The beginning of the Dohnavur Fellowship (part 1 of 3)
Chapter 10
The beginning of the Dohnavur Fellowship
Rooted for life
At the beginning of this chapter, the famous words of Livingstone come to my mind, that ‘the end of a journey of discovery is the beginning of the mission’. Amy’s circuitous route came to its destination in Dohnavur. Amy, after an exploration of several years, had discovered the secret travel of little girls and boys, whose very young lives were used for evil purposes. God gave her a mission in Dohnavur to rescue these children:
Deep in the heart of India, if only one can pierce to it, is a sense of God. Many a child is here because of that sense. Let our thoughts be tender when we think of India. The fiercer our fight against the unclean power whose nature is summed up visibly in certain of the symbols in Hinduism, the gentler let our thoughts be of the soul of this people, who might be so different.868 Amy’s last move had been made in 1901, to Dohnavur, a village some 15 miles south of Tinnevelly. The place is named after Count Alexander Dohna (1771–1831), a German friend of missions.869 During her itinerary work, she had also already visited Dohnavur and stayed there for a while.870 Rev. Walker with his band and Amy with her team used Tinnevelly as their operating base.871 Often they travelled to faraway places and therefore it was useful to have a place nearby to stay for a rest. It was not easy to
868. Gold Cord, 225.
869. Count Dohna was a Prussian politician, a friend of Schleiermacher, Schlegel, Novalis and Wilhelm von Humboldt. See Neue Deutsche Biographie (vol. 4, Berlin: Dunckler & Humblot, 1959), 53.
870. Cf. KCMMB, 1879. In the annual report of the KCMC, July 1897, we read: ‘Miss Amy Wilson-Carmichael, Tinnevelly, India’.
871. KCMMB, Mission Committee report, 08 March 1898: ‘The Committee heartily recommend Miss Wilson-Carmichael’s location with the Rev. T. Walker in Tinnevelly district as proposed.’
How to cite: Kommers, J. (Hans), 2017, ‘The beginning of the Dohnavur Fellowship’, in Triumphant Love: The contextual, creative and strategic missionary work of Amy Beatrice Carmichael in south India, pp. 217–246, AOSIS, Cape Town. https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2017.tl41.10 reach the Dohnavur compound, situated far away from the main roads. For Amy the place was just ‘an open compound in jungle land’.872 ‘This work [to save the children] would never have been done by the road side, so He hid you’, was the remark of a Christian friend from Palamcottah.873
Dohnavur was a small enclave of native Christians mostly from the caste of palm climbers. Amy, once high in the mountain near Dohnavur, seeing the green forest stretching as far as her eyes could see, gazed down enchanted over the plains far below her:
Dohnavur, it is our own Dohnavur that holds us; we can see into it; see part of its nearly mile-long wall, the little pointed roofs of its nurseries, the trees of its gardens, the bungalow roof, a mere slip of red paint, my room’s roof a round-shaped daub, and most clearly of all the new, largest nursery, built all by itself in the field facing the hills. […] For surely more precious than even the glorious forest and the mountains which sweep in new and beautiful curves unperceived from below, more precious than all the coloured glory of the plains in so far as it is only of earth, air, water, is that little square within its garden walls, the work of the everlasting God. […] Why should we fear for His work, whether it be in a place dear as the apple of our eye to us, or in a soul to succour whom we would pour out all we have? Are the children of these lands, yes and of our cities at home of all waste places, not regarded by Him? On many a life fell, as we looked down, what seemed like a special ray of that commanded light, and we saw, as if we had never seen it before, that we need not, dare not, fear for any single child in whose unconspicuous life is set the imperishable work of the Lord.874 She herself had not chosen this place and this kind of rescue work. She writes: ‘We have a God who thinks beforehand for His children; we have only to follow His thoughts’.875 In this country with uncountable millions, ‘are the children of these lands, yes and of our cities at home and of all waste places, not regarded by Him’?:
The roots of our Fellowship, it seems to me, run down through Matsuye to Broughton Grange, then to Ancoats, Manchester and further down to the Welcome in Belfast. Through that way they run down to the book of Ezra, the Epistle of 1 Peter 1:22 and 4:8 and to the 13th, 14th and 15th chapter of St. John’s Gospel.
The Dohnavur text ‘Love never faileth’ was the red thread through all the work:
We are trusted to spread the spirit of love. Tenderness in judgement, the habit of thinking the best of one another, unwillingness to believe evil, grief if we are forced to do so, eagerness to believe good, joy over one recovered from any slip or fall, unselfish gladness in another’s joy, sorrow in another’s sorrow, readiness to do anything to help another entirely irrespective of self- all this and much more is included in that wonderful word love. If love weakens among us, if it ever become possible to tolerate the last shadow of an unloving thought, our Fellowship will begin to perish. Unlove is deadly. It is a cancer. It may kill slowly but it always kills in the end. Let us fear it, fear to give room to it as we should fear to nurse a cobra. It is deadlier than any cobra. And just one minute drop of the almost invisible cobra venom spreads swiftly all over the body of one into whom it has been injected, so one drop of the gall of unlove in my heart or yours, however unseen, has a terrible power of spreading all through our Family, for we are one body – we are parts of one another. If one suffers loss, all suffer loss. Not one of us liveth to herself.876
872. Ponnamal, 31.
873. Lotus Buds, 145.
874. From the Forest, 13 and 14.
875. Fragments that Remain, 13.
Chapter 10
Just before she had settled in Dohnavur to take up what would become her life’s work – the care for the children – the question of the ‘other life’ came again. Never to marry – was that really what the Lord had in stock for her? Questioned by Neela about her renouncement of marriage Amy wrote to the Dohnavur children (Figure 11):
Neela’s second question, the one that is so difficult to answer, takes me back to an evening before I sailed to Japan. I had been far too happy, too much wrapped upon the life of the people I loved, to have any time of thought about my own. It didn’t seem to come to mind. So when a letter that looked towards what you call ‘the other life’ came, I was startled. It was a new thought. But presently as I waited quietly deep down in me a voice seemed to be saying: ‘No, no, no: I have something different for you to do’. And from that time on, whenever this question rose, that seemed to be the word that settled things. […] But was there no desire for the other life? Yes, at times there was, and there was fear. One day in Japan that fear was so strong that I went away alone to a cave among the mountains of Arima, where we were staying then. Alone in that cave I listened to that voice of fear. ‘It is all very well now while you are young, but when you are old, you will be desolate’. And then Another Voice spoke. ‘None of them that trust in Me shall be desolate’. […] The last time ‘the other life’ pulled was at Ooty, just before you [the Dohnavur
Source: © Dohnavur Fellowship. Permission to reproduce was obtained from Jeremiah Rajanesan. Photographer unknown. FIGURE 11: Amy with two children in Dohnavur (1912): ‘It is very comforting in so sad a world to be allowed to make even a little child happy’. children] began to come. There was no cave nearby there, but I had a room to myself and I knelt down in that room and laid this that was pressed upon me before the Lord. It was not a question of giving up His service. It never had been that. And now that was (as others would have told me) such a good thing would have led me into wider opportunities than ever had been mine, but it would have led out of India. Lord what wilt Thou me have to do? Shall I do this? And all I heard in answer to that was: ‘No, no, no. I have something different for you to do’. I did not then know what that ‘something different’ was. But I know now.877 Amy always saw the whole enterprise in Dohnavur as a divine commission. Writing about the practices in the Indian temples, she says; ‘We have been appointed to save such children – girls and boys’.878 Dohnavur might be a forsaken, lonely place, somewhere in south India’s plain, but “in His hand are all the corners of the earth”, is one of our words in Dohnavur’.879 Was not Dohnavur and all that happened there the visible answer to prayer with which that place abounds?880 The place is situated off the road and rarely unexpected visitors or people who have no good intentions pass by. Amy saw it as God’s provision:
We are also most mercifully quite out of the beat of the ordinary exploiter of missions; few except the really keen care for such a journey; so that we get on with our work uninterrupted by anything but the occasional arrival of welcome friends and comrades. These, when they visit us for the first time, are usually much astonished to find something almost civilized out in the wilds, and they walk round with an air of surprise, and quite aspiring appreciation, being kindly pleased with little, because they had looked for less. The compound in which the nurseries are built is a field, bounded on three sides by fields, and on the fourth by the bungalow compound. The Western Ghauts with their foothills make it a beautiful place.881 To a visitor, entering the DF premises one can say that if you seek Amy’s legacy, look around you. The buildings, the church, the clock tower, the hospital, the nurseries – all have Amy’s touch. Walking through the moon arches, one realises that much more lies ahead. Look around and you encounter a feast of treasures and monuments that tell the story of the Fellowship of the 20th century. Of this place in the very south of India, it is as if the Lord has said, ‘I will make the place of My feet glorious’. Here the Spirit of God had the habit of taking the words of Jesus out of their spiritual setting and putting them into the setting of the Fellowship, where they are determined ‘not to know anything save Jesus Christ and Him crucified’. A unique Fellowship in the very south of India, in the middle of nowhere, desert-like, came into shape in the first decades of the 20th century. An Irish lady, with other men and women from England, of whom two men came via China, were united with Indian women and men and hundreds of children, without distinction of caste, who were drawn by the Gospel to Jesus Christ, lived and worked there for his glory and to his service and depended for financial support fully upon him.882 Their fellowship is expressed in the Fellowship Song, with the notion of ‘We are, as it were parts of one another’:883 Welded together, parts of one another,
So we are oned in Thine obedience,
Oh let no earthly vapours ever smother
The heavenliness of this sure confidence.
Comfort and joy meet this vital union,
877. Amy in ‘Taken out of the Auto-Biography’, papers in the office of the Dohnavur Fellowship, Dohnavur.
878. Ploughed Under, 144.
879. Nor Scrip, 77.
880. Nor Scrip, 51.
881. Lotus Buds, 146.
882. Ultimately, workers came from England, Canada, Northern Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia and Scotland. As far as it is known, only one came from the Netherlands.
883. Weymouth’s translation of Ephesians 4:25.
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Shelter in storm and peacefulness in strife;
Thus to be knit in Thy pure love’s communion
It is our life, O Lord; it is our life.
And as the petals, fitly framed together,
In rose-bud nourished by or rain or sun
Make one sweet rose, so nourished by Thy weather,
We would be one, dear Lord, in Thee all one.884
The work here was completely new and Amy was pioneering in a place ‘hand-picked by God for her and the children’.885 For several years, Amy thoroughly researched in what way the ‘secret travel’ with the children was done and what was done with them in the temples. She felt a burden laid upon her heart and shoulders to do something:
At last a day came when the burden grew too heavy for me; and then it was as though the tamarind trees about the house were not tamarind, but olive, and under one of those trees our Lord Jesus knelt, and He knelt alone. And I knew that this was His burden, not mine. It was He who was asking me to share it with Him, not I who was asking Him to share it with me. After that there was only one thing to do: who that saw Him kneeling there could turn away and forget? Who could have done anything but go into the garden and kneel down beside Him under the olive trees?886 From that day onwards Amy went a way on which no one had been before, and since that memorable, heart-searching day, when she had to give up all her itinerating plans, she crossed an invisible frontier into an unknown land which for so many years we have known as the Dohnavur Fellowship. Meanwhile, by correspondence she was well informed of what was done in other mission fields, for instance what happened in China. Missionaries, also from the CIM, were threatened, driven away, even murdered. In her Bible we find a reference when she read Jesus’s words in Luke 12:4, ‘Be not afraid of them that kill the body’, to the killing of missionaries during the Boxer rebellion in China.887
Service in a sari
We did not choose Dohnavur. We were living here, itinerating in the country round and almost entirely Hindu tract […] when the work for the little children grew up about us, and before we knew it, we were a family.888 Though naturally conservative, Amy was unconventional and she warmly welcomed new ways of evangelism. She was careful not to be occupied too much with the instrument – the truth – and too little with the end – conversion. Her first years in India were spent with itinerary work, which had a prominent place in her daily programme. For transport, Amy sometimes used a pony, Scamp, but she thought it would be good to sell the pony. In riding Scamp, she felt separated from the Starry Cluster. With a band of Indian girls,889 she went around in a bullock cart. Previously Thomas G. Ragland and Thomas Walker did this itinerary work. The small group of women missionaries were always among the unofficial crowd. A crowd that was not always noticed, but they went out with their one dominant
884. Carunia, Dohnavur Fellowship.
885. Williamson, Amy Carmichael, 82.
886. Gold Cord, 31.
887. In Amy’s Bible (1895) in the margin of Luke 12:4.
888. The Beginning of a Story, 9.
889. In Overweights of Joy the names of these women are mentioned: Golden, Blessing, Star, Joy and Gladness (the names are translated names). note, Jesus Christ. The women in the group did not get any salary for their work. They could afford to be poor with such a rich father!
In an effort to respect Indian culture, members of the organisation wore Indian dress and later on in Dohnavur the children were given Indian names. Amy used to dye her skin with dark coffee and so she could travel and even enter locations only open to Indian women. Often the group encountered a lot of resistance. ‘Many doors had been closed to us after the conversion of two caste-girls in the Great Lake district.’890 Sometimes they were beaten and many evenings they came home and were glad to return ‘with whole bones’. In Ploughed Under Amy gives us a vivid description of such tours which were all but luxurious.891 Early morning and afternoon hours were spent with preaching and talking to the people. One child, searching for the ‘Living God’, and longing to see Amy again, one time prayed: ‘O living God, take me to that Ammal in the sari’.892
The village fountain was a favourite place to go to, because there the women gathered to collect the daily water portion. She tried to talk with them, as a group, or to enter a house to talk with the women, who like Linnet ‘thought of nothing outside the walls of her home and the borders of her field’.893 Men and children gathered early in the morning or in the evening at the village fountain and this was for the preaching band an exquisite preaching place. ‘And we searched the faces before us to find the face of a seeker.’894 People listened for a while and then melted back into the streets of their town. What really failed the women were ‘a real desire after God’.895 Amy felt stricken and she felt compassion in her heart when most of the listeners showed no single sign of interest:
Heaven, hell, sin, holiness, what did those great words mean to them? […] We had prayed to be led to souls prepared; we had not, so far as we knew, found one yet. It mattered tremendously that these people who were so near to us now, and yet so far away, should know the true God and Jesus Christ whom He had sent. Nothing else really mattered. And thoughts of India’s millions who were as though the Saviour of the world had never died on Calvary, had never risen, was never to return, swept over me. And thoughts came too of the unrecognized love of Him who said, ‘All day long I have stretched forth My hands’, and of the Voice which cries without in the streets, in the chief places of concourse, in the opening of the gates, by the well-side of the town and village, by the well-side this evening, ‘turn you, I will make known My words unto you’; and so few heard, so few turned, so few cared to know those words, and I was sorrowful, never dreaming that in the town nearby, that night, there was a child who could not sleep for awe and wonder.896 Itinerary work as a mission method gave the missionaries the opportunity to reach the people with the Gospel in their very localities, often in remote areas. One year after the death of Amy in 1951 the situation in the Indian church is described in The Cross Over India by Rajaiah D. Paul. In this book he urges the church to go back to its first vocation: to uplift the Lordship of Christ. As obstacles to it he mentions: the prevalence of caste, the persistence of intemperance, the failure to naturalise the faith, the neglect of a ministry of reconciliation, especially between Westerners and Indians, the tendency to stand apart from the rest of the people of the country, which has led to an unfortunate communalism, and the
890. Ploughed Under, 59.
891. See pp. 80–81.
892. Ploughed Under, 38.
893. The Widow of the Jewels, 14.
894. Ploughed Under, 25.
895. Things As They Are, 143.
896. Ploughed Under, 27–27. The child mentioned in the quotation is Arulai Tara, Star of Grace, sister of Mimosa.
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appalling lack of interest in Christian evangelism, in large measure due to losing the original freshness and zeal of the Christians of a previous generation. Paul stresses one call: repentance; repentance that will lead to fuller dedication to the Christian vocation. We show so little evidence of what the Gospel has done for us.897 The wish of Paul to go back to the ‘first vocation’ was already done by the aforementioned missionaries Ragland and Walker.
Working in India meant working in an old field, set with fixed and firm tradition. The field of work was about 5000 square miles. Dohnavur was Tamil country and Amy was not the first who had been active in that area. People there did not respond easily to the Gospel. What did they do after hearing the good tidings for the first time? Amy wrote, ‘They simply stare’. Sometimes the message touched them, ‘but the Tamils are not easily touched, and could never be described as unduly emotional’. During their itinerating work, they rarely had five consecutive minutes in which people were willing to listen. Especially for the women it was difficult to listen. ‘Most of them would prefer to be told that secret [of using soap that makes the skin white] than how to get a white heart’. The villages for the bandy were just ‘a very citadel of pride and the arrogance of ignorance’. As was often the case, ‘their interest was simply nil’.
Amy required devoted, single-minded service of her associates. In fact, she formed a religious order of sorts to accommodate these women – Sisters of the Common Life. These women were not compelled to take vows, but should they marry they would automatically revoke their status in the sisterhood. Amy’s work depended heavily on national women who would devote their lives to the children’s ministry that became known as the Dohnavur Fellowship. Her heart was broken for these innocent children and she felt called to save them from this evil. Never give up. ‘Sometimes, […] we dream a dream, dream that perhaps at last it may be possible to win souls peacefully.’ A song came in her heart:
Oh, might some sweet song Thy lips have taught us,
Some glad song, and sweet,
Guide amidst the mist, and through the darkness,
Lost ones to Thy feet.
When it happened that someone wanted to become a Christian, the people who at first loved Amy and her band ‘hated them because the whole caste was roused’. The pattern for this work was shown to her on the mount. It was:
A work which was set on the glory of the Lord.
A work whose workers were all truly the Lord’s.
A work full of love, joy and hope and peace.
A work hidden from the eye of man, but open to the eye of God.
A work whose needs are supplied by the Lord Himself.898
The DF was a select minority within the local community. The practices observed were intentional, not accidental. To enter meant crossing a boundary. Motivation and character were deeply related to the Gospel they sought to proclaim. Amy could hardly find words to describe all that she saw in the temples and heard during her investigations. Sometimes she could not put on paper what she saw and knew about the real situation of the children and what they had to suffer. ‘Words are poor things when the heart is burning with unspeakable indignation.’ The temple walls were thick, but ‘though only an arm’s length separated us, the legions of hell were massed there’, and an attempt at rescue would have led to a riot. In the temples at that time little girls could be seen, all dressed in white, girls devoted to an infamy countenanced by the religion of the land.
897. Cf. R.D. Paul The Cross Over India, SCM Press, 1952. A review of this book in National Christian Council Review, Vol.73, No.3, 1953.
898. Whispers of His Power, 30 September, 207–208.
Thousands of little boys in south India were sold when they had no will in the matter to be trained for the drama, in an atmosphere that precluded all hope of purity and the true life for which God brought them into this world:
Those whom God has saved and brought to us here are but a drop in the sea. In face of this: ‘It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones perish’ is a solemn word. Laws had been passed in various parts of India to forbid the adoption of minors into temple houses. But to fully enforce such a law is impossible in a land ‘where evidence can easily be bought’. Many went to moral destruction by the deliberate will of men and women to meet a popular demand. The beauty of holiness is a phrase very far removed from Indian idolatry. They were brought up in the worst way for the worst purposes, and had no chance at all of being good. They were fore-doomed to sinfulness – and yet ‘Christ died to redeem them from all iniquity’. More and more she saw the need to help children in mortal danger:
The living movement for the salvation of the threatened children had already been born, but there was still to be sore travail of soul for those who were ordained to give their loves to nothing less than the spiritual salvation of these children.899 In Dohnavur Amy knew the children through and through, enough to make us pray: ‘O God, save them through and through, or take them quickly to Thyself’.900 She could pray this, because after her long research she knew exactly what was going on in the temples.
She wanted to know what was really going on behind the big temple walls, determined as she was ‘to get down to the roots of the things’.901 In 1926 she wrote an introduction in a book about the Gorakhpur Nursery:
I know, it will tell of children delivered from a peril so great, so cruel, that no imagination can exaggerate it. Perhaps one has to live in the East for many years, and hear and see and touch many hidden things hidden from the winter visitor, and even from those whose lines are cast where ugly things are not allowed to obtrude, before one can begin to understand these depths of Satan. […] You cannot care too much. The danger is to care too little, and if you care, what are you going to do to help to save these children from the grasp of the Terrible.902