Amy’s missionary approach (part 1 of 3)

Chapter 14

Amy’s missionary approach

Sacrificial service

The taking up of the cross always means, the emptying of the life of everything that is merely selfish in motive, high things may become that. If there shall come a moment when a man has to choose between the call of Christ to sacrificial service, and the appeal of high and beautiful earthly affection, there is only one thing to be done according to these terms of Jesus. That is to follow Him. He calls for much; He calls for everything. He calls for the march that may have no return and can have no compromise. He demands His loyalty because His enterprise is a crusade. Its method is that of the cross, and there is no other way. Because He goes that way, His disciple also must go that way.1426 On 03 June 1851, a breathless date, for no rain from the western hills had come yet to cool the air, and the pitiless heat of six parched months makes all weary and very tired. On that date Thomas G. Ragland wrote: ‘Of all plans of ensuring success, the most certain is Christ’s own, becoming a corn of wheat, falling into the ground, and dying’. On 11 June 1901, on just such a day, a man like-minded, Thomas Walker of Tinnevelly, repeated these words of Ragland’s very slowly.

On a glary white road, under the burning sun, two women and a man silently went on. The stifling heat discouraged speech, until they halted about the ugly little ruin and the depressing tombstone. The three on that blistering day along the hot road were Thomas Walker and his wife together with Amy Carmichael. What brought them that day to the tombstone of Ragland on a bare plain in north Tinnevelly, near the small, ruined house where he had died? We hear it from Rev. Walker who at the grave of the pioneer missionary Thomas G. Ragland broke the silence with words associated with Ragland:

Of all plans of ensuring success, the most certain is Christ’s own – becoming a corn of wheat, falling into the ground and dying: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit’.1427

1426. Whispers of His Power, 24 August 180–181.

1427. John 12:24. Cf. Paul when he was challenged to prove his apostolic credentials. He did not give church planting statistics, academic qualifications or numbers of people in his church. He pointed to his ‘burials’ – his suffering and his weakness – Galatians 5:11, 6:17; 1 Corinthians 4:8–13; 2 Corinthians 11:22–33. See also Acts 9:16, where the Lord tells Ananias to go to Paul, ‘For I will show him how many things he must suffer for My name’s sake’. See also Ragland, 104–107.

How to cite: Kommers, J. (Hans), 2017, ‘Amy’s missionary approach’, in Triumphant Love: The contextual, creative and strategic missionary work of Amy Beatrice Carmichael in south India, pp. 345–377, AOSIS, Cape Town. https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2017.tl41.14

Amy then walked around the house, looking in through the gaping holes, trying to see, trying to hear:

If walls could speak what a strange confusion of words there would be! Or would each house have its dominant word? This surely would. We could almost hear it now, Word of words, Name of names, Jesus.1428 Many years later, when Amy wanted to recapture that moment, she wrote:

Forgotten then were the heat, the fag of life – forgotten was everything. For a minute we stood in silence, and I know that the prayer rose from the depths of our hearts: Lord, give it to us to live that life and to die that death, and to bring forth fruit unto life eternal.1429 Her vocation was her identification with Christ’s sufferings and Cross. For his name and his Cross she had come to India. Here at this grave she again gave up her right to herself to Jesus Christ,1430 and fixed her mind on the things of God. Through the Cross of Christ, the door is open for a world in need. It is the Cross that tests the missionary and the work, because God’s mission is Cross-shaped. Amy abhorred the triumphalism that so often infected the church and the mission, which destroyed humility, minimised grace, and offered far too much homage to money and human activities. Real power and greatness is about sacrificial service because ‘even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many’. There is no prestige or worldly power to be found in being ‘buried’. The missionary’s motivation is tested through the Cross.1431 In a letter written from Kotagiri in 1896 in which she writes about reaching the Indian people with the Gospel she says about Christ that ‘He emptied Himself and made Himself of NO reputation. In India that would mean much’. And then she continues: ‘Sometimes I think we shall never never lift these people up until we get lower down’.1432

The very raison d’être of the DF was the love of God in Christ and devotion to the slain, yet conquering Lamb:

So we sympathise with everything that tends towards life and light in India, and rejoice with our brothers who bind sheaves, believing that though all is not genuine corn, some is, yet we feel compelled to give ourselves mainly to work of a character which, by its very nature can never be popular, and possibly never successful from a statistical point of view, never, till the King comes, Whose coming is our hope.1433 There in Dohnavur Amy worked out her God-given, Cross-shaped mission by being ‘buried’ in the Fellowship’s compound and surrounding communities to where God had sent her, preaching and demonstrating the Gospel of Jesus Christ to fight the ancient old devadasi system and saving little children and bringing them to Jesus, through humble service and sacrificial love. That day there at Ragland’s grave Amy felt so unworthy of doing this work, with the flame of love burning so dimly. She quoted a fellow missionary, whose thoughts were hers too: ‘I do not think I would dare to call myself a missionary yet’ and ‘to me there is no more tragic sight than the average missionary’.

1428. Ragland, 106. ‘Jesus’ was the last word that was heard of Thomas Ragland who died 22 October 1858 (Ragland, 102).

1429. Gold Cord, 8.

1430. Cf. Galatians 2:20.

1431. Cf. Count Zinzendorf’s prayer that Christ would draw him into the ‘fellowship of His sufferings’, and into a life of service.

1432. In a letter written in Kotagiri, June 1896, p. 13 (PRONI D/4061/1/1-D/; D/4060/6/8).

Chapter 14

‘Good, acceptable, perfect’

For her work, Amy looked upon God and in obedience to his Spirit she went her way. She refused to be swamped by the cares of this world; she cared for the one thing that was necessary. Therefore she cut out all non-essentials and continually revised her relationship with God to be concentrated on him. Him, only him, she trusted completely. ‘Real faith believes not only that God can, but that He will.’1434 She was eager to know, not the people and the things as they appear, but what is behind, underneath. Pain of men and animals could crush her. The question that cut like a knife striking the ground was not ´Why do the innocent suffer?’ but ‘Why do the innocent sin?’ For her the pain she saw in the sexual abuse of the children, the vileness of the symbols and talk of the people, even of the young ones, seemed to be normal for the people:

There are evil things, which are so common in this land that they shock no one. The reaction is not shame, but a smile. […] Many a child is born into a heritage which must be harder to triumph over than we can imagine. Certainly, it is so with some whom we have known. Given ancestors who belonged to one of the secret phallic cults (cults old as the East), must not there be a terrible hell-ward pull day by day, night by night? […] When an Indian woman invited her to her house that flanked a temple wall and took her upstairs, she wrote: a feeling of something wrong with the place came over us. There were pictures on the walls, an air in the rooms that oppressed us.1435 Which power could ever break these vices and opposition to the Gospel? ‘Nothing is strong enough to counter it but the powers of Calvary.’1436 With the other Sisters of the Common Life, Amy often was on her knees now they knew what was really going on. She prayed:

O God of peace, strong is the enemy
But Thou art nigh,
And he must fall beneath our feet, because of Calvary.
Mighty the weapons of our warfare are
Through Thee alone,
Oh, lead us to the battle, captain us, Most mighty One.1437

Actually, the person for whom they had prayed to be set free, ‘to become a force for good among us’, had become one of them. When one of those who was released from Satan’s power became very sick and when all human hope had fled, ‘He to whom belong the issues from death came into the house, and took her by the hand, and called saying, Maid, arise’.

Such an experience does not leave any who share it just where they were before. They may not be able to put their gains into words, but something has been gained, the precious things put forth by the moon, the chief things of the ancient mountains are theirs, and they can never lose them. But sometimes words can be found that sum up the gains, and for us there are three which will be forever bright because of that darkness. These words are Good, acceptable, perfect – the words learned off by heart by Ponnamal’s bedside.1438

1434. Nor Scrip, 46.

1435. Gold Cord, 173–174. ‘Then were the powers of evil aroused in all their fury, and when Arulai and I visited her later we realised that her house is indeed as the way of hell going down to the chambers of death and, as we shrank from contact with such a place of wickedness, feeling ourselves defiled, we entered a very little into what it cost the Holy One when He trod the winepress alone and with His own arm brought salvation’ (Gold Cord, 175).

1436. Gold Cord, 166.

1437. Gold Cord, 166.

Amy knew that all the power was wholly in the hands of their Commander-in-Chief. ‘And it was in times like these that our nights became light about us.’ There is no depth so deep, no situation so dark:

[B]ut what fathomless depths it must have held for our Lord Jesus when He set His face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem, Gethsemane, Calvary, and certain it is that whatever way of pain may open before any one of us, we find as we walk in it the marks of our dear Lord’s footsteps leading on. He walked alone on that road so that we need never walk alone. No star, no flower, no song was Thine, but darkness three hours long.

Since then, Amy’s Cross-shaped mission enterprise was lighted by the very tenderness of God:

And a light shined in the cell, Light of Love shined in the cell, Dearest Lord, how can it be
And there was not any wall, Turned to gold the iron bars, That Thou art so kind to me?
And there was no dark at all; Opened windows to the stars; Love is shining in my cell,
Only Thou, Immanuel. Peace stood there as sentinel. Jesus, my Immanuel.1439

Towel life: Amy’s view on mission

Before Amy had settled in Dohnavur, she had some 20 years’ experience of evangelist work. She evangelised in Belfast, Manchester, Japan and Ceylon and itinerated in India, until the Dohnavur children bound her feet; that seemed an end to everything that she had believed she was called to do. Since then her missionary work was a ‘towel life’, serving and bringing up the children. She dearly missed the direct way of evangelism, but the work in Dohnavur was also real missionary work for her. Obedience to the heavenly vision kept her for the rest of her life in Dohnavur and that held her to be faithful in this work, even ‘when many a time I would have turned from it, but for His hand upon me’.1440 She now was fully involved in what the apostle Paul called travail ‘until Christ be fully formed’1441 in the children who were given to her:

Is it not just that there is work to do and that we have to see it is done properly. It is much more than that. We believe India is meant to evangelize India, so our first care is to help and to strengthen our dear children who are our fellow-workers. […] But if we go on with our God we come to the place where we ask Him to take and bless and break and give. After that it does not matter what our part in any service be, if only souls are won and His name glorified.1442 Do not think my brother, that God sends us to the field sweetly to tell the story of Jesus, and that is all. He sends us there to do what Jesus came into the world to do – to bear the cross.1443 Amy saw that people who wanted to see foreign countries and the work of the missionaries, only saw the mission compound and did not look outside. She would say: you should see more and deeper:

God give us hearts that will care more, and eyes that are clearer to see past the edge of the halo rim, over the walls of our compounds, a way up through His wide world, till we feel as we never felt before the overwhelming enormousness of the work that is not being done, in places where souls are sitting in darkness which does not pass.1444

1439. Gold Cord, 170.
1440. Fragments that Remain, 94.
1441. Galatians 4:19.

1442. Fragments that Remain, 95. Here she quotes Bishop Handley Moule who wrote that all the work done is with this single consuming purpose, ‘the equipment for work of service’.

1443. Overweights of Joy, 59.

Chapter 14

In her mission work, either as an itinerating evangelist or to confess Christ’s name in a resident situation, the aim is the same. Mission is about giving what we have already received: the Gospel. God sends his children and takes care that they are not discouraged, for ‘discouragement cuts the nerve and effort’. The service is ‘whole-time service’. ‘But when was a Christian’s work not whole-time service’? And those who have little courage, know ‘that the battle is the Lord’s’.1445

Frank, vital telling in ordinary language that the Lord Jesus Christ lives and loves, and can save and keep, and can be known like a real friend, and is a Master who gives real orders and strength to carry out – think of the power that is in that!1446 England’s queen sent the best-qualified servants for the many affairs in foreign lands; therefore, ‘it is a disgrace of our Zion that she sends not some of the ablest and wisest and holiest of her servants’.1447 God had put into the hands of men and women, pardoned and saved by mercy, a proclamation of mercy and pardon to all who would accept of it. In her thinking about mission, she stood firm, her heart secured in the anchor of biblical truth. Day by day she was to be found everywhere on the Dohnavur compound to assist and inspire the other workers. She was ‘a bundle of energy’; once she prayed: ‘Make us inspirers of others to the very end’.1448

Fully engaged in practical issues she was always aware that she was engaged in spiritual labour and spiritual warfare. Although she appreciated the faithful toil of many whose line was different, she had seen how Muslims and Hindus were hindered to come to Christ by the lives of nominal Christians.1449 She was not in favour of mass meetings and preaching before large public audiences:

To tell the people in the mass, even of patients in the mass, does not do much, I think; to show one singly may do something. But the Lord of the field knows where every seedling is. He never loses sight of even one.1450 In her itinerary work and in Dohnavur all the work was done by offering the people the simple lifechanging Gospel and wrapping all other gifts in it.

The chosen site in the Tinnevelly plain – was it right or wrong? She never bothered about that question. To her mind, it had long since been answered. The policy settled 19 centuries before in that one sentence ‘The love of Christ constraineth us’. Never at rest until people were safe in Jesus’s arms and when they had come to eternal rest. People ‘unknown to the great world, but well-known in the place where they sing when lost people are found’.1451 For Amy, evangelisation was the core business of mission work. She knew that many organisations had honeycombed themselves into mission work by undertaking the civilisation of the people first. For her it was not man’s need first, but the obedience to the will of God, her Father.1452 ‘The heathen shall know that I am the Lord […] when I shall be sanctified in you before their eyes.’1453 Amy always insisted on a right relationship with God first and then the

1445. Fragments that Remain, 92 and 93.
1446. Fragments that Remain, 93.
1447. Broomhall, Robert Morrison, 27.
1448. Williamson, Amy Carmichael, 99; Whispers of His Power, 27th of March, 72.
1449. See Gold Cord, 304.
1450. In Though The Mountains Shake, 42.
1451. The Widow of the Jewels, 35.

1452. Here we can think of an expression of Dr Moffat, missionary in Africa and father-in-law of Dr Livingstone, who once said ‘Civilisation drives away the tiger, but breeds the fox’. A statement of a man after years of work in the mission field. 1453. Ezekiel 36:23. carrying out of the work along God’s line, and just being faithful.1454 To comfort God’s servants, who might become tired, or did not see results, she very nicely said:

So little is He weary of us that He wants to have us altogether and forever for Himself. He wants us. Oh, the joy of being His wanted one! […] Let us love full scope. Nothing happens by itself, and every sorrow, every trial, is part of the plan of love, part of the refining. Love meant it. Love sent it. Love will bless.

‘Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?’ (Mt 20:15).1455 At the end of Lotus Buds, Amy pleads for foreign mission. Obedience does not always lead to foreign countries. However, Amy’s concern was that:

[A]t home there is so much earnest Church life, with so many evangelistic campaigns, and conventions, but that there is so poor an output as far as these lands abroad are concerned. How is it that so many are meant to stay at home? […] Will the girl by the fireside, if such a one reads this book [Lotus Buds], lay the book aside and spend an hour alone with her Lord? […] Will she ask Him to fit her to obey?1456 For evangelistic work, she was already ahead of many in her method, for this work had to be done by local men and women. In 1938 she wrote to Godfrey:

If you are asked about our willingness or otherwise to accept evangelists, isn’t this the thing to stress? We accept no others, but we ask for those who believe as we do that India can be best reached by Indians, and who are ready to cooperate with us in leading them out into service.

In missionary life, the relationship between God and man is a very practical one. It finds its destination in the way it deals with in common daily life. In this view, there is no distinction between living for Christ and dying for him. Is this not to see in the Apostle Paul’s mission, to live for God is to die, and that ‘daily’? To lose all and everything to gain Christ. In laying down our lives, we will find these things. To know him, and the power of his resurrection. To know him! The knowledge of the redemption in Christ Jesus:

These things that are given to us to see are not for us alone. They are for the cheer of all who push off from the shore and sail their boat in deep waters, and so must know the beating of many storms. There is for them no easy passing by on the other side of any one’s suffering or sinfulness whom they might help. When the people do not understand, and try to divert them with a word that skims the surface of life and never sounds its depths, they only know that it has no voice to them. They are called into another fellowship. It is for such we write. The Lord has ways of entering fast-closed places. And He has a long practice, too, in binding up the broken, and in keeping hope alive in famine, and in drawing men back to Himself, though they may have wandered far. But He is in South India, and He does walk her fields, and He meets His Linnets [one of the converts] there.1457 Walking over the roads she was looking to him who walked before her. ‘We returned from that village knowing that we had been walking over roads where our Lord had walked before we had even

1454. Here I mention Amy’s view on ‘Predestination and Works’, in Chapter XVIII of G.H. Pember, The Great Prophecies of the Centuries, ed. G.H. Lang (London: Oliphants Ltd, 1941). The author writes about being a member of Christ’s Body, ‘unless one is predestined by God before the foundation of the world, and that this seal is invisible to men and known by God alone’, Amy wrote in the margin ‘Put in this crude way, it is a stumbling block’. She had a more evangelical Reformed view, where human responsibility is not denied, without trying to intervene in God’s decisions. Amy learned her mission strategy in Millisle and Belfast. In the margin of the same chapter, she wrote of the balanced teaching of Bishop Handley Moule. On top of this chapter, we read her words: ‘Compare Moule’s treatment of this subject’.

1455. Fragments that Remain, 109.
1456. Lotus Buds, 340–341.
1457. The Widow of the Jewels, 58 and 70.

Chapter 14

heard of the place.’1458 She needed belief every time and prayed: ‘Lord we sympathise with Thee! Let us never be unresponsive to Thee. Let us never be a disappointment to Thee’.1459 During the itinerary work Amy distributed parts of the Gospels. ‘We did not see anyone taking it then – but we “believe to see”.’1460 For those who were converted, Amy was very honest, because they could expect the sword. In Amy’s time, there was freedom to evangelise, and no one loosened their grip on life for Christ’s sake and the Gospel’s, ‘God only knows the bitter secret martyrdoms of India’.1461

The missionary

Amy was a pioneer. She trod roads others had never gone down before, and she acted and lived in a way fellow missionaries would not – or did not want to – live. She often challenged the Christians in the West who, with all their knowledge and access to Christian literature, were so slow in giving themselves for the work of God. She guessed the reason for she knew of the cost of missionary work: it could ‘wound’ those that God counted worthy of his calling. In Elisabeth Elliot’s foreword of God’s Missionary she talks of an ‘utterly impossible standard’.1462 As the ideal missionary Amy saw one who could say like the angel in Luke 1:19: ‘I am […] that stand in the presence of God; and I was sent to speak unto thee, and bring these good tidings’. The ideal missionary says, ‘I stand … I was sent … To speak unto thee … To bring these good tidings’.1463 However, she was very practical and there were situations that the body needed the first attention. ‘Do not talk to a soul when its body is hungry. Wait till it has “dined”.’1464 A missionary is one who gives time enough to the Lord to hear, and who responds to Christ’s love. It is love that brings forth obedience and that must be in a context of being called personally by God. Of all qualifications for missionary work – and every other charity – Amy would say love is the most excellent.

The need is not the call. We do find this eschatological motive, the coming of Christ, in Amy’s missionary motives, although it is not central in her thinking. She never put her ideas in a rigid system. Brought up as a strict Presbyterian, she had a flexibility in working out her ideas; her missionary thoughts she ultimately drew from her communion with her heavenly Father. Being busy only ‘for the Things of the Father, that Business for which all we Christians are in the world’.1465 She would advise not to hurry to work in the mission field. Wait for God and the go, even if it looks the opposite of what one had in mind:

The faculty of fitting oneself quite happily into one’s circumstances, be they ever so uncomfortable and changeable […] I would advise missionary candidates to practice balancing themselves on pinpoints – it will all come in useful.1466

1458. The Widow of the Jewels, 86.
1459. The Widow of the Jewels, 87.
1460. From the Fight, 19.
1461. Gold Cord, 304.
1462. On p. 11.

1463. See Amy’s remarks in the margin of Luke 1:19 in Stevens & De Witt Burton, A Harmony Of The Gospels, 22. 1464. In Amy’s Bible, in the margin of John 21:5, ‘So when they had dined, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon son of Jonas, do you love Me more than these’.

1465. Whispers of His Power, 12 June 1950.

1466. Amy in a letter to her sister, who was preparing to be a missionary in South Africa.

She was very precise in writing down the money that came in and was spent for the Fellowship. She was not governed by the cry for results and statistics. She went for the aim, because her children were safe when they were in heaven, she once said. For her the invisible results were far greater and far more important than the visible. She rested in the knowledge that God was in control and that gave her in the overflow of work patience. Not ruled by statistics, Amy did see the fruit of her work and that in a remarkable way:

There is a wonderful sense of release when we understand that we never plan for ourselves, never try to twist circumstances so that our wishes shall come to pass. We have only one thing to do, such a happy, peaceful thing that we can never be glad enough and grateful enough for it. We have only to commit ourselves and our ways to Him who guides us by the skilfulness of His Hands.1467 How did Amy view her own place and role as a missionary? She had seen around her how many of her colleagues were as a spider in the mission web. The work was concentrated on them. They worked out the scheme and they took the lead. Amy however was made of other stuff. Having little in common with the other missionaries, she felt directed by God himself. When she arrived in India she met ‘this ice and formalism’ and she wondered ‘how to kindle these dry sticks’. ‘The love that should fuse us all together was simply not there’.1468 She knew about the pitfalls in a country like India:

We who walk there know them well. Things are sure to happen which will drain the heart of human hope, but the hall-mark of the true missionary (the good Lord make it ours) is refusal to be weakened or hardened or soured or made hopeless by disappointment.1469 Amy gives us a nice insight into her views. Once in Dohnavur she got an offer from an English girl who was ready to work with her. Arrangements were made for her training but the candidate had in mind was expected to skirmish around with Amy and raid temple houses, so she envisioned a life full of tension, adventures, in this way taking the initiative and the lead in the children’s rescue work. Amy gives here a lesson to all mission organisations and missionaries:

Only, and here the English girl was quite out of her reckoning, it is never we white people who do these things, that would be to defeat our own purpose; we are far too conspicuous in daylight at any rate to be any good at raids. No, to us belongs the humbler part of inspiring others to do.’1470 In the actual daily work with all the heights and the depths, sickness and attacks, there is in her work the unseen nearness and assistance of the unseen. In her meditations and prayers there is assuring knowledge: he is near.

See, I am filling the interval with shining answers to those prayers. Look and see them, star-like, strewn across the places you thought were void. There are no empty places here. Look up, and praise.1471 In situations of distress and setbacks, whatever the Lord’s way was with his work and workers, ‘we are on the winning side; and yet it must not be too bright, for few fight through to victory’.1472

1467. Whispers of His Power, 22 June 136.
1468. Gold Cord, 9.
1469. Gold Cord, 75.
1470. From the Forest, 86.
1471. Overweights of Joy, 51.

Chapter 14