Leadership

Chapter 12

Leadership

The unseen leader

God was in Dohnavur at the soul of Amy’s leadership. Everything was set out to lead toward a vision. ‘Someone unseen but intimately concerned is in command.’1150 She wrestled with God for her children and all the decisions made were grasped from the Word of God. Her intimacy with God fed her own soul. She relied heavily on the Bible stories as a window into the different aspects of leading the DF. In reading, studying and praying over a Bible word, she longed to receive a word from God spoken to her own heart. God’s Word was the light on her path, and God’s presence and his promises were sure. It takes practice to become conversant in the language of the soul. After the coming of the first girl she learned by doing and God taught her to wait for him. The Lord taught her to pray, to stay faithful, to lead and to let go, how to deal with money and with other (foreign) helpers.

For those, who were especially in her heart, she had some advice because she knew that they longed to know the voice of the Lord. It is so easy to be misled by the devil who will lead those who want to follow the Lord into the marsh. Therefore, she gave the following advice for guidance:1151

The Word of the Lord in the Bible. The Word of the Spirit in our heart. The circumstances of our lives, which have been arranged by God. All three must point one way. It is never enough for any two of these be taken as showing God’s will. If the voice is God’s all three will agree.

On the eve of leaving Bangalore, 29 November 1896, she asked prayer supporters in England to give thanks for a girl who attended a Bible class in English, and who had heard the call to do village evangelistic work. This stirred Amy to ask her friends to pray:

[T]hat He may fit and choose out some Indian Sisters to work with us […] only those who know something or are willing to learn something of definite trust in God for daily needs. Here it is most sorrowfully true that ‘What pay shall I get’? is almost always asked when Mission work is mentioned. Many say it will be impossible

1150. Nor Scrip, 120.

1151. In ‘Amma’s Message About Guidance’, paper in the Dohnavur library.

How to cite: Kommers, J. (Hans), 2017, ‘Leadership’, in Triumphant Love: The contextual, creative and strategic missionary work of Amy Beatrice Carmichael in south India, pp. 283–296, AOSIS, Cape Town. https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2017.tl41.12 to get any other than the old lines. But it would roll away a great stone of stumbling if we could all answer […] the invariable question, ‘How much do you get for coming to talk to us’? by saying, We don’t get pay. God supplies our needs through His servants […] but we come for love of God and you. So do pray. Pray for the burning love- the life-consuming love of the Master. Pray that Jesus’ love- His own dear love- may shine and burn through the awful darkness of heathendom.1152 ‘I am not here because of choice’, she writes. To avoid disappointments for those who were thinking of joining her in the work, she explains that rest of the heart is the medicine. ‘Anything less is torture.’

We pray for the call, the thrusting forth. Should any read this who are at the parting on the ways, I want to say very earnestly, Be sure of your call. Our Lord deals variously with souls, but the soul must be sure that He and He alone is the Chooser of its path. […] Do not feel the call of God is always as it were audible. It is more the quiet sense of peace that comes when one is on one’s knees before Him and as one goes about one’s daily work; peace, but also outward attack. Has anyone come to us un-attacked? I do not know of any. Certainly all who are to bear the burden of leadership know it. […] A call is a quiet, steady pressure upon the spirit from which there is no escape. It is an assurance, a conviction. Then there is the leading of God at the other end. If both coincide and the way opened, let the soul go in peace.1153 New helpers, Indians or from overseas, had to answer 25 questions, before they could be admitted and join the family. Questions such as:

• Do you truly desire to live a crucified life? This is to be prepared to do very humble things. • Does the thought of hardness draw you or repel you?

• Do you realise that we are a family, not an institution?

• Are you willing to do whatever helps most?

• Apart from the Bible, can you name three or four books which have been of vital help to you? Apart from books, what refreshes you most when tired?

• Have you ever learned any classical or continental language?

• Can you mention any experience you have passed through in your Christian life which brought you into a new discovery of your union with the crucified, risen and enthroned Christ? • Have you ever had an opportunity to prove our Lord’s promise to supply temporal as well as spiritual needs?

All the questions have one focal point: Do not come to Dohnavur unless you can say to your Lord and to us, ‘the Cross is the attraction’. Be prepared to meet difficulties, and therefore Amy asked for co-workers with ‘steel’. Do not expect gratitude but know you are entering a battlefield when coming to Dohnavur:

Not a word of attraction can I write to such a one. It will be desperately hard work, iron would snap under the strain of it. I ask for steel, that quality which is at the back of all going on, patience, which cannot be tired out, and love loves in very deed unto death. If anyone expects gratitude, he will be disappointed. We are here not to receive gratitude but to do the will of our Father. But very often, far beyond our deserving, we find response and love.1154 In the first 50 years, from 1900, the family grew, children as well as workers. In such an enclosed environment with so many expatriates in a small area, with few possibilities to have outside contact, and due to the strain of the work, frictions were inevitable. In the case that someone had to depart, Amy’s lips were sealed. Love covers everything and she could not always tell the full story. This gave rise to the thought that she was an autocrat who would tolerate no one who refused to obey her. She had learned

1152. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 91.
1153. Fragments That Remain, 15.
1154. Fragments That Remain, 16.

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this from her parents; in the Millisle home there was no compromise, principles were principles. She did not have people who could match her or trusted people from whom she could ask advice. Thomas Walker had died in 1912 and that year her spiritual mother, Mrs Hopwood from Ooty, also died. Mrs Hopwood could cheer her up and give her strength; she prayed for Amy and gave her motherly counsel. Her own mother died in 1914.

She was always ready to gather what the Lord gave her and she shared these thoughts with her family. Every morning during the 20 years of her sickness she wrote down some of the thoughts from a Bible verse on a piece of paper and this paper was handed over to one to read it for the children and the other staff members.1155 She wrote to her family:

It is a great cheer to know that these notes are sometimes a help. There are so many of you, and your needs are various and your ages so different, that it is impossible any word should be for everybody. No archer ever shot several hundred targets with one arrow. But if any arrow finds its target I am content – and grateful. I do not want you to be spoon-fed children, but to get your food direct from your Heavenly Father. But this is my only way to reach you, my own dear children, and I often read things I long to share with you, and sometimes our Lord Jesus speaks a word to my heart which I would speak to yours.1156 One of her most trusted co-workers was Ponnamal – her name means gold – and Amy wrote of their working together: ‘and thus was the awakening of a spirit that was to travel far in the fields of joyful adventure’.1157 It was Mrs Walker who took care of Ponnamal when she was still young so that she was allowed to go to church and Sunday school.

Ponnamal was for Amy not just one of the workers. Since 1897 she had itinerated with Amy’s band of women and she was a ‘fellow-worker, not an under-worker’. Everything concerning the Fellowship Amy shared with her:

Those years lie in memory like a handful of jewels that sparkle as I turn them over. Why do past years sparkle so? They were full of ordinary things while they were being lived; they were often so dusty and dull, but they are jewels now, many-coloured, various; lighted with lights time cannot dim nor tears drown. Mabel Wade, who joined the Fellowship in 1907, was also someone Amy could rely on completely.1158 Just as it was with Ponnamal, money had ‘no power over her’. ‘This in her was most precious to me.’1159 Amy, grown up in the Victorian era, resembled women like Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale, who recognised and accepted their social responsibility in a dark sinful world, caring for those who have no helper, and for unloved little ones, often children in mortal danger. In 1917, she read Fullerton’s At the Sixtieth Milestone1160 and on 30 August that year she wrote on the first page ‘I am here on business for the King’.

After 1930 Amy, being an invalid and ageing, was unable any longer to participate in all the activities with the children or go out with them exploring the environment. Yet her spiritual gifts and vision shone out undimmed. She had led the Fellowship through many and great experiences; could she not

1155. Cf. Editor’s foreword of Edges of His Ways, V.
1156. Letter from Amy to her Dohnavur family. From the introduction to Whispers of His Power, 5.
1157. Ponnamal, 2.

1158. When she came to Dohnavur, she knew that this was the place for her. ‘It is as if I had found my spirit’s home’ (Gold Cord, 65).

1159. Overweights of Joy, 82.

1160. Fullerton, At The Sixtieth Milestone. lead them still? Amma’s prayer always was that an Indian should be appointed as official leader of the work her labours had brought into being. Nesaruthina said that Amy did not want English leadership: ‘India is from India’. But – as she continued:

[M]issionaries kept Indians from further knowledge. Women were put behind men. ‘No need for them to learn’, the men said. Therefore we were not developed. We were afraid when they called us and if you were too friendly then you were placed in another compound. There was no respect for us. Only Amma understood us. ‘One day’, Nesaruthina continues:

I had lost a ribbon, and was very afraid to tell my housemother for she would beat me. I went to Amma and said: ‘My sister is very harsh to me, because I lost my ribbon.’ Then Amma gave me six ribbons, and said, ‘One you give back and keep the others for yourself.’1161 For a long time the family members would not hear of new leadership, for Amy was their leader, and was she not their mother? Who would alter that! Was somebody else ever in a position to take her place? Amy absolutely did not want the Fellowship to be built around her personality. Already in the mid– 1920s, when the Fellowship had grown considerably, the need was felt to constitute a society so that the Fellowship could legally hold property and land. After registration, its Memorandum affirmed that:

The Leader with the help of the Council shall direct the conduct of the Fellowship according to the plans that God shall reveal. It is agreed that the supreme authority is vested in the Unseen Leader, the Lord Jesus Christ, while the human leader seeks, in co-operation with the other members, to carry out the mind and will of the Divine.1162 Often Amy had sleepless nights thinking of the future of the Fellowship and who would lead when she left. One night she went out of bed and sat before a window:

I saw a few stars through the trees. That was all. Then, as I sat there, wave upon wave came over me. I thought of so many of our beloved D.F.s, tired and getting near the end of the day’s work, and others not very strong. How could the family go on? I thought of the forces against it, some openly ill-wishers, some secretly so, and the one who would have stood like a rock through any storm and strengthened the hands of all, perhaps going from us. How could we go on? And if we could not, or did not what then? So much seemed to hang on a few. The line seemed a very thinly held line that night. And the grief and everything was just too much – till I looked again, looked up again, saw the stars. ‘I am the God of the stars’ – it was like a word spoken aloud in my ear.1163 Her fear, expressed in the above words, concerned Arulai’s health. Some years before, in a special meeting in God’s Garden with the Sitties and the Accals Amy had proposed to choose Arulai as future leader, and all agreed unanimously with her choice. Now Arulai was severely ill, Amy’s ‘most precious thing’ she had on earth. In a letter to Frances Beath, who would visit Arulai in the hospital, she wrote:

[T]ell her, that after I see His Face the first face I shall want to see will be hers, and forever and forever we shall be together then. […] Tell her that my longing to be with her.

Amy had sought – to make a transition easier – the possibility of a co-leadership, a European with an Indian. One of the Webb-Peploe brothers was her wish, but in 1947, Murray Webb-Peploe had to leave the country for family reasons. Murray’s wife, Oda, had taken their twin boys to England for further education. More and more Oda felt she could not be away so long from Murray. Also Murray’s mother stood behind her. To Murray she wrote: ‘Years ago you sought my counsel, but those days passed, and

1161. Nesaruthina Carunia, in an interview with the author, 16 November 2013 in Dohnavur.

1162. In Wilkinson, At BBC Corner, 73.

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another woman [Amy] took that place, though you may not have realised it’.1164 In this matter Amy sought the will of God. In her opinion, was not Murray’s commitment to the DF a commitment for life? Murray’s mind at that time was not settled about the matter, until an urgent letter came from Rev. Aldis, in those days the home director of the CIM and chairman of the Keswick Convention, telling him to come back to England. Reluctantly, Amy said goodbye and Murray left Dohnavur in 19481165:

I remember well when that anxiety was heavy on me and I felt if only you and Godfrey were here it did not matter what became of me, and I told the Lord so. He has taken me at my word. He always does I think, and I feel now as I felt then – nothing matters if I have you two beloveds for the leadership of this far-more-to-methan-my-life Dohnavur. As I see the future, it is you Murray dear, as leader in general (Servant of all is my name for that), Godfrey with the boys and others too, and May with Arulai, Mabel and others as able with the women and children, doing what neither you or Godfrey could do. And with you Oda, mothering all, loving all, not thinking of any as outside the circle of special tender love.1166 In a letter, two days before Murray left, Amy wrote to the whole Fellowship – to all her ‘warrior comrades’:

A voice spoke in my soul, ‘Dohnavur is built upon God’. After that, what could I do but look up to our Lord and say, ‘Thou remainest’, saying it not as a sigh but as a triumph song? If we appear to have suffered a defeat and Satan says, ‘You see, you have had to fall back after all’, our reply is, ‘Then we fall back upon God’. […] During this time of spiritual strain may He keep us from spiritual defeat. I pray that we may be led on into spiritual triumph. To help towards that, will you read words written long ago out of the midst of battle and suffering. II Corinthians 4:8–11 and 16–18 are vital to us now. Notice the while of verse 18. It is only while we look not at the things which are seen but at the things which are not seen, that the things which are seen can work for us as far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. And let us use this whole matter as an occasion for proving afresh the certainty of the promises, the certainty of the Presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, the true Founder of this work, and its true Unseen leader.1167 An interesting paper found in the Dohnavur’s office reveals Amy’s views for future leadership.1168 This paper was written under a good deal of pressure:

Before so entirely changing the spirit of Dohnavur, the one who will have to carry on in the future should know India, work in other places, and study the underlying life of that work. This cannot be done in a hurry. Only if India be known will it be understood why we built up the work here on quite different foundations (from the usual) and aimed at something different from that is often counted enough. […] Our way asks for something much more costly – travail until Christ be formed in our boys and girls – and men and women too. We ask far more than the usual of them, and this way of working asks for more of us. It is, as you know, founded on the tradition of the Indian family, into which the thought of ‘pay’ does not enter at all. […] Personally, I could not carry on, on any other lines. I should lose my way. I am sure of this: once paid work begins in Dohnavur, the family love will die. It will, slowly but surely disintegrate, and the parts will never be put together again. So I earnestly say, be very sure of what you are doing before you change the Pattern.

Amy also confesses in the same paper that on board ship to India she already had her doubts as to how the CEZMS’s work was run:

1164. In Makower, Follow My Leader, 158.
1165. In England he worked as a physician in Hampshire, at Barton on Sea, and died in 1982.
1166. In Makower, Follow My Leader, 134–135.
1167. In Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 360.
1168. Amy’s notes on future leadership in ‘About Changing the Pattern’ in the Dohnavur library.

And felt I could not fit into that way. I watched in silence for two years, first at Bangalore, then in Tinnevelly. And at last I was sure. I believe and have proved that this way of working, this which the word ‘Sontham’ (own) connotes, draws the best out of our Indian brothers and sisters. The other way may be the only possible way for a mission – I don’t know – but we are a family. But it is costly. I have never disguised that fact. It asks for all we can give it – and sometimes it may seem as if it asked for more than we have to give – till we go to our Strength. Now the Lord direct our hearts into the love of God, and into the patience of Christ – the steadfastness. Murray’s much loved brother Godfrey, leader of the boys, who took the prayers and the worship in the House of Prayer, trusted and loved by all, would be an excellent leader. On the girls side Dr May Powell, for years Amy’s deputy in practical matters, had earned the trust of the women workers. These two were well equipped and loved by all and this in a time when the role of foreign administrators seemed to grow anachronistically. Towards the end of 1947, two days were set apart for quiet waiting upon the Lord. Two days instead of the one day each month, but this was something extra, planned to meet a deep felt need. ‘We needed light’, Amy wrote.1169 Light was given and his guidance was sought intensely during this time, because everything had started to shake severely. At the end of January 1948, India was shocked by the assassination of Mahatma Ghandi at the hand of a religious fanatic. ‘The sky is cloudy over India now’, Amy wrote in a letter of 04 February. In that year – it was summer – another blow fell for the Fellowship. Amma slipped in her room and fell heavily. She was gravely injured. During the last two and a half years of her life, pain and weakness increased. Still, from her bed she was writing, talking and praying, while her eyes could rest on a rough carved plank, on which the words were painted, ‘Good … Acceptable … Perfect’. In God’s will she rested. For Amy, amidst all these crushing events, she held herself to the promises of God, which never fail. Arulai, the first proposed leader and whom she so dearly loved, was gone; Murray, whom she regarded as the spiritual leader of the family, had to leave; she herself, now 80 years, bedridden and physically weaker and weaker, no wonder many questions came to her thoughts. But Amy strengthened herself in her God: ‘Christ our Lord is with us!’ She kept the faith, also, when another blow struck the family.

The sudden death of Godfrey Webb-Peploe, the proposed successor of Amy, in February 1949, shook the whole community. Just before Christmas, Godfrey, whom she called Benediction, became seriously unwell with thrombosis of the veins in the right leg. Godfrey at that time was thinking much about the Lord’s return:

I am asking the Lord to use this illness to help me pray more. For me it is but ‘a day’, for you it is always, and yet not always, for joy cometh in the morning, and that morning may be very near when our Beloved One will come.1170 He saw his Beloved on 19 February. Mary Mills brought Amy the news of his death with the words ‘God has trusted us with a great trust. Godfrey is in heaven’. She gave Amy the keynote of her message to the family written that same evening: ‘Our God trusts us to trust Him […] Let us not disappoint God. Let us rise to this great trust’. The next day Amy took up her pencil again and wrote:

Tears are not sin. Jesus wept. But to go on lamenting would be sin. It would be as though we doubted the love of our most tender Father. To wonder why this has been allowed to happen would be to dishonour Him. I found myself doing this very thing. ‘Oh, why am I left – I who am useless to you all – and he, who could do so much for you, taken’? Suddenly I knew that even to think such a thought for a moment, was sin. Thank God for the cleansing Blood. But do not let us grieve His love by wondering why. Faith never wonders why. Faith trusts […] My children, my heart goes out to you all. Let us help one another. Let us

1169. Cf. Robbins, Not Forgetting to Sing, 43–45.

1170. In Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 362.

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look up and see our Annachie rejoicing in the presence of His Lord, and with our own dear unseen family too, and be glad with him.

Referring to Murray in this same letter she went on:

They have both gone, and I am left quite broken, but content, for I know that we are safe in the Hand of the mighty and loving One to Whom this Fellowship belongs.1171 However, God is a God at hand and he drew near. In the event, Amma’s retirement from active leadership was compelled by the accident she had and the members of the Fellowship realised that they must come to accept the fact that their Amma had to hand over all leadership to another. Amy always prayed for workers ‘with a spirit of Epaphroditus’. That spirit would be required, for the life of utmost service was not called comfortable:

Comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master. […] Verily, the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning to the funeral.1172 Scattered in the south Indian plain lies the DF compound, as a sanctuary far from the bustling towns, but very near to villages from which the sounds of the temples come over the walls. Here Amy focused on a cultural family structure, which one can say was more or less inspired by both her happy childhood reminiscences and the intimacy of south Indian culture.

The atmosphere is one of love and the Bible is the guiding principle. Amy’s desire was that Dohnavur might be the place where the Lord himself would feel at home. Here they wanted to live in obedience to his commandments.

In all the nurseries, in the hospital, in the office and in the houses Bible texts adorn the walls and they are there as ‘nuggets of gold’, encouraging all who read them to be steadfast in the Lord and always to look upon him, in any need, in any joy, in whatever circumstance (Figure 23). Here the Holy Spirit brings back to remembrance a certain word of the Lord and applies it to the daily particular circumstances in which they are. For them the point is to obey God, the unseen leader. When they stand with the strength and the courage of God, the devil cannot gain one inch at all. Here they draw from Jesus the holiness, manifested in him, and he manifests it in them. The Fellowship’s hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’s blood and righteousness, banking in unshaken faith on the redemption of Jesus Christ and exercising themselves along the line of his Word in patience, godliness and love. Here in Dohnavur the Lord made the place of his feet glorious.

Amy went to India in 1895 as a CEZMS missionary, and after being settled in Dohnavur she always went with the children on Sundays to the Anglican church next to the Fellowship’s compound. The CEZMS was responsible for her missionaries and for guidance and counsel, but since 1925 Amy had been thinking more of God to whom she could look for counsel and who was always near and who could tell her and the others what to do from hour to hour. ‘It was His word which had caused the work to begin, and only He (we write reverently) knew what we should do.’

Then, too, we always had a feeling that there was more to each apparently small decision than we could understand. We dared not move in anything without a sure direction. Our friends at home were very kind.1173 In one of her letters home, she wrote:

1171. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 363–364.

1172. Gold Cord, 336. Amy quotes the Lebanese poet and artist, Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931).

Source: © J. (Hans) Kommers.

FIGURE 23: Comforting words in the house of Heavenly Healing (the hospital).

Since I last wrote, the three of us who belonged to C.E.Z. have resigned. For a long time we thought of it, but hesitated lest we should break any cord of affection. But the work had been led out of C.E.Z. paths, and it has seemed more straightforward to be called what we really are, a fellowship rather than members of a society. We have Moule’s motto: ‘I believe… I belong’.1174 Amy built the Dohnavur Fellowship – officially registered in 19271175 – on the pillars of the Bible, the power of God, and the love for one another. It was registered with the vision:

To save children from moral danger and from the evil one; to train them to serve others, to succour the desolate and the suffering; to do anything that may be shown to be the will of our Heavenly Father, in order to make His love known, especially to the people of India.1176 The management of the Fellowship was entrusted to a president assisted by a committee: The leadership will be guided by God and God alone on whom the President, the Committee and the Members shall wait in prayer. It was started as a Faith Mission and the life and experience since its inception has justified it. Margaret Wilkinson was of the opinion that Amy resigned from the CEZMS, but was not breaking in fellowship, for she only wanted to make clear that there was no ‘sending mission behind the work’.1177

1174. In Dohnavur letter no. 6, September 1925, 16 (PRONI D/4031/24/1A).

1175. The society was formed and registered on 08 August 1927 under the Societies Registration Act, 1860. See the official Constitution of the Dohnavur Fellowship (Tamil Nadu–627 102).

1176. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 118.

1177. In At BBC Corner, 76.

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Sarah Curtis sees Amy’s move to separate from the CEZMS as ‘her need to have control over the children’s welfare’,1178 and so to formalise her position as the home’s first president. These events happened during the time of the departure of the Neills and their son Stephen (see further in this study).

From various sides Amy heard critical voices about the Fellowship. Usually she did not react, but once she wrote something against these critical voices. In ‘The Calm Community of the Criticised’ she mentioned what the Fellowship stood for. She doubted a long time whether to publish it or not,1179 but finally it was printed. Then she wrote in the margin, ‘Had heard all sorts of comments on us. This came. Did not want to let it go into the book. I was over-persuaded. Rightly? Wrongly?’

The Fellowship did not break away from the Church of the diocese, but it was a gradual loosening of the outward links. When, for instance the House of Prayer was dedicated; the Bishop of Tinnevelly, Dr Tubbs, was officially invited and he did the dedication.1180 Later on she would write:

When the local Bishop has been a friend whose coming we felt would help towards the spiritual life of our company, we have asked him to come to us from time to time.

Someone else, not officially ordained, but fearing the Lord, could do the work. Amy, who was a companion to all that fear the Lord, and of them who kept his precepts, did not turn away someone who had received only ‘the Ordination of the Pierced Hands’.1181

Dohnavur was far away from the headquarters of the CEZMS in London, so communications were not always easy. The CEZMS board could ask questions she could not answer, such as, ‘How much did they plan to expand? What financial liabilities would they incur?’ As the Fellowship looked for God to give them guidance and to provide the means, Amy was more and more convinced that for counsel, there was one who was near enough to tell them what to do from day to day. Contacts with the CEZMS remained good – ‘sometimes they inquired through their Secretary’ – but from then on, the Lord was seen as their unseen leader. This did not mean that the leadership was something wrapped in vagueness, but it remained practical and open in all its doings:

So we went on looking to Him to tell us clearly what we were to do. I do not mean by that anything mystical, but something as practical as possible. We do not live in the clouds – we have never lived there: our way is in the dust of the ordinary road. But it is not presumption to count upon a promise being fulfilled.1182 The Fellowship continued fully independent from any Church denomination. Connections with the Anglican Church until now had always been good, but as it was noted in the legal document that ‘our Unseen Leader’ was in charge.1183 CMS property, part of the compound and the house, was given to the Fellowship. ‘This house in Dohnavur is ours now, given to us by the CMS with brotherly words which added to the pleasure of the gift.’1184

1178. In Amy Carmichael’s Aesthetic Legacy, 10.

1179. See Made in the Pans, 37.

1180. The author personally witnessed in 2013 in Dohnavur that the local pastor was invited to preach in the House of Prayer.

1181. Cf. the words of the Keswick speaker F.W.H. Meyers in his St. Paul.

1182. Gold Cord, 177.

1183. Gold Cord, 331. ‘In the document the Lord our Saviour, the Leader of the Fellowship, is clearly mentioned. For example, there is this sentence, “It is agreed that the real Authority is vested in the Unseen Leader, Christ, while the human leader seeks in co-operation with the other members, to carry out the mind and the will of the Divine”’ (in Meal in a Barrel, 108).

1184. Meal in a Barrel, 107.

The Fellowship was not a ‘mission’ or a kind of ‘faith mission’, but they continued – just a family, a fellowship, ‘free to fill any gaps we can’.1185 Convinced of the urgency of the Great Commission, Amy adopted the faith principle for the operation of the Fellowship. The evangelistic work around Dohnavur continued, but ‘our first business all along has been true to our trust towards the children for whose salvation we were called into being’.1186 Amy saw in the institutions in Friedenshort (Germany) a kind of example along which line she wanted to operate.1187

Sisters of the Common Life

Across the will of nature
Leads on the path of God
Not where the flesh delighteth
The feet of Jesus trod.

This song of the German mystic Gerhard Tersteegen was the leading song of the Sisters of the Common Life.1188 For this reason Carla Brewington sees the DF as a ‘friaristic model’.1189 A place separated, a dispersed order; a community of believers who take vows and who are bonded together. Amy knew very well the work of the Dutch mystic Geert Grote and the French abbess Madame de Guyon, people who favoured the searching of their own hearts and who formed fellowships practising this kind of life. Quaker communities in Cumbria’s Lake District sympathised with their thoughts and Amy had something like this in mind with the DF. ‘We had at that time seven Indian girls who were seeking to live a life of unreserved devotion, a life without fences.’:

Something was required to unite and fortify them. Jonathan, Saul’s son, arose and went to David in the wood and strengthened his hands in God. We needed to meet one another in Jonathan’s wood.1190 We did meet there; we shaped ourselves into a group, and called ourselves Sisters of the Common Life.1191 Amy says that this name came from the Brotherhood of Common Life, founded by Geert Grote, of Holland.1192 Her intention was that in Dohnavur they would live and work in the same way as the Brotherhood of Geert Grote and rub out the distinction between sacred and secular:

Our thought in taking the name was that the line so often drawn between spiritual and secular has no place with us if we follow him who not only withdrew to the mountain, but also went about doing good.1193

1185. Gold Cord, 331.

1186. Gold Cord, 331.

1187. The Friedenshort Institution was started in 1890 by Eva von Tiele-Winckler (1866–1930) in Miechowitz/Oberschlesien as a place of Christian welfare for those in need. Christian lifestyle as well as practical skills went here hand in hand. ‘Mother Eva’, as she was called, made a home for homeless children.

1188. See full details in Chapter 11.

1189. In The Sacred Place of Exile, 104–106.

1190. C. Brewington, The Sacred Place of Exile. Pioneering Women and the Need for a New Women’s Missionary Movement (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013), 105.

1191. Gold Cord, 158.

1192. Gold Cord, 158–159: ‘The Brothers worked with their hands and gave themselves to the training of “such as sought, apart from the evil about them, a pure and godly life.” Communion with God and laborious work filled their days. They lived the common life, but they lived it with God for common men.’

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The Sisters had to learn how to take a towel, like Jesus did1194 and also according to a translation of 1 Peter 5:5, ‘Put on the apron of humility to serve one another’. Every Saturday the Sisters of the Common Life used to meet.

These women knew the cost of exile, even in their own country. Most of them had been rescued from sexual and physical abuse, some were abandoned by their families and left to die. The women chose to live together and devote their life to him who loved them. The meetings of the Sisters of the Common Life were mainly in English and usually they met on Saturday mornings. They read the Bible and Bunyan Pilgrim’s Progress in Tamil. Other books they read were written by Rolle, Suso, Tersteegen, Thomas à Kempis, Samuel Rutherford, Père Didon and contemporaries like Bishop Moule and Josephine Butler.1195 All these authors ‘offered just what these women began to want’, and they gave ‘the still dews in the century of turmoil’, ‘brave and burning souls of every age, these had left torches’.1196 A small booklet for the Sisters of the Common Life has several poems and words from the Bible and well-known authors, like Bishop Creighton, Reimund Lullius, Thomas á Kempis, Père Didon, T.T. Lynch, and others. They liked to quote Père Didon: ‘This sacred work demands not lukewarm selfish slack souls, but hearts more finely tempered than steel, wills purer and harder than a diamond’. Also some of Andrew Murray’s books were read and one of these books was translated by the Fellowship into Tamil.1197 Amy quotes Lilias Trotter (from her private diary) as to the kind of people that God gives power:

So many questions lie ahead concerning the work, and a great comforting came this morning in the chapter of Job (Job 28) about ‘the way’ of wisdom and ‘the place thereof’ (verse 23). It tells how God finds the way for the wind and the water and the lightning, and it came with a blessed power what those ways are. The way for the wind is the region of the greatest emptiness, the way for the water is to the place of the lowest depth, the way for the lightning, as science proves, is along the line of the greatest weakness.1198 These Indian Sisters meant a lot to Amy and to the Fellowship because they knew how to deal with many different characters. ‘Nothing but the love of God can control and fuse into a happy unity such diversity as this.’1199 From the very first the first words for the Fellowship were, ‘the Cross is the attraction’.1200 The sisters could always be asked to do a task from which the flesh would shrink. Since the first meeting of the Sisters of the Common Life, on 18 March 1916, until Amy wrote Gold Cord in 1932, between 20 and 30 girls signed the following confession of love and agreed with the following declaration:

My Vow. Whatsoever Thou sayest unto me, by Thy grace I will do it.

My Constraint. Thy love, O Christ, my Lord.

1194. See John 13:4.

1195. Josephine Butler (1828–1906): a Victorian era religious evangelical Anglican, well-known as a social reformer who was especially concerned with the welfare of prostitutes.

1196. Gold Cord, 161.

1197. A. Murray, Humility: The Beauty of Holiness, translated into Tamil in 1936 by the DF. Other translations in the Dohnavur ‘Fullness of Life’ booklet series, are The Winning of Souls and A Pure Heart.

1198. Gold Cord, 92.

1199. Gold Cord, 160. Amy also quotes Père Didon to underline what was to be expected from the Sisters of the Common Life: ‘This sacred work demands, not lukewarm, selfish, slack souls, but hearts more finely tempered than steel, wills purer and harder than the diamond’ (Gold Cord, 161).

1200. Gold Cord, 161. ‘For “the symbol of the Christian Church is not a burning bush nor a dove, nor an open book, nor an halo round a submissive head, nor a crown of splendid honour. It is a Cross”’. Amy here quotes C.M. Clow’s expression (see Gold Cord, 161).

My Confidence. Thou art able to keep that which I have committed unto Thee.
My Joy. To do Thy will, O God.
My Discipline. That which I would not choose, but which Thy love appoints.
My Prayer. Conform my will to Thine.
My Motto. Love to live: live to love.
My Portion. The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance.

Teach us, good Lord, to serve Thee more faithfully; to give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labour and not ask for any reward, save that of knowing that we do Thy will, o Lord our God.1201 The girls were free to marry, and some did. Some lived out in the villages, but the greater number of those who had not married stayed in Dohnavur, serving in various parts of the work, as comrades and companions in the Fellowship. To be a Sister of the Common Life was for Amy to have a life of joy, but they knew it was soldier’s life:

The nearer the soldier is to the Captain the more he will be attacked by the enemy. […] To belong to the Sisters of the Common Life will certainly bring the devil’s fire upon us. […] As Sisters of the Common Life we are trusted to be very careful about our inner discipline, and continually expose every part of our inward life to the searching light of God. […] 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 joys, 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. […] Not one of us liveth to herself. We owe it to the younger ones to teach them the truth that united prayer is impossible, unless there be loyal love. If unlove be discovered anywhere, stop everything and put it right, if possible at once.1202 It is often said that Amy opposed marriage for the Sisters of the Common Life. On the contrary, she could enjoy the happiness of a married couple, but the Lord had shown her: ‘I have something greater for you to do’. Then she goes on:

This life is not greater than the other, but it is different. That is all. For some our Father chooses one, for some He chooses the other, all that matters is that we should be obedient unto all meeting His wishes.1203 Since 1927, the Dohnavur children and the staff have worshipped in their own church, the House of Prayer, in the middle of the compound. Church attendance at the Anglican church in Dohnavur was so high at that time that there was hardly any space for the DF children, so the separation also had a practical side.

One wonders why Amy took this step. The trend in those days was to amalgamate institutions like Dohnavur with their denominational societies. This happened with women’s societies in England and America, but the final outcome was that women running societies and institutions declined drastically. The end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th centuries had proved that women could perfectly do this work. ‘They had carved out their own niche and their structures had been more collegiate than the men’s.’1204 For Amy the wide network of the CEZMS disappeared, but there was still so much prayer support from that church and many other Christians all over the world. They, too,

1201. Gold Cord, 161–162.

1202. Amy, in a little manuscript prepared for the Sisters, in the DF office. In the 1950s there were three groups of Sisters of the Common Life in Dohnavur: a group that used the English language, a senior and a junior Tamil group. 1203. In a printed document written by Amy, ‘Taken Out Of The Autobiography’ (in the Dohnavur library). 1204. Griffiths, Not Less Than Everything, 337–338.

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never failed to support the DF and never did the Dohnavur children and staff go to bed without any food. The Lord cared. The ‘freedom’ Amy had after 1926 gave her the opportunity to run the Fellowship on the primacy of the Bible, evangelism, service and child welfare. Amy’s executive and managerial skills can still be seen in all the buildings, nurseries, the church and the hospital on a compound that expanded nearly every year; one wonders what it all must have been like in Amy’s time when everything was in full operation. It all developed from the vision of that once physically frail missionary, medically unfit to go to the mission field, but the Lord decided differently. It was he who used Amy as his instrument and led her all those 56 years. With small provisions in a small place, she gained the highest.

The Fellowship did not have a board or committee in England to direct them. Asked, ‘Have you no one anywhere responsible for you?’, she replied:

The leaders and those most able to give counsel frequently about the affairs of the Fellowship. When a decision has to be made which concerns all, as many as possible meet to ask for guidance for those who must take action. Those on whom the responsibility lies meet for prayer, and light is given. We have no one on earth who is responsible for us; but we have our Father in heaven.]

It is written that He knows what things we have need of before we ask Him. But we work in closest cooperation with our Home Secretary in London, and our Travelling Secretary in Australia. And our father has given us others who act as Secretaries in various countries and who for love of Him, gather any who care for us to meet in prayer for the work. They send out to us any gifts which are given to them, circulate D.F. letters and sell D.F. books.1205 Amy was very realistic and did not want those who were to be the leaders of the Fellowship after she passed away to look back over her decisions:

[A]nd wonder what I would have done. Look up, and light will come to do what our Lord and Master would have you do. It may be that decisions which seem to change the character of the work will have to be made. But if the root principles which have governed us from the beginning are held fast, there will be no real change. The river may flow in a new channel, but it will be the same river. If you hold fast to the resolve that in all things Christ as Lord shall have the pre-eminence, if you keep His will, His glory, and His pleasure high above everything, and if you continue in His love, loving one another as He has loved you, then all will be well, eternally well.1206 Never were the Dohnavur premises guarded by guards. They knew of ‘the Wall of Fire’ around them.1207 The sisters Evangeline and Francesca French, with Mildred Cable, visited Dohnavur in 1928 where they gained the impression that they were in ‘a garden of Paradise where exquisite children play with joyous abandon, sheltered from the gross of the evil world; but on the footing of comradeship in spiritual campaigns’. After having met the women in their flowing saris, they thought that they were:

[T]aken out of this century of vulgar exaggeration into the quiet austerities of an earlier age. We were housed in a red-tiled bungalow with shady veranda resting on granite slabs. Masses of gorgeous flowers lit up the quiet room, and during the days we spent there our whole beings seemed steeped in the sense of peace and beauty.1208

1205. The Starry Cluster, 12. ‘We do not have committees at Dohnavur’ […] ‘And still we waited. When at last we rose from our knees we all knew we had received the thing that we had desired of the Lord, even clear guidance’. In Nor Scrip, 72. 1206. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 258–259.

1207. Lotus Buds, 236.

1208. In E. French, M. Cable & F. French, A Desert Journal. Letters from Central Asia (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1949), 23–24.

Still one aspect of the leadership has to be tackled. Some have argued that Amy acted like a dictator in Dohnavur, that she opposed marriage and did not want to hear any critical voice.1209 True she had a stern Irish character and strong convictions and was not married herself – there was no partner to correct her – but, to say she was a ‘hard taskmaster’ for the Dohnavur people is too harsh. Today the very old Indian women in Dohnavur who can remember her speak with great love about Amma.1210 Only once did an Indian co-worker openly oppose her and she herself chose to go away, while Amy still loved her and felt very sorry that she had gone away. The DF had little or no contact with other mission organisations. The outside world was kept out to prevent contamination. For Amy many missionaries were half-hearted. Her experience with some made her say that all were like that. Sometimes she was too forthright in her opinions, which others did not like. Ruth Tucker says ‘she was more often ignored than opposed by other missionaries’.1211 About the stormy relationship between Amy and the Neill family, new details can be read in Daughrity’s Bishop Stephen Neill.1212 She had a strong character and her Irish background, being a ‘Dalziel’, meant she must have been one who could hardly deal with someone next to her. Like C.T. Studd, who withdrew from the CIM and started his own mission in the heart of Africa. Studd and Hudson Taylor, both strong independent characters, could not easily go through one door. Often God’s servants live on a lonely height, which gives them many inward struggles difficult to understand for those living near to them.

Amy’s conviction was that she was called by God and divinely directed to this work. In her decisionmaking, she asked from all members of the Fellowship obedience as she herself saw it as her highest calling to be obedient to God and his Word. Obedience was her secret of being conscious that God was guiding her personally; therefore, she often did not discuss the decisions that were taken. This, however, could give others the impression that she did everything on her own without consulting them. God is the unseen leader of the DF, the greatest testimony to Amy’s leadership capacities is the fact that the DF survived both the ending of British rule in India and her own death in 1951. Continuity of the Fellowship was ensured by adapting both the ethos and the work of Dohnavur to the modern India in the first decades of the 21st century.

1209. Cf. Elliot, A Chance to Die, 198, 201.

1210. See R.A. Tucker, ‘Amy Carmichael’, in From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan), 301. She herself did not go on furlough, but when others needed rest she arranged for them a retreat in the mountains, in Cape Comorin, or, as for Murray and Oda, a longer rest period in Australia.

1211. In ‘Amy Carmichael’, in Daughters of the Church 302.

1212. See also Chapter 13 in this book.

‘But thou shalt call thy walls Salvation, and thy

gates Praise’. Isaiah 60:18 (KJV).

Above the moon gate of the DF compound, one reads as

one enters Salvation in Tamil and Praise as one leaves.