Women in mission work: Strategic to God’s vision for the world (part 1 of 2)

Chapter 1

Women in mission work: Strategic to God’s vision for the world

Impression 1

The audience of the mission meeting of the 1895 Keswick Convention saw on the platform three outgoing women missionaries presenting themselves to the public. Two of these three were sisters. Each gave a short address and when it was the turn for the last one, she unfolded a scroll on which she had written in huge letters: ‘Nothing too precious for Jesus!’ Her words were deeply impressive. She was the elder of the two sisters. The younger sister, Eva, would go to South Africa, and she was booked for India. We are talking about Amy Beatrice Carmichael,⁵ who had determined in her heart to learn what it means to have ‘faith in God’. God, who is the Lord of the universe had created her and would take care of her. Her God is also the God of the sparrows, and he cares for them. Is she not more than the sparrows? She would go in Jesus’s steps, but it was his way, a way leading – no escape here – to the Cross. ‘He that spared not His own Son’ (Rm 8:32) forever satisfied her that God loves the lost. She had heard the cry of the millions across the sea, and they became her personal responsibility. Obstacles on the path? Mountains of them. She was led to climb by him, who went in front. She climbed, and saw the fruit of ‘thy will shall be done’ and was allowed to see the change in the lives of thousands of children in south India in missionary work that covered the first half of the 20th century. Here we are in touch with one of the most significant role models (from a human perspective) in the history of the modern era missionary movement.

Impression 2

On a chilly Sunday morning in December 2012, I got a warm welcome from the pastor and the members of the Welcome Evangelical Church, Cambrai Street, in Belfast. This was the place where in 1887 Amy

5. Hereafter referred to as Amy Carmichael, Amy or Amma.

How to cite: Kommers, J. (Hans), 2017, ‘Women in mission work: Strategic to God’s vision for the world’, in Triumphant Love: The contextual, creative and strategic missionary work of Amy Beatrice Carmichael in south India, pp. 1–19, AOSIS, Cape Town. https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2017.tl41.01 Carmichael gathered the mill girls on Sundays for Bible class, and during the week for singing, sewing work and other social activities. It overwhelmed me being in the same place where for so many living in destitution, hope is offered and where lives had been transformed by the love of Christ. The songs we sang in that service were all in Amy’s spirit: Leaning on the everlasting arms and Nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing, nothing is too difficult for Thee. Again and again, like Amy had done in the dedication service of the newly opened hall in 1887, I also read the words of Colossians 1:18 written above the platform: ‘That in all things he might have the preeminence.’

Amy’s wish that those words would be fulfilled had become true in her life. ‘God has been and still is faithful,’ I thought while I walked back after the church service to the Maranatha Guesthouse where I would stay for some days. Helpful church members had offered me a lift, but I had insisted on walking. I had in mind to go the route she always walked up and down from College Gardens in south Belfast to the Shankill area in the north of the city. It took me at least one hour.

‘God is faithful.’ This was confirmed by God himself, showing on my left a rainbow, the sign of the Covenant. After passing Ulster Hall I saw the fountain at the kerbside, the silent witness of the dramatic change in Amy’s life. It was there that Amy’s life’s values completely changed. As I walked on, I saw the impressive buildings of Queen’s University. The front door was open and after I looked around, the bookshop invited me to come in. One title caught my attention: Great Irish Lives. Scanning the index, I did not see the name of Amy Carmichael. ‘Do we live in a time in which the secular world does not recognise what Christians have brought about and how some of them changed age-old values?’ I thought. The bookshop is near to the place where once one of Ireland’s greatest women lived! Continuing my walk I soon turned right having reached College Gardens, where the houses on one side overlooked a spacious park in Amy’s days. I imagined seeing a 20-year-old young woman walking to and fro from, at that time, a well-to-do area in the dark streets on the other side of the town, compelled by love for the needy and the lost, to help those who had no helper and who lived there in evil and poverty. Here Amy had learned the major lesson of her life, giving her the foundation for her work in Japan and India, that in all things our gracious Lord, Christ Jesus might have the pre-eminence.

What experience it is for someone to be in a church where it all began 125 years ago? To see her busy in your mind, telling mill girls the saving Gospel words and afterwards in India rescuing many girls and boys from a life of shame and destruction to lead them into the saving arms of Jesus Christ. Really, the boundless and unsearchable riches of the saving and sanctifying grace of God in the Lord Jesus Christ reached from that place to a remote village somewhere in the plains of south India. This overwhelmed me in Belfast that Sunday morning in the Welcome Evangelical Church.

Impression 3

The hot south Indian sun forced us to look for a shady place at the airport of Tuticorin. My wife and I were on our way back to Europe. Sitting in the shade, waiting for the plane to Chennai (Madras), my mind was still wandering with the women and children in Dohnavur. We had left them in the morning, prayed off by many of our new friends, and there in Tuticorin I already felt the awe I had to leave them. When the plane took us up into the sky, I felt I had left behind some precious people, because for me the stay there meant I had to redefine myself. Dohnavur in south India had changed my life’s values.

Dohnavur: the place throbbed with history and life. My wife and I arrived on 08 November 2013, one day before the commemoration of the day that Amy Carmichael arrived in India in 1895. Our first introduction to India, the endless crowds, cars, motorbikes jostling their way through the streets of Chennai. After a few days, we boarded the plane to Tuticorin, where a kind taxi driver was waiting for us and took us

Chapter 1

to Dohnavur. I had longed to see the place where everything had taken place and meet the people, especially the elderly ones who had known Amy personally. The great love of the Dohnavur people overwhelmed us, and left us with so many impressions. Really, this is a sanctuary in the wilderness built by vision and prayer. We looked over the same plains Amy had looked at, and walked through the villages around Dohnavur, and remembered the agony she had had in her heart that so many were living, ‘hidden away in little shut-up rooms in little shut-up towns, and of the need of those Christ-less hearts’. In her day, those villages, temples and castes, were all ‘Hindu to the core’.⁶

Many days I sat silently working in the room where Amy lived, worked and died. Everything in the room reminded me of her who until today has a word for us. Her thoughts do not remain within the walls of this room and the wall surrounding the Dohnavur compound. In Amy’s life story is a sense of quietness in the heart and a sense of a heart in communion with God.

To be honest, everything nowadays in Dohnavur talks of bygone days, except the computer in the office, the mobile phones of many women and the sun collectors to get hot water. Buildings over 100 years old still function and the guesthouses are provided with water by means of buckets for washing. Here history lives, and that more than 60 years after Amy’s death. Whomsoever you speak with, everybody talks with tender love about Amma, as she is called, and everything that is done on Sunday and during the week is done in the way Amma would have done it. In answer to questions as to why things are done here in a certain way, you will hear every time, ‘because Amma wanted it so’. In Dohnavur she is still ‘around’.

I came to Dohnavur with the intention to get more inside information. The room where Amy stayed is still full of bookcases with the many books she read and from which she drew many ideas for her writing. One of the women here who had known her told me, ‘Amma was a ferocious reader’.

I was astonished by the many books she had: from Bible studies, history, archaeology, mystics, sermons, mountaineering, flowers and dogs to bird watching. In many of them, her name is inside. She used to make remarks in the margin, which gave me a lot of information. The time I went through many of her books, I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Being involved in life at the Fellowship for three weeks had the lovely feeling of the meeting of Christ’s body, the instant sense of at-homeness awaiting all the guests. Several times, I sat for a few moments in the upper room in the Prayer Tower, the place Amy liked to sit to be quite alone with God. From here she saw the whole compound and prayed the Lord would stretch his wings over them all.⁷ Now nearly 100 years later, the Lord still possesses and guards his little Dohnavur flock.

The three weeks at Dohnavur and some time in the holiday house at the sea, ‘Joppa’, of the Dohnavur Fellowship (DF) at Kanyakumari (Cape Comorin) were a precious gift from God and definitely marked our lives. Now at home – ‘at the time of the lighting of the lamps’ – we still see in our minds the Fellowship members kneeling and we hear Dohnavur’s evening prayer:

Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord; and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of Thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ.⁸ And in our ears we every time hear the lovely song Aathumae en muzhu ullame by which we were surprised every Sunday morning at early dawn, sung from the tower of the church in the village. It is all about the soul praising God for his beautiful creation and all good things of life.

6. Cf. Gold Cord, 279.
7. See Meal in a Barrel, 35.
8. See From the Forest, 122.

Still, the forces of prayer are lost there for so many women and children living in danger in India. Is Dohnavur evening’s prayer God’s provision to unlock new powers on their behalf? He or she who reads this book has the answer.

Crossing the frontiers

In every generation, there is a fresh need for a faithful exposition of God’s work in mission to the contemporary culture and people on this earth. One cannot write about mission history without touching on the lives of those who obeyed the call and carried out the message. The biography of Amy Carmichael is the history of a mission period, but it is also the chronicle of a small south Indian town in the plains. Through her, and her fellow workers, the music of the name of Jesus reached those far off in the hills and valleys in south India and penetrated deep into the old Devadasi system of the Hindu religion.

To do justice to my subject, this book is written in sympathy with her whose life and thoughts I write about. I am fully aware of the temptation to highlight the bright side and hesitate when aspects that are more critical have to be described. However, I can now already say that the second part of the previous sentence will be very difficult to fulfil when you write about Amy Carmichael. However, I agree with Sharrock’s argument that, ‘a picture without shade, like a harmony without discord’, is not only untrue, but is also ‘weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable’.⁹ Nevertheless, it remains an adventure to write about someone who was so full of love for God and the people of India, so skilful in writing and who could put down deep thoughts on paper. I tell her story more or less chronologically, touching also on the lives of the men and the women: family, colleagues, pastors, missionaries and, not least, the Indian children who crossed her path. I think this is the best way to bring her life and work into a clear focus, for it is only by chronological narrative that one avoids the temptation of seeing the past through the obsessions of the present. Mission history does not change as opinions on mission do. Writing afresh about Amy’s life and mission work is necessary for each new generation. For our selfcentred 21st century generation it will be a blessing to put forward the shining example of Amy Carmichael who came into the world and lived a portrait of sacrifice.

Amy’s native grandeur of deed and character asks for no pretence. Her vocation called her to live a holy life along the dusty levels of commonplace ways. I follow her from Millisle to Dohnavur and write what I have seen, read and heard. I listened to those who have known her, which is all fragmentary, for the spiritual, her innermost, remains secret. Only God knew her inner life, where she really was with him, and from there the springs rose, which fed the river of her life. God’s dealings with his servants do not require our opinion. What Amy wrote about Thomas Walker refers also to herself:

Is it not true that in this clamorous world, in the midst of weariness and strife, there are some who are glad to turn sometimes in byways of quietness, glad to meet in those private ways men from whom it may be they must differ in public, glad to get to know them underneath and above all difference, in that mystic communion of spirit which will surely be one of the joys of heaven?¹⁰ Amy’s life has been the subject of several books and essays. I read many of them: narratives of close friends and critical observations of some scholars. The sketches at close quarters, in which those who had the privilege of being associated with her have tried to depict for us the very woman herself in the way she lived and worked. The books Amy wrote, the stories I heard in Dohnavur and some gripping

9. In J.A. Sharrock, Bishop Caldwell: A Memoir (Calcutta: Whitaway Press, 1897), 2.

10. Walker of Tinnevelly, VIII.

Chapter 1

biographies¹¹ have given me the desire, and it became my profound conviction, to write this elaborate study to give an intimate picture of Amy Carmichael.

Her own self-effacement attracted me, giving Christ Jesus the honour and the glory in her work and in her literary legacy. She saw visions of duty nobody else looked at. She blazed her trail in India by the spiritual altars she built, so we can trace her work by the ‘altars’ that she left behind. Earlier biographers could draw on stories told by Amy’s contemporaries, many of whom were her friends or met her personally.¹² Even very old villagers of Broughton in Cumbria could reminiscences about the Tuesday night meetings in the fifties of the 20th century reminiscences where Amy gave the Bible explanations.¹³ I spoke with some elderly women in Dohnavur who had known Amma (Tamil for mother, as Amy was called) a few years when they had been tiny kids in Dohnavur and without exception all who had known her, talked, with a glitter in their old eyes, of Amy’s love for children.

We know about the work she started in Dohnavur, but I think too little attention is given to her spirituality and connected with that her views on mission and missionary principles. That she contributed so much to mission thinking has been overlooked by professional missiologists either because Amy had no academic education and therefore was looked down upon in certain circles or because people were so impressed by her practical work in Dohnavur that they did not wonder from which source she drew. The abundance of biographies of missionaries from Victorian and Edwardian times shows the popularity of men and women like James Hudson Taylor, David Livingstone, Lilias Trotter, Mary Slessor and many others; all these biographies focusing on their ministerial exploits rather than on their missiological or theological significance. These men and women operated with theological assumptions and they often had more enduring influence on the developing church worldwide than the ‘professional’ theologians who worked out their principles from behind a desk in an office somewhere on the third floor of a university.

Scattered throughout her books, Amy has given us many valuable thoughts and reflections on mission issues, and I intend to pay full attention to the fundamental orientation that guided and sustained this missionary. In this I want to follow Hardy who argues for the study of theological notions underlying the motivations and assurances of mission, ‘that the events can be seen within a theological context’.¹⁴ We are impressed by what happened in Dohnavur, but we have to see that the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of this mission enterprise in south India was driven dynamically by theological convictions. We will follow Amy in her spirituality, her dedication and devotion, her contemplation and prayer life. We do not forget her lifestyle and behaviour as a missionary, crossing frontiers drawn by her Victorian-minded colleagues. These were all vital elements in the life of this missionary pioneer; really, this ‘Wild-Bird Child’¹⁵ was a unique personality. Putting praxis and reflection together, we hope to meet the real Amy Carmichael. If we want to understand what was Amy’s real motive in starting the DF we cannot overlook the issues of her own spiritual growth and formation by her use of the Bible, her missionary outlook and her subsequent activity, even from her sickbed, in mission work.

11. For the books written by Amy, the biographies and other literature, see the Bibliography at the end of this book.

12. Her first biographer Rev. Frank Houghton corresponded with her for 30 years. Three times he and his wife visited Dohnavur in the forties of the last century where they had long times of fellowship with her. In addition, after her death, he could look at all the papers, by that time not collected and secured in the archives in Belfast.

13. In F.L. Houghton, Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur (London: SPCK, 1998), 37, 38. Hereafter referred to as Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur.

14. D.W. Hardy, ‘Upholding Orthodoxy, in Missionary Encounters: A Theological Perspective’, in Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, ed. Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001) 199.

15. The title of D. Bingham’s book on the life of Amy Carmichael (Belfast: Ambassador, 2003).

When we navigate the waters of the missionary world, we see in this 21st century a shift in the thinking of many who are changing the initial intention of mission. The glory of Christianity is that it is able to save all that come unto God by Jesus Christ. We are living in a time when an inexorable weariness lies at the foundations of the nations and in their inhabitants a terrible feeling of desolation and emptiness arises, which leaves no place for faith in man and hardly any place for faith in God. How dark has been – and is – the history of mankind. Amy Carmichael revealed ‘dark deeds in a dark country’, but the light brought by her in Japan and India has been an eternal blessing for many. The debate on mission work in the 21st century will go on, but I am convinced that Amy showed and lived the essence of the Gospel and that her vision is an obstacle for many who cannot follow where she put the priority, that ‘the Cross is the attraction’.

This work is a synthesis based on wide reading of primary sources in the archives in Belfast and Carlisle, records of mission agencies and missiology, biographies of missionaries, case studies and fieldwork in Dohnavur (India). I am very conscious that all this I wrote from the limited understanding of a European looking back on what was primarily an Indian experience and I dare hope that its lack of sensitivity and understanding is compensated by thorough study.

Since my first encounter with Amy Carmichael through the daily reading of Thou Givest …, They Gather when I was on the mission field myself, I was compelled to go on and felt the inner conviction to know more of her. I want to connect her with the present generation, which would give us all back the primary goal of mission work. Her first little book I read was for me a truly great book and I found I had made a real discovery, and am grateful for the stimulus and spiritual quickening that have come to me from her writings. For me, these are very real spiritual tonic. They come from a great heart and this missionary woman does not shirk the problems in mission life, but looks them straight in the face. Not a day passed without my reading some pages of her books and in the daily talks at home, Amy was often mentioned. Part of the family is not the right phrase, but in her books, she even travelled with us to holiday homes and airports. Always her written legacy has given me the inspiration to keep on doing this work. Digging through her books, I found a remarkable woman, one through whom many lives were changed. For me, Amy Carmichael personifies the spirit of missions and of rescuing helpless children. She was part of a modern mission spirit that swept the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This despite, as some may say, a few false starts, which she herself saw as stepping stones for her life work in Dohnavur, work the Lord entrusted her to do for more than half a century.

Nobody vanishes from memory more rapidly than the missionary does and no influence is easier, even for the sympathetic researcher, to underestimate than that of the missionary. However, as an old proverb says, ‘some people come into our lives and quickly go, but others stay awhile and leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never the same’. With regard to Amy Carmichael, that old adage has proved itself to be true. Having access to her books, I discovered she has a real say about today’s missionary issues, and that she gives a depth and breadth to your faith in Christ; that is what made her so magnetic. This book about her is not a eulogy for an individual or a hagiography,¹⁶ and I am not dealing here with a typical experience of a saint, but with the way in which saintly life has been made possible. I want to picture Amy Carmichael in her web of time, ultimately seeing the hand of the Saviour in the life of this remarkable woman. It is a life abandoned to God at all costs.

16. Cf. Ruth Tucker: ‘Unfortunately for Carmichael and her legacy, she has been the victim of missionary hagiography. Although controversy swirled around her often unconventional ministry in India, and the fellow missionaries who questioned her judgement, her biographers have elevated her to super-sainthood. Yet Carmichael herself (at least in the early years) called for honesty in presenting the work of mission outreach, and it is in this area perhaps more than any other that we can look at her life in the light of biography as missiology’ (R. Tucker, ‘Biography as Missiology: Mining the lives of Missionaries for Cross-Cultural Effectiveness,’ Missiology: An International Review XXVII(4) (October 1999): 434).

Chapter 1

Over the lives of God’s servants is the rainbow of his promise. Spoiled for the earth, they live, work and speak backed by him. In writing about her work, we write about God’s work and will learn about his dealings with his servants and even learn the strangeness of his guidance of them. This is not so much the story of a woman who is so utterly dedicated and self-effacing that her name does not even appear on the letterhead of the Fellowship she formed, as it is the story of what God can do and is ready to do when he finds that kind of person. Though focused upon Amy Carmichael, this book is also intended as a tribute to all the faithful missionaries I worked with, to those who are now in the mission field serving God and to those who have given their lives to the people in need of the saving grace, and whose stories will perhaps never be told.

My research has brought special joys: that of reading wondrous and excellent works of fellow missionaries, that of spending time in Ireland, England and south India, that of even walking through Broughton Grange, the stately house near Cockermouth with the splendid view of the Derwent River, where Amy lived several years before going to the mission field. Being befriended and helped with such trust and generosity by several beautiful men and women who share with me the same passion. Amy Carmichael and many others of God’s faithful servants completely surrendered their lives to God and were so overwhelmed with gratitude that they gave everything to express their heartfelt love of and thanks to God. I think of the time when I felt so grateful to my Saviour for his grace that I wanted to give him my best and trusted him when he said ‘Go Ye’, and the answer was ‘Yes, Lord’.

Walking the ‘high road’

Much of the action described in this book took place 100 years ago. It is written with reference to old books, letters and memories concurrent with the happenings in Dohnavur. Since then the world has changed radically, as has India, as has the English language and as has the vision of missionary work. This accounts for the sometimes archaic words and phrases used in this book. Amy Carmichael tried to introduce the atmosphere and thinking of India as she knew it. In several of the ideas of addressing children and adults, and in describing behaviour, we recognise the style and the language of evangelical Christians of the Victorian time in a colonial setting, a way of life that is nowadays foreign to us. Amy Carmichael, as we will see, saw the world around her as full of ‘figures of the true’ – parables. In persevering reading through her writings we will discover a missionary who demonstrated an unexpected strength in her views, and that the beauty of her life lives on.

For two centuries many Christian women played an active role in overseas missions. Amy Carmichael is one of them, also as a major figure in the evangelical missionary movement of the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century, in which she has become a paradigm for all that is saintly. With her DF she questions today’s missionary work. Her evangelical calling to Japan and then to India and her existence there meant a provocation, from which people who are not willing to become acquainted with her can easily withdraw. She was that kind of a courageous missionary who went further than many of her contemporaries and dared to challenge age-long customs and saw the outcome effected by governmental law. The talk with her becomes a confrontation between the church and her mission in the 21st century. She has answered Christ’s call, dared to exchange the security of a privileged home and all the comforts and love of her society for an insecure, often lonely foreign environment, with a weak body and facing opposition, even from colleagues. To many of her contemporaries her ideas seemed eccentric and unrealistic. She never wanted to be in the spotlight; she never asked for admiration. I see this missionary for whom the ‘Cross was the attraction’, as a model of front-line missionary service in Christ’s worldwide saving plan. The grace she appropriated in the midst of the turbulent years during the forming of the DF is a beautiful testimony to the love and power of Christ in her life. What we receive from her and learn for missionary work today from all who went before us makes us aware that the questions we face today cannot be solved without consulting them. High in their banner was ‘all to the honour of God and to save people for eternal life’. They were willing to stand for the truth of the Gospel.

This book is written with this in mind. It is a fact that we should neither forget nor shut out. The figure that is before us is a woman with folded hands honouring the living God, taking him at his word, expecting everything from him. He who is ultimately accountable for his own work. The mysteries of a Christ-like existence in God ensure that a book like this will not become a voyeuristic enterprise, even where weaknesses and second-rate issues have to be spoken of. The biographer sees the weaknesses under the protection of grace. Amy Carmichael is not an icon and we do not want to make a legend of her life. I see her as a faithful disciple who followed the footsteps of Jesus Christ, who had come to India before she had. Her biblical realism was the foundation of what she believed and what she did. Once you start to know her, she will draw you into a process of a devaluation of all other values.

However, getting to know her is not made easy for us, because she is surrounded by the then and the now prevailing religious and missionary kitsch. To know Amy Carmichael is also to understand the critical voices about today’s mission praxis and we will experience that we can only draw her to us if we are prepared to face her views of our mission work and to be corrected. In confrontation with her, we experience a feeling of having missed an essential issue in our life before God and in our mission work. Yet, an encounter with her holds a promise: experiencing a want in confrontation with her, one sees a richness in her transparent life before God which she shares with us. Her eventful life had many lifechanging moments. These moments cannot always be identified as they occur. However, with some it is possible, as can be seen in Amy’s life. In our present day, when we hear the crying need for a baptism of holiness, a demonstration of godly living, we focus upon one whose life is so evidently marked with God’s intervention. Her words and acts changed both her life and the lives of others. The impact and the influence of those changing moments can still be felt more than 100 years later, in our present time, when our spiritual antenna is brought to bear on God’s voice to catch and understand his call. Her example of sacrifice and obedience has inspired countless others, both in missionary service and in motherhood.

As I survey the landscape of men and women in Christian missionary circles today, I have to say that the view is both discouraging and promising. Missionaries in our era are in desperate need of a real primary aim of mission. Daily, missionaries meet with frustration, pain and loneliness, and the stories they tell are often disappointing. They ask themselves if the call was real and have their doubts about their going overseas. They feel victimised by circumstances and think about the many who went before and their gripping biographies they have read. Is God working differently now or is something wrong with them?

Mission agencies experience the same. Nowadays, they send many missionaries into the mission field, but where are the stories of real transformation among the people they work with? Especially after the 50s of the previous century, mission agencies focused on more than one thing, and is not the frustration a result of this not having focused on the ‘one thing necessary’? I believe that this sense of confusion and distress among Christians is mostly the result of the disorientation about who God is and who we are. We, representatives of the 21st century, almost all have brought in a way of secular thinking about life, work ethics, marriage and missionary work that is culturally accepted and politically correct, but many times fundamentally unbiblical.

However, others tread the ‘high road’. In daily life and work, they show the way to reflect the glory of God, and we are greatly encouraged by the zeal and persistence to receive and to work for the Word of God and to act on it. In life, they resonate with the truth and do not fear to make tough, radical choices to re-orientate their lives around the Word of God.

In every age, God raises up men and women who are rooted in the Word of God and understand the essence of Father’s will: obedience and love. High-profile individuals, not seeking their own

Chapter 1

glory, not searching for the limelight or aspiring high positions of influence. Yet their contribution is beyond earthly limits and they turn the wheels, sometimes age-old customs, into God- fearing life. Of all those raised by the Lord in ages past, the missionary Amy Carmichael in her time was obedient to Christ’s last command and equipped to be God’s chosen instrument to rescue those who otherwise were doomed to a life of shame and to dishonour the living God. A missionary who was practical, authentic and biblical. Today she triggers us to walk the ‘high road’ to the honour of God and to save those who still live in spiritual darkness.

The aim with this book is to get this across to the reader Amy Carmichael in her existence before God and men. In our days, she needs an introduction. A missionary so well known in evangelical circles during the first part of the 20th century has been forgotten in academic missionary circles one or two generations after she left this world in 1951. Still, in small circles, her name is remembered and well kept, but soon after she went, the spotlight flashed to names of men and women who were drawn more into publicity. Missionary life today, just as in other circles, conforms more to comets than to stars but stars do remain, as the comets have soon gone. Amy Carmichael is one of the many ‘stars’ still twinkling in God’s firmament. She opened the eyes of the missionary world for things only she saw in her time in south India. She made it impossible for us to turn a blind eye to Things As They Are and to see him, who gave his life to save the sins of the world and brought ‘freedom to the captives’. The world Amy was born into in 1867 and the world she departed from in 1951 were as different as the invention in 1867 of the first practical mechanical typewriter is from the modern computer:

We are currently living through one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide. Over the last five centuries or so, the story of Christianity has been inextricably bound up with that of the West. […] Over the last century however, the centre of gravity of the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward, to Africa, Asia and Latin America. […] Christianity is doing very well indeed in the global South.¹⁷ The first decade of our 21st century has shown us the worldwide fascinating growth and development of the Christian church southward; that of the church in Asia is an integral strand of this remarkable shift in Christianity. To explain this shift we need to analyse the significant transformations in more than one way. When we focus especially on India, we see that Indian Christianity, as a mirror to this global shift, is experiencing a remarkable change, which is noticeable even to the casual observer.

From Indo-centric perspectives, its origins can be traced back to the first century¹⁸ and over time many changes have been effected. However, in the last 150 years one can speak of a ‘reconfiguration phase’.¹⁹ Here we are observing an indigenous appropriation of the Gospel, to fit local frames of reference. In the last 30 years, scholars of modern colonialism, European domination and mission work are invigorated and transformed by the influence of historical anthropology and postcolonial theory. Moreover, the focus of the studies shifted from what happened in the past to the ‘colonial encounter’. The study of Christian mission work has expanded rapidly in the last decade, with a growing emphasis on constructing more deeply empirical and historically contingent analyses of the cultural encounter between missionaries and indigenous peoples.

Nowadays, mission work is put under the magnifying glass of many phenomenological studies about colonialism, missionaries and conversion, freshened by rapid globalisation. This fuels the thinking that

17. P. Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: OUP, 2002), 1–2.

18. See R.E. Frykenberg, Christianity in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 91–107.

19. An Andrew Walls expression. Walls enumerates three stages involved in the process of Christianity relating to its host cultures: the missionary stage, the convert stage and the reconfiguration stage (in A. Walls, ‘The Expansion of Christianity: An Interview with Andrew Walls,’ Christian Century (02–09 August 2000): 792–799). mission work alienates people not only from their religion and spirituality but also from soil, country and culture. It is true that modern scholars and readers cringe at the ‘sweetness and light’ of Victorian mission studies and biographies. No one could have been that good. In addition, many have a tendency to spot a conspiracy behind almost every bush, even where neutral observers would perceive only prudence as a typical Victorian way of writing. This kind of approach, usually negative, will ultimately result in the fact that the life and work of Amy Carmichael and her mission as a whole will be depicted negatively, with criticism far outweighing recommendation. Therefore, it may happen that an academic study wants to prove that Amy comes across as a hysteric missionary.²⁰ Amy Carmichael and the DF deserve to be studied in a concise and objective manner of research and description.

We also see a growing scholarly preoccupation with colonial encounters, for instance Eliza Kent in her Converting Women and Kumari Jayawardena in The White Woman’s Other Burden²¹. Both construct a theological context for foreign missions and in this process they miss the theological and ecclesiological distinctions, writing mostly with little sympathy for Christian belief in general and, when they write about Amy Carmichael in particular, her work undergoes the same fate. In considerable detail, Kent examines the underlying structures of belief in Western missionaries and the Indian castes in south India. Her study is unambiguously inspired by feminist postcolonial theory and historical anthropology. As in other postcolonial studies, this one also draws on feminist analysis that has revealed gender as a key constitutive field in the production of colonial knowledge. The work of Western foreign missionaries, described in many books and articles since 1840, often with the tendency to hagiography, now returns as a legitimate and important subject of academic study. With the return of the missionary and missionary encounter as focus of enquiry, the realm of spirituality, faith and religion of the converts is also brought to the fore in the analysis of cultural negotiation and social change. The only conclusion is: the classic missionary has served their turn. This ordeal also fell upon Amy Carmichael. In Kent’s ordeal, Amy Carmichael will be remembered as a woman who consecrated herself completely for the people in south India, but her motives and aim to do mission work, and the way she did so, are nowadays seen as a remnant of highly British Victorian mission enterprise, which is something of bygone years.

From the Indian side Amy was put on one line with liberation theology, propagated by Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928), a Peruvian philosopher, theologian and Dominican priest, who is also regarded as the founder of liberation theology:²²

According to Gutiérrez true ‘liberation’ has three main dimensions: First, it involves political and social liberation, the elimination of the immediate causes of poverty and injustice. Second, liberation involves the emancipation of the poor, the marginalized, the downtrodden and the oppressed from all ‘those things that limit their capacity to develop themselves freely and in dignity’. Third, liberation theology involves liberation from selfishness and sin, a re-establishment of a relationship with God and with other people.²³ Matthews articulates Amy’s work as a reflection of the pain and suffering and of the search for relevance in relation to Christian mission and spirituality. He also interpreted the Bible with its context. It cannot be interpreted literally, but needs interpretation to the concrete context of the theological

20. Cf. S.J.L. Curtis ‘Amy Carmichael: The Hysteric Symptom and Evangelical Millenarian Utopianism’ (PhD diss., Monash University, 2007).

21. E. Kent, Converting Women, Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); K. Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden. Western Women And South Asia During British Colonial Rule (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995). Both take a feminist perspective of the work of foreign women in South Asia.

22. As done by B. Matthews, ‘The Theological Contributions of Amy Carmichael’ (thesis, New Theological College, 2007), 37–38.

23. Cf. http://www.liberationtheology.org/people/gustavo-gutierrez/, dated 22 August 2014.

Chapter 1

activity; in his study Amy is ‘a proto-type of liberation theology’.²⁴ Amy’s motives to live poor, to work with the poor and to liberate children from prostitution came from the deeply felt need that everyone in south India, rich and poor, needed a Saviour. Amy however never left the evangelistic aim of the DF. She cannot become someone’s tool for the liberation theology of the seventies in the 20th century. Those who are doing this re-imagine and reconstruct history, read their own favourite thoughts and predilections, with often anti-Christian roots, into this type of mission and missionary work, rather than letting historical evidence speak for itself.²⁵

This book is a blend of biography, mission history, biblical teaching on mission and the contributions a woman has made to the Christian faith. I have tried to let Amy speak for herself. In writing this book, I listened to important historians who call for biographical dimensions in history books. This mission history is no exemption to this call.²⁶ The results here given will not only be a recital of her life’s story, but will give an insight where her ideas for her mission enterprise come from. There is no need to flatter her, because the evidence will speak for itself. Amy has provided us with a gold mine full of her spiritual insights, which is both timely and significant. The book has academic depth but is written in a way that is accessible to all those engaged in mission work and those eager to know about the progress of the work of God in this world. In spite of much that nowadays militates against quietness, there are still people who read books. These are the people who keep the researchers going. This book is written for those who bring to their reading a mind not narrowed by the sensibilities and trivialities of our time, but who are prepared to contemplate the eternally relevant. To be more specific, to trace specifically the truth and the hidden meaning of a single life and to see from within ‘something of the most pathetic and noble rescue-work in the world’.²⁷

In my opinion, the work of Amy Carmichael and other women missionaries from the latter half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries needs more attention and we have to dig deep in their intentions to discover an authentic mission enterprise. We have to look behind the outward manifestation at the inward spiritual transformation that took part in the hearts and lives of – in this case – south Indian Christians. Amy’s work, especially, was done in a male-dominated CMS low church evangelical mission. In the context of expiring Victorian religion and in these strong entities, she took a different way. As a woman, coming from the late 19th century revivalist Keswick holiness movement, she undertook her mission work and was inspired to spiritual activism in the larger context of theological and social development. The DF is a unique coexistence of faith and work, ‘a sanctuary in the desert’, as it is called, initiated by a woman, who with eyes on God had a real heart for the people.

We, standing on the crossroads, will have to live and work under a sense of urgency and to extend our horizons with the sense of Christ’s supremacy and sufficiency. The contribution women made in the 19th century to the mission through their (often) years of service challenges us to be in the race and

24. Matthews, ‘The Theological Contributions of Amy Carmichael’, 39 and 53.

25. See also D.L. Severance, Feminine Threads. Women in the Tapestry of Christian History (Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2011), 13. ‘Indeed, the feminists found themselves back in the garden with Eve, questioning what God had said and deciding to choose what looks best for them, rather than listening to any authority or examining the historical truthfulness of competing interpretations. Media acceptance of feminist revisionist history and its presence in leading academic circles gave it an aura of authenticity which belied the evidence. Feminist historians generally follow postmodern historical methods.’

26. Historians like H. Lehmann, G. Iggers and R. Frykenberg plead for ‘a biography as a genre of historical writing, specifically in dealing with the recent past’. Frykenberg has called biography ‘a veritable prism of history’ (D.B. Daughrity, ‘A dissonant mission: Stephen Neill, Amy Carmichael, and Missionary Conflict in South India’, IBMR 31(1) (2007): 250). This method is also proposed by Ruth Tucker, in ‘Biography as missiology’.