OMF Bulletin 3(2) (2007): 30–31).
33. Readers of this book will understand why ‘leader’ is here between inverted commas.
34. Houghton was consecrated as Bishop of East Szechwan (China) in 1937. Due to the difficult situation in China from 1940 to 1951, when all CIM missionaries were expelled from the country, he served as general director of the CIM. For several months he stayed in Dohnavur preparing Amy’s biography.
35. She died 14 June 1915.
36. In Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 84.
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present time, but the explanation of the length of this book is the following. I want to give a full record of Amy’s life and work, which cannot be understood without the larger context of the era in which she lived. I have felt compelled to include this study with ample examples of her own writings, because next to her life’s work in Dohnavur, my intention has been to uproot the sources of her inspirational missionary enterprise in order to get more insight into the formation and development of her inner spiritual life.37
Missionary biographies that really address the complexities, compromises and contradictions that are experienced by those who engage in cross-cultural mission are relatively rare. People at home like to read biographies of a hagiographic nature because they feel them to be more effective in encouraging others to support or to engage in mission. I tried to avoid the pitfalls and the limitations of a hagiographic approach by portraying her in a balanced way and to see through the aura of holiness in which many wrap her. In giving too much attention to the missionary, the contributions of others, like national evangelists, pastors and catechists who worked together with the missionary, can be mysteriously absent. Amy was fully aware of her weaknesses and her idiosyncrasies. Her ideas about mission and education were often modern for her time. Next to her Bible, there were the mystic Christian writers, which in Dohnavur gave the Fellowship that unique existence of the Fellowship, which enabled her to resist assimilation. In shunning alienation from the Indian culture, she managed to shape her idea of early Christianity.
Elizabeth Kent centres her Converting Women precisely on ‘understanding the far reaching transformations of custom and habit that took place over the course of Christianization’ and uses Amy Carmichael’s life and work as an example of a missionary who kept aloof from Indian interests. She asserts that Amy should have imposed her Western ideas on her passive Indian converts, which conclusion is an example of having a blank eye when it comes to certain aspects of the real intention of this missionary. For example, the way she portrays Amy as a woman working as a maverick ‘validating a bold, iconoclastic, experimental style of evangelism that did not recognise the authority of any institution’38 is not an honest portrait of her. When talking about the devadasis, Kent does not write about them used as sex slaves. That this hidden child trafficking system existed in the shadows was revealed by Amy. When Kent writes about Amy’s work she uses the word ‘rescue’. Does Kent deny what Amy wrote in Things As They Are? Amy looked behind the scenes and saw more than is revealed in the phenomenology.
My aim is to write about Amy Carmichael as I see her in her own written work and to listen to those who worked with her or met her. In the approach, I drew upon some previous research efforts which have focused on particular issues. In commemoration of her birth, 150 years ago, I am willing to listen anew to her phrasing and answers. It is a salutary reminder not only of this missionary but also of the deep realism of the Gospel. I am impressed by the beauty of her character and her radical, outpouring passion for Christ. I spent many years in research, reading through her written heritage, walking through the streets she trod as a child and as a young lady and viewing the work of the DF, recalling the things that happened there and then and seeing it as it now is in the 21st century. It is in consolation and hope that Amy Carmichael, who never lost her focus, will still influence future
37. J.A. Sharrock, in a memoir about Bishop Robert Caldwell, CMS missionary in Madras since 1838 and from 1841– 1890 in Tinnevelly (Tamil Nadu), wrote about his approach to writing a biography: ‘A biographer cannot, I presume, do justice to his subject, unless he has a sincere regard for, and hearty sympathy with him whose life he writes. To some extent, at least he will be tempted to lay in his brighter colours with too lavish a hand, while hesitating to dip his brush in the more sombre hues. This is a temptation to be resisted. A picture without shade, like a harmony without discord, is not only untrue to nature, but is also “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable”’ (Sharrock, Bishop Caldwell, 1).
38. Kent, Converting Women, 102. mission workers. An instrument in God’s hand, walking closely with God, listening to the Spirit, she measured her life by loss instead of gain. Giving up her own rights and taking up the cross and following Christ marked her as a missionary. Her ministry was in proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ and of healing India’s secret – only known in a small circle – satanic sore, in fellowship with him whose heart is still utterly ‘moved with compassion’ for the perishing souls and suffering bodies. In things great and small, she seemed to have a way of mission so characteristic to her, depending on God alone.
From her birth in 1867, until 1951 when she died, world events moved rapidly and social conditions changed drastically. Missionary history at its heart is the biography of God-sent men and women who shaped this history. There are missionaries in the worldwide church who have had a great influence for a number of years. Some of these are content to be mere echoes of their predecessors. There are also people who leave their mark on a whole period. And there are a very few who by their work and writings influence whole generations and live in the hearts and thoughts of many people. Only a very few are given to break fresh ground and to share in laying the foundations of a movement which within their own lifetime profoundly and extensively influences the lives of their own generation for good. They show a great deal of originality and enterprise in their work. Three of those few are David Livingstone, Peter Cameron Scott and Amy Carmichael. All three have been studied in either academic or popular volumes, but the latter, ‘this spiritual giant’,39 has a story to tell and to devote a single volume to her, in which her significant role in India as well as in mission history and mission theory is being told, is still a desideratum.40
In mission history, the year 1867 was very eventful. That year the missionary of Scottish origin, David Livingstone (1813–1873), was in the middle of his fight against the cruel slave trade and that same year saw the birth of two children, a boy and a girl who would change the fate of many, adults and children, forever. Both children were from Scottish ancestry; both got their first religious experience from parents who tried to teach their children to love God; both attended a Presbyterian church in their youth, the boy in Philadelphia (USA) and the girl in Millisle (Northern Ireland) and later on in nearby Belfast. On these three, in later years, the burden of the lost multitudes weighed heavily. David Livingstone, Peter C. Scott and Amy Carmichael, they whose souls were lighted with wisdom from on high, could they deny to men and women benighted the lamp of life? When stories about Livingstone’s life and aspirations to end the slave trade and to spread Christianity were published, they aroused a great deal of support among the British people, and strengthened the movement in Britain to abolish the slave trade de facto. The news of Livingstone’s death in 1873 ‘sent a wave of missionary zeal throughout Britain’.41 The American Peter C. Scott, visiting Westminster Abbey in London one day, was caught by the name of David Livingstone, cut into a slab on the floor. There, oblivious of the crowds, he knelt on the floor and prayed for Africa, wondering what God might require from him. He ‘saw’ a line of mission stations passing through east Africa into the mysteries of the Sahara Desert. In all the questions, God calmed him. ‘If the venture be of God, it shall and it must prevail.’ He became the founder in 1895 of the Africa Inland Mission (AIM) and in that same year the first AIM missionaries led by Scott arrived in Mombasa, then British East Africa. A year later, after long safaris, the ultimate sacrifice came: malaria forced him into bed and on 04
39. This expression is in Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 484. His wide ranging study closes with: ‘The legacies of Mother Teresa or Amy Carmichael remind Christians of India of spiritual giants from abroad who, in their hundreds and thousands, gave their lives to India’.
40. Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 462. Amy Carmichael is in his list of ‘noteworthy missionary women’.
41. K. Fiedler & S. Paas, The Faith Moves South. A History of the Church in Africa (Zomba: Kachere Series no. 27, 2006), 90.
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December his mother asked him, ‘Where to, Peter?’ He gasped, ‘To the eternal city’ and, raising his arm, he continued with his last breath ‘I want the arm of the Lord of Hosts around me’. The last written words of this servant of God, buried in African soil were, ‘Here am I, use me in life or death’.42 Scott started his pioneer mission enterprise in Africa in October 1895; in the same month, Amy, the object of this book, was ready to start a mission enterprise in south India, known today as the DF. When she closed her eyes in 1951 to be with the Lord, her death marked the end of an era of genuine mission movement. She was born at a time that was highlighted by massive mission enterprise, in the midst of the 20th century; the world and the focus of the essence of mission had changed completely. However, the vision of Peter Scott and Amy Carmichael is still vivid in the AIM and in the DF.
Amy Carmichael is one of those we encounter when we read the history of mission. History has to do with the past, which we can describe. Nevertheless, history does not always mean distance, objectivity or relativity. There is another type of historical encounter, which is close. The nearby decades disappear, as if they do not belong to us, and faraway times emerge so close at hand that we think they are our times, and we see the light of the people and the events of those days in such a way that we understand what was thought and what was going on. The reality is there at hand. It is there as a treasure we have discovered anew, a fullness that has only to be grasped spiritually with a deep affinity and to be understood. History can talk in a way that we grow to understand, and it is from here that we again understand again our life and our reason for being here. The history of mission is there where it compels our present time into a decision either to be worthy of her or to go to rack and ruin. Tracing the varied ways by which the Lord leads his people is always a fascinating study. Observing the joys and sorrows, the difficulties, the trials, the anxieties, the manifold vicissitudes, which are all implements in his hand to shape his servant ultimately for his eternal home. Amy Carmichael was one of the hundreds of British women who from the mid-19th until the mid-20th century went eastward, a shining participant in a unique venture of Christian womanhood.43
Her life was saturated with the passion to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This element of mission was at the fore. This was what her life was like before she went to India and during her life’s work there.44 Tracing her in her web of time, beside the charm of noticing God’s dealings and grace in her personal life, there is record of some valuable mission work committed to his servant’s care. We see the hand of God at work in Asia around the turning of the 19th to the 20th century and especially over the past first 50 years of the latter century in the south of India.
This book is not a biography of a great missionary – she herself would not favour that idea – but more the account of a great mission enterprise. As mentioned before, we do already have some biographies of Amy Carmichael and my intention is not to add another one just to improve the ones we have. After having looked at reference lists in many studies about the church and mission in India, even
42. D. Anderson, We Felt Like Grasshoppers, The Story of the African Inland Mission (Nottingham: Crossway Books, 1994), 17–23.
43. Since 1834 women became more and more involved in missionary work. ‘During the next three quarters of a century, Britain sent more missionaries overseas than any other country, by the end of the century, well over half were women’ (R. Seton, Western Daughters in Eastern Lands (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013), XX). At the end of the 19th century, ‘women outnumbered male colleagues by nearly 20 percent’ (J. Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700 (London: Routledge, 2010), 269).
44. ‘For always the missionary element is to the fore. The whole work is saturated with it and the twenty-fourth of the month is kept as a preaching day, when a little band of girls go out to the villages near Dohnavur and an equally missionaryhearted group stay at homeland do the work of those who go’ (The Continuation of a Story, 45). academic ones, I was astonished how rarely I saw Amy Carmichael’s name.45 The Indian church and mission agencies are doing themselves an injustice by not taking notice of her mission enterprise.46 Our focus will be on Amy Carmichael as a missionary and which sources her principles came from. I put everything aside that did not have a direct bearing on the object in view. I have only one object before me: the elucidation and illustration of God’s grand missionary purpose. Amy had her faults and foibles and these are apparent when we look at her life story without rose-coloured spectacles. However, from whatever angle we focus our attention on her, the predominant impression nobody can deny, is that God’s grace in all her human weakness was enough for her to do the things in Dohnavur and to glorify her Saviour.
I have to come down to earth. Amy puts faith in service. In India she discovered ‘dark deeds’, atrocities against women and girls. The dedication of little girls to the Hindu temples, seen as ‘marriage to the gods’, was nothing less than a euphemism for sex trafficking of little girls into a life of temple prostitution. Amy’s DF is a landmark of protection, even today, of an ongoing war against the stream of violence against women, sex trafficking, child prostitution, forced child marriage and gang rape. What Amy grieved at is my grief, too. I often wonder how it comes into the head of a man to mistreat, disgrace and abuse a woman. Dignity of women and girls in the 21st century is continually at stake. Being a father of seven, I have seen what it is for a woman to raise a family, to bear children with all the possible complications in pregnancy and during childbirth and to regain health and strength. Years in Africa as a missionary in Kenya and Mozambique have opened my eyes to the sufferings of women, physically as well as the injustice done against them: the high rate of mortality of young women before, during and after childbirth, their vulnerability to the threat of being raped in conflict situations, female genocide, genital mutilation and always trying to keep the family going. A deep grief is in me when I see, hear or read about these sufferings of God’s images.
Carolyn Custis James’s Half the Church. Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women47 convinces us not only that knowledge of Amy’s work is important, but also that the actions she undertook must not be absent in our mission work. Even today in India and here in the West, evil practices with little girls and women still happen. In Dohnavur, the work Amy started is ongoing and her work challenges Christians today to be at the forefront to rescue God’s daughters from evil. The work of Katie Davis48 in Uganda, who with reckless abandon in 2007 followed Jesus Christ to care for children living in extreme poverty, is really an inspiration and a testament to what God will do when you obey and are willing to be used in his service. You are inspired and challenged by it, seeing the mighty hand of our Lord and you are encouraged by this for generations to come. Having said this, you will understand I cannot evade the biographical details of Amy Carmichael and I need to place her portrait in her web of time as an instrument in God’s hands if we want to see God at work in that specific time, at that place, among the people he wanted to draw near to him.
Our vision of God’s graceful dealings in this world can be traced from our ancestry and childhood, spiritual environment and spiritual encounters; for me it was a moving journey to discover God’s interventions in the life of Amy Carmichael, making her the rescuer of so many young girls and boys
45. Cf. A. Kanjamala, The Future of Christian Mission in India (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2014), which covers the whole history of Christian missions in India, but does not mention her name and work.
46. The time Amy died in 1951 marked the end of pious but excellent writing by missionaries, mostly women, about mission work. The CIM had Geraldine Howard Taylor, Mildred Cable, Francesca French, Rosalind Goforth, Isobel Kuhn and A.J. Broomhall as its mission ambassadors and in Amy Carmichael India’s need for the Gospel got a voice and a pencil.
47. C.C. James, Half the Church. Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011).
48. Cf. K. Davis, Kisses from Katie. A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption. (Croydon: Authentic, 2013).
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whose lives reflected the grace of God. Her clear mission vision originated from her steadfast belief in God and his dealings in this world. Born in Ireland, she showed her strong Irish character throughout her life in faraway Dohnavur, where she was the inspiring missionary, shepherding her young flock and in biblical wisdom setting up a mission and fellowship to save, spiritually and physically, the lives of many endangered children. In her writings, she sheds light on hidden paths and gives us glimpses into a religion that consumes the souls and bodies of the very young into a sinful life and to death. Her tender heart saw the beauty of God’s creation and with the brilliant colouring of an impressionistic painter the colours of the flowers and the ever-changing beauty of a landscape were etched in her writing, which describes the local people at the well, in the fields and in their homes, all pictures of a life that has gone forever.
Many decades after her death she influences and inspires thousands all over the world. She had a wide circle of friends and a host of confidants who were encouraged by her work and vision depicted in her books. The fire that burned in her, and which we warmed ourselves at, is still burning in the 21st century. When we can discover the secret of her life, we shall find the One, to whom all glory should be given.
Amy was the first who was supported by the Keswick Mission Council. She had lifelong links with Keswick. ‘One of the most memorable missionary links with Keswick is through Amy Carmichael’49 and because of her own deep spirituality very much based on Keswick teaching and experience, I need to spend a full chapter on Keswick and its relation to mission work.
It may be that when we describe her era, and the way she pioneered in India and penetrated with the Gospel into the heart of the religion there, that this is an essential and intimate glimpse into an era of mission work. What has been and still is her legacy? What gives her the claim to be listened to? How should one understand her influence, her impact, perhaps her presence, in a time so completely different from hers? I write about a time that does not exist anymore. I want to see Amy in historical perspective, with an eye to the future. I have tried to explain what the mission work in India was about, particularly the way that she was passionately engaged in ‘the fight’ and sought to conquer in God’s power. The pages of this book tell of vision and obedience in early faith and lifelong faithfulness. Through her life and love she has ensured the right to be heard today. Through her struggle in fighting the dark deeds it is right that she presses her claims with confidence. She could speak to the society she lived in and even impress the secular world. Amy’s consecration is not merely an act to look back upon, a date to be cited as a landmark in our spiritual history. Essentially, consecration for her was a matter to express in everyday life, in the trivial round, the common task. The mission field is right around us, as well as all around the world. Times have changed, not Jesus’ commission to proclaim the Gospel worldwide. I hope that her commitment and service may be an inspiration to many who confront the challenges of our century for Christian discipleship. So many are living in superstition, spiritual darkness, without hope and where the abusive traffic of young girls and boys for evil practices is still going on.50 Let us begin where she began and where we all need to begin – as a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ! Let us who know the beauty and dignity of a God-given guided life indulge ourselves in her mission principles and perspectives. Let them in Amy’s own words ‘be seeds of light to us’51 and reveal to us her secret that the invisible is the actual, and the spiritual the real. Therefore, what is recorded here are many of Amy’s
49. P. Hacking, What He Says, Where He Sends, A New Challenge to Mission and Service, New Keswick Collection (Hants, UK: Marshall Morgan and Scott, 1988), 107.
50. Cf. the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, held from 10 to 13 June 2014 in London, a UN initiative aimed at eliminating sexual abuse against women.
51. In J. Guinness, Mrs Howard Taylor: Her Web of Time (London: CIM, 1950), 1. actual words. Amy Carmichael was not a saint and we do not want to make a legend of her life. In Triumphant Love the secret of her life is pictured: a woman with a rich spiritual life, active since her youth in philanthropic activities and deep insights into the Bible and blessed with keen intelligence and spiritual acumen. The secrecy of a Christ-like existence in God takes care that a book like this will not become a voyeuristic enterprise. The title of this book indicates what she for herself was: a life consecrated to God to the utmost.
Built on the small and very dangerous Eddystone Rocks, 14 miles southwest of Plymouth, is the most famous lighthouse in the British Isles. Round about the Eddystone Lighthouse these words are inscribed: ‘To give light and to save life’. Amy sailed from the British shores in 1895 – no small venture of faith for her – bound for the unknown India. A step of faith today – it was still greater then and she was never to return to Britain and Ireland. The words on the lighthouse exactly express the aims of the DF, whose beams have shone for more than 100 years over the south Indian lands to lighten the lives of so many living in spiritual darkness and to save endangered children from moral destruction. Still to this day the Dohnavur family, and thousands of men and women in Asia, are devout Christians, serving the Lord and doing what Jesus asked, namely letting God’s light shine all over Asia. They continue to devote their lives to this great goal. Amy Carmichael left behind converts scattered over India and many parts of the world, and to each she has imparted a vision and a mission. Her capacity for love is a rebuke. She carries us to a higher level. Let go of earthly things and aim for the highest: to make the vision known, reflecting in our faces the radiance of God’s own. Most missionary women got little resonance in mission-related literature and were not given a biography, or were not portrayed in mission handbooks. That is not fair or, in the words of Jemima Thompson in 1841:
Many excellent women have adorned, and still adorn, our foreign missions; - full of love to the perishing Heathen, and of zeal for the honour and glory of the Saviour of men. Missionary biography ought not, therefore to be limited to Schwartz, Henry Martin, Morrison, Milne, Carey, and such laborious and apostolic men […] Women, possessing those indispensable qualifications which have conferred imperishable honour and shed such sacred lustre on the cause of the Redeemer, are needed to accompany the servants of Christ in their evangelical missions.52 Since 1841 much has changed, and today, as it was already at the end of the 19th century, women, married and single, outnumber men on the mission field. The lives of most women missionaries remain hidden or obscured, in part due to what can be described as ‘a collective art of forgetfulness’.53 In the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries the aim of mission work was to convert those who did not know Christ. The missionaries were constrained by love for Christ, the only Saviour. The church today has to see that those who went before us have left us a legacy not to be denied. Researchers in mission history will appreciate the fact that all their understanding and findings forever remain incomplete. To find a way in the abundance of all the verbal information, literature and source materials bring us to the point of just being faithful, and of using the insight and grace the Lord provides. In writing the life story of Amy Carmichael, I came into close contact with the way she was used by God, and this in such a manner that writing about her was a continuously humbling experience. The result is inadequate to the possibilities of the subject.
I was privileged to be in the place where she worked and now, with her personal Bible in my hands, I have the awareness of entering ‘hallowed ground’, to listen to what she wanted to say and to watch the Bible being lived out in her belief and in the common tasks of her daily life. What gives Amy and others
52. In Memoirs of British Female Missionaries (1841), quoted in Seton, Western Daughters in Eastern Lands, XX.
53. Seton, Western Daughters in Eastern Lands, XXI.
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the claim to be listened to in our present time? What was Amy like as a woman who persevered in spite of all the rejections of her fellow workers in the mission? What were the assumptions and motives driving her mission and how did she and others enter the mission field? The names of the pioneers nowadays are unknown or have little resonance in today’s Christian circles, but all are known to God. They had the Bible as their guide, in a form of kerygmatic caring for souls, and it is for us to interpret their words and doings. The reality of the people in Hebrews 11 is still flowing in the hearts and lives of people on the front lines of mission work in the present day.
We do know what this distinctive personality accomplished. Today many in India are witnesses of her amazing work, and the fruits of her pen are to be read in books and articles fighting against the 21st century sexual exploits of young girls and women. Her struggle against this evil continues into this century and the force of her convictions leaves traces in our own. The pages of this book tell of this: her vision and obedience, of early faith and lifelong faithfulness, of resource and courage, of wisdom, hope and love, of looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of faith. Surely, mission history helped to shape the person she was, and she certainly has helped to shape mission history of the first part of the 20th century. For many in our age she is a trusted source of inspiration and guidance. Not everyone would always agree with what she said, wrote and did, but we all know that her word and work originate from a steadfast communion with God, life experience, great independence of mind and from a deep interrogation of her own conscience. She was never in for a crowd-pleasing soundbite, but would be heard and understood by those who in stillness were willing to be led by the same Spirit who drove her, and then listened, to discover a truly God-fearing missionary, who set up a high standard for all her successors to live up to. This committed missionary already in her lifetime became a maker of mission history. Is not her life story a kind of vade mecum of missionary sainthood? In her struggle fighting the dark deeds, and bringing the saving Light, it is by right that Amy possesses her claims to us. The title of this book indicates what she saw as the utmost of a life consecrated to God. Her prayer was, that ‘the sum of all my life be love’.54 Owing to her life and love, she has earned the right to be heard.
Listen, this is her story.
54. Edges of His Way, 134; Mountain Breezes, 179.