Global thinking – heart searching
Chapter 20
Global thinking – heart searching
Changed perspectives
The world’s population in 2017 is estimated to be 7.5 billion, of which about one-third is Christian and two-thirds is outside the saving Word of God, of which the majority is largely not evangelised.2252 To know these numbers we all understand that missionaries cannot retire. Their task in several parts of the world may be different from a hundred years ago, the primary call is the same: ‘Go ye’.
The lethargic resignation concerning the problems of mission at present time should alarm us. The crisis missions face today is obviously related to wider developments. Firstly, there is the fact of the erosion of the home base. In the Western churches is a growing consumerism and less continuous consecration on real Biblical issues. The modern missionary movement began and flourished in the Victorian era, the period of colonial expansion when the British could sing of its influence spreading ‘wider still and wider’. In such an atmosphere, it appeared self-evident that Providence had created an opportunity for worldwide evangelism and missionaries were sent to the far reaches of the empire on which ‘the sun never set’.
Today the older sending churches have been in desperate decline for several years and, in many cases, are preoccupied with a struggle for life itself! In evangelical circles, the impression Spurgeon had of his time can be said of our days: ‘Possibly, much of the flimsy piety of the present day arises from the ease with which men attain to peace and joy in these evangelistic days’.2253 Many a church life is spent by controversy, or very soon people are impressed by pragmatic arguments, and by alleged success. Is it not that today’s Gospel preaching is deprived of true authority and expressiveness?
2252. According to United Nations, World Population Prospects, the 2015 Revision. In a global religious landscape it is estimated that 32% is Christian, 23% Muslim, 15% Hindu, 7% Buddhist, 0,2% Jewish. C, 11–14f. L. Lyall, Missionary Opportunity Today, 11–14.
2253. In C.H. Spurgeon, C.H. Spurgeon Autobiography, vol. I (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1962). How to cite: Kommers, J. (Hans), 2017, ‘Global thinking – heart searching’, in Triumphant Love: The contextual, creative and strategic missionary work of Amy Beatrice Carmichael in south India, pp. 517–527, AOSIS, Cape Town. https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2017.tl41.20 Global thinking – heart searching
The missionary and evangelic movements of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century were based on the authority of the Scriptures. Due to strong Biblical orientation, missionaries took seriously what the Bible said about men’s lostness and the need for redemption. Several Christians living in the West are now questioning the commitment to ‘overseas missions’. Since World War II many sending churches have become more liberal in their theology, resulting in social activism. The reason that the great missionary movements of the 19th century were able to make a lasting impact on the world was that internally they were strong. They knew what they believed and they were determined to proclaim it to the world.2254 In missionary work in the second part of the 20th century accents shifted and God was not anymore in the centre. Rose Dowset in the 2006 OMF’s International Council warned us of the end results of a Godless mission. Through liberal influences in missionary circles, the accent on contextualisation with God decentred became anthropology and the ecclesiology with God decentred became sociology.2255 As a reaction to the liberal thinking of the World Council of Churches the American evangelist Billy Graham took a bold stand against the increasing erosion of the meaning of salvation and missions. In 1974 he invited many evangelical leaders to a Congress of World Evangelization at Palais de Beaulieu in Lausanne, Switzerland. The catchphrase for this conference was ‘Let the Earth Hear His Voice’. The Lausanne Congress was necessary, according to Graham, because the saving knowledge of Christ, real conversion and a holy life for God, were replaced by dialogue and Christian activities by the World Missions Conference in 1972 in Bangkok.2256 Graham thought that missionary thinking is pervaded by a belief that views humanity as basically good and morally unaffected by the Fall, and others think that mission is seen as a ‘task rather than a gift’.2257 In the second part of the 20th century the waning of the era of evangelical agencies and missionary societies is seen. Western Christians nowadays are rich in information and have the luxury of travelling around the world, but they are rather poor in commitment and relationship building. Today the validity of religious pluralism is a real fact, and therefore a prophetic stance against postmodern relativism is absolute necessary. ‘The hopes of Edinburgh 1910 stand as a challenge to us in mission today.’2258
Amy’s death in the middle of the 20th century marked the demarcation of the Biblical evangelistic enterprise when the kingdom theology gained more and more influence. Mission work in the first half of the 20th century was grounded on what we might characterise as a ‘theology of obedience’. The centrality of Christ and the necessity of witnessing and proclaiming his name with faith and conviction was a central theme.
In the second place, we see the closure of many of the traditional fields of missionary activity. This increases the tendency to feel that the age of missions is coming to an end. China and many other Asian countries, in the Middle East and in northern Africa, are banning the activities of mission societies and missionaries are refused visas. Missionaries have been seen as agents of former colonial rulers. Missions undeniably have historical links with colonialism, and this historical fact is not beneficial for presentday enterprise in the former colonies. Pius Wakatama spoke for many African Christian leaders when he said in Zimbabwe in 1976:
2254. Quotation from J.D. Douglas, Let the Earth Hear His Voice (Minneapolis: World Wide Publications, 1975), 24, in H. Nüesch, Ruth & Billy Graham, The Legacy of a Couple (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2014), 203.
2255. In East Asia’s Billions, no. 3 (July–September 2007) (Singapore: OMF-International), 22.
2256. See Nüesch, Ruth & Billy Graham, 235.
2257. Newbigin in the foreword of H.J.B. Allen, Roland Allen, Pioneer, Priest, and Prophet (Grand Rapid: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1975).
2258. In S. Bevans, ‘Issues in Missions Today: Challenges for Reflection at Edinburgh 2010’, International Review of Missions 99(1) (2010): 3.
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The mission must see itself as a temporary scaffolding, which will one day have to be taken down. This must not remain at the theoretical level but must be actually seen in the actions of missions. Too many missionaries say it is their intention to ‘work themselves out of the job’ while at the same time doing all they can to protect those jobs from being taken over by nationals.2259 Those who see that it is the priority of the Church to preach the Gospel, and not to give all the attention to a sociopolitical involvement as it is nowadays, have often to row against a strong oppositional side. Often missionaries of the past are accused of the fact that they destroyed the cultures of the people who were evangelised. Amy certainly did not belong to this group. Nowadays it is said that enculturation is today’s challenge. This path however leads to syncretism. And yet there is real dynamics for worldwide mission. The remark of Isobel Kuhn is also true for our generation: ‘I believe that in each generation God has called enough men and women to evangelise all the yet unreached tribes of the earth’.2260 In perception, the 21st century has completely changed compared to the first half of the former century in which Amy Carmichael lived. Then it took several weeks to travel from Britain to the coastal cities in Asia; today we board an early morning flight from Amsterdam to Bangkok or Chengdu, arriving 12 hours later in a completely different world. Our world has become a global village and we are talking about global thinking, global economy, and we are threatened by global warming. Waves of Asians now live in English cities; Los Angeles is home to 700 000 Koreans;2261 thousands of Chinese are working in African countries and Western CEOs meet their Eastern counterparts in Shanghai and Singapore. Missionaries from the Philippines and Korea work in Kenya, and Nigerian missionaries come to France. Today missionaries from these continents bring the Gospel back to those who originally provided it.2262 In what way are we able and is it possible to implement the core issue that shaped the heart of Amy’s vision of mission? How do we articulate and evangelise the Gospel in a world that has changed dramatically from the world we inherited? At least this is the challenge of tracing the identity and continuity of historic Christianity across the centuries. It is also the comprehension of the history of Christian mission and the modern world in its intellectual and spiritual ambiguities.
Yet, there is no turning back the clock and it is not enough to parrot the faith of the past. However, in speaking up for faith and missions in the language of our contemporaries, we may never surrender ‘the old, old story of Jesus and His love’, which can only save men and women in this present world from eternal death. By the sight of Calvary, we know how the Lord feels about even one lost soul. After the 1960s, secularism became a catchword to explain the decline of most of the established churches. From the centre of daily life, the church moved to the margin of society. Proclamation of the Gospel and the explanation of the Cross became more and more difficult in fast-moving times towards the digital society. What was the validity of the Christian message? A kind of ‘fatigue’ came over many Christians. They know the ‘good old tidings’, but in what way has it any relevance with daily life? The presence of vibrant and powerful churches in Asia and Africa changed the mission field. The missionary situation in the world changed by entering the second part of the 20th century. Doors closed, others opened and still unprecedented eagerness to hear the Gospel was seen, but the situation changed. That time China had closed its doors, Burma too, and India, which gave preferential treatment to Commonwealth missionaries, now put them on the same
2259. In P. Wakatama, Independence for the Third World Church (Westmont, IL: IVP, 1976), 109.
2260. In I. Kuhn, Nests Above the Abyss (London: CIM, 1949), 224.
2261. D. Lane, One World – Two Minds, Eastern and Western Outlooks in a Changing World (Littleton: OMF, 2005) 4.
2262. Cf. the work of Joshua Sendawula, who came from Uganda to the Netherlands in 1987 and formed a new organisation, Gospel from Africa to Europe (GATE), in the Netherlands, a missionary society of Africans living in the Netherlands, with the aim to evangelise their fellow countrymen. Nowadays it is called Gift from Africa to Europe. In K. Bediako, & M. Jansen (eds.), A New Day Dawning, African Christians Living the Gospel (Zoetermeer, 2004), 190.
Global thinking – heart searching
footing as all others. ‘We live in a nightmare world.’2263 Our world is deeply marred by sin, preoccupied with sex and global realignment. Severely fragmented, we daily experience that the gods of this age have blinded those who do not believe the light of the Gospel or the glory of Christ.2264 Amy’s life was a life of sacrifice, but nowadays the general feeling is voiced by David Bowie who sang ‘surprise yourself, don’t sacrifice yourself’.2265 In India child prostitution has been illegal for several decades, but still children there and all over the world continue to be targeted by evil people forcing innocent children into an evil life. Lyall’s shocking observations in 1965 have since then proved worse. Our present world is in a sphere of persistent apathy, ungodliness and immorality, with a diminishing Church, which lacks missionary zeal and sees missionary education as an optional extra.2266 Worldwide, the sex trade and paedophilia flourish; still hundreds of thousands of children below the age of 14 are known to be involved in prostitution in India. Not only there, for it is a worldwide evil. To this very day, Christians have to live in the midst of the extreme lustfulness of a surrounding sex-crazed post-Christian pagan society.
The evil one has penetrated in politics and in the world of the media and obtained a foothold in the thinking of the people. God’s beneficial rules, which protect people’s lives, are rejected, and men and women in every country and every culture are discovering through bitter experiences the wages of sin. Churches do not escape worldly thinking and do not even see now – blinded! – that the saving message of the Cross can only turn the tide. When even in churches the belief is waning that without faith in Christ Jesus men face future judgement beyond death, the passion to preach Christ crucified is waning, too. But the Church cannot live in indifference to the crying need of the world.2267 In our present world, where Satan’s strongholds tower up triumphantly, God responds. He gave his son, but we, where is our answer?
In India the great towering Hindu temples still stand as they stood before – as it seems – unchallenged for centuries. The urgency of the need is patently true. Mission organisations that recognise their indebtedness to preach the Gospel to those who have never heard are now confronted by the encouraging fact that Christians in many countries, formerly objecting to mission work, now want to participate in this work and so bring the Gospel to their own people and to glorify God. This is the right emphasis. Of course, the task is urgent, but neither the urgency nor even the loss of the lost represents the ultimate motive for mission. We live in a world in which God is robbed of his glory. Mission work as well as missionaries always have been the playground for the ‘Enemy’, who would not have his stronghold broken. This is what makes evangelism urgent. Giving God his rightful place, declaring the beauty of his character, proclaiming his saving goodness, demonstrating his transforming grace in holiness life, acknowledging his lordship and bringing men and women to the obedience of Christ. To each of us the impetus is there to follow along the line Amy drew with deep consecration, yielding ourselves, our all, to him without reserve. Amy never gave up and with a burning zeal sought to save men. The essence of Christian faith has survived across the cries of church history. Our task of mission today requires dynamic, practical Biblical theology to preach the message of human regeneration, which includes relationships to people and things. Preach and teach the Gospel as a God-sent man or woman, as a sinner in need of a Saviour. The Gospel needs to be preached, free from its Western wrappings so that
2263. Lyall, A World to Win, 7.
2264. Cf. 2 Corinthians 4:4.
2265. Cf. Metro Lyrics, Tintoretto Music. The song is track 7 on the album Tin Machine.
2266. Lyall, Missionary Opportunity Today, 12.
2267. ‘She [the Church] obeys or she rebels’; and Ph. Brooks says, ‘The Church must evangelise or fossilise’ (Lyall, A World to Win, 12).
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it might answer the anxieties and fears of believers who live in the cultural framework of their present countries. The Dutch missiologist J.H. Bavinck (1895–1964) said:
God takes us, and those to whom we speak, very seriously, and as his ministers we ought to do the same. Abstract, disembodied, history-less sinners do not exist; only very concrete sinners exist. whose sinful life is determined and characterized by all sorts of cultural and historical factors; by poverty, hunger, superstition, traditions, chronic illnesses, tribal morality, and thousands of other things. I must bring the Gospel of God’s grace in Jesus Christ to the whole man, in his concrete existence in his everyday environment. It is obviously a great error on my part if I do not take a person’s culture and history seriously.2268 The Church in its mission in this 21st century has to reach out to the poor and the weak, and fight against the dehumanisation of children. Satan’s doings today are the same as in Amy’s days. He still poisons minds and hearts of people. Mission work today is as urgent as 150 years ago. It has been observed that today the Christian missionary effort:
[S]hould be characterized by serving from a situation of weakness and vulnerability. […] Freeing itself from the shackles of power allows the Church to rewrite its identity, enter the margins and serve in weakness and humility. Then evil structures will be crumbled instead of maintained. […] The new white man’s burden, i.e. the Christian white man’s, is: (1) To recognize the nature and appearance of evil power structures, (2) To disconnect from the powers of this world and (3) To claim and fully exploit the freedom this disconnection gives.2269 I have not read or heard if Amy knew J.H. Bavinck but she already practised what he taught. Both were for the furtherance of the glory of God that it would be heard and be visible in all their written and practical work. This was learned from close contact with Christ. Out of his glorification of the Father sprang life-giving life. Paradoxically it was life through death. Effectiveness in the ministry is always marked by a cross. ‘So then death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.’ If we all realise this and catch a glimpse of what this might mean for our modern world, our loaves and fishes would be multiplied! Let us not lose sight in missiology of the broad horizons of the Biblical promises. A missionary with a Christ-like character will have a heart for the glory of God and will show mercy to all still unknown to the Gospel. The glory of God matters to us! We could use more kernels like Amy, buried in this world’s soil, dying that others might live eternally.
On the other hand the Lord wants to teach his church not to relax, not to give way and not to lend ears to those ‘whose minds the god of this age has blinded’ (2 Cor 4:4). Christ is the Lord of the open and the closed doors (cf. Rv 3:7), He knows his time and he gives the marching orders, and we? Our eyes are upon our Master, he takes the lead, and we shall follow! We have not even reached the primary goal of missions in our time, and it has to be done now in close cooperation with the churches in those countries. The fact that the foreignness and the often dominating character of Western missionaries gave negative thoughts is not an argument to disobey the command of Christ. We believe the word in the Apostolic Creed: ‘I believe the fellowship of the saints’. Missionaries from Asian, Western, African and American countries will carry out together the great commission, walking hand in hand, sharing the same burdens and looking forward and upward. In this, the long-term missionary is a God-given work of invaluable significance.
In the secular world there is a general response to the challenge of high endeavour. Dr Paul Rees at the 1967 Keswick Convention, who led the prayer for the world, prayed: ‘Help us to enter
2268. In his Introduction to the Science of Mission (Philadelphia, 1960), 81.
2269. C.f. M.A.W. Kommers, ‘Shedding the Shackles of Power’ (Master’s diss., University of Gloucestershire, 2015), pp. 13–15.
Global thinking – heart searching
into the heartbreak of our Saviour over the heartbreak of the world’. Spiritual apathy, together with the consequent prayerlessness in our days is often connected to God’s discipline of his people.
The 21st century is in need of missionaries who are fully devoted to God. At the 2010 Keswick Convention, Jeremy McQuoid told the audience that having read the biographies of some giants of the Christian faith – he mentioned George Whitefield, John Wesley, Jim Elliot, great Puritans from the past, but also women like Amy Carmichael – he has been struck by one fact, viz.:
These men and women had devotional lives’. […] These men and women were also powerfully active, but their activity for God was fuelled by this deep devotional life. They walked through the dying world breathing the air of eternity.2270 Jonathan Goforth, CIM missionary to China, who experienced several revivals in Manchuria, Shansi, and in Korea from 1906 to 1910, was very disappointed by the outcome of the Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910. ‘Would a new era in missions dawn?’ he first thought. ‘Would home churches be empowered by the Holy Spirit?’ Then he continued:
Alas! It was only a dream. Never have I experienced such keen pain and disappointment as I did that day. Of the many who addressed that great missionary gathering, not more than three emphasized God the Holy Spirit as the one essential factor in world evangelization. Listening to the addresses that day, one could not but conclude that the giving of the Gospel to lost mankind was largely a matter of better organisation, better equipment, more men and women.
Goforth’s conclusion was that ‘the dethronement of the idol of ecclesiastical self-sufficiency was apparently too great a price to pay’.2271 At that time Oswald Chambers signalled the same tendency to change priorities in mission work:
The first purpose of missionary enterprise is evangelistic, and the evangel is that of personal sanctification. […] The first aim of missionary enterprise is the spiritual evangelisation of the people. […] Today people are trying to better Jesus Christ’s programme, and are saying that they must first look after men’s bodies, heal them and teach them. […] Missionary enterprise on the line of education, and healing, and social amelioration is magnificent, but it is secondary, and the danger is to give it the first place. […] The testimony of missionaries over and over again is to the effect that when once evangelistic work is put in the second place, it is the devil who gets his way, not God.2272 Now 100 years later things have not gone better. Mission work is benefitting from the latest technological developments, but fast computer-steered programmes, video-call conferences, text messages, administrative and technical personnel cannot replace the work of men and women bringing the Gospel where they live. The focus upon the one thing necessary has shifted to so many things that are important and that have to be done, and meanwhile the real thing is not heard. We have to realise that
2270. J. McQuoid, ‘Christ-Centred Renewal’ in 2010 Keswick Convention Book, 177–178. ‘Great Puritans from the past like John Owen, women like Amy Carmichael – these men and women had deep devotional lives. The righteousness that characterises true children of God is impossible without disciplined devotional lives. These men and women were in the habit of journalizing; of reading the Scriptures almost insatiably, and writing down what God was teaching them, putting it into their own words, until they owned it, and then mulling over the Word of God’ (p. 177).
2271. J. Goforth, By My Spirit (Minneapolis, MN, INC, 1964), 137–138. Cf. also Chambers’ remark: ‘The great need for Christians today is occasional fasting from intellectual and religious and social activities in order to give ourselves wholly to the realisation of some purpose of God’ in O. Chambers, Still Higher For His Highest (Fort Washington: CLC, 1970), 123.
2272. In Chambers, ‘So Send I You’ in Complete Works, 118, 119, 120 and 121.
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we live in this 21st century with new challenges and new opportunities the Lord gives us,2273 but his ultimate goal when he said ‘go ye into the world’ has not changed. We have to take seriously Goforth’s plea for a ‘dethroning’ of our many mission hobbies, which darken the main cause of the Gospel to save a lost world.
The India of Amy has changed radically and we have seen a number of the old values and certainties fall away – which is why the historic missionary way of working of Amy Carmichael was so reassuring. She cared for the future of her children and about contemporary issues and struggled to make sense of them in the light of Scripture. Nowadays various doors are closed for mission work in many countries. Closed by whom for what purpose? Closed by governments to prevent God coming in? Who can? We need to realise, knowing Paul, that those who know the Lord cannot be prevented and cannot be demoralised by forces seen and unseen because they are all created things (‘nor any other created thing’, Rm 8:39). Coming from India, Mr Ben Wati said at the missionary meeting of the 1964 Keswick Convention that there were about five million Christians in India2274 and he went on to say that the church union of 1947 in India had not made any significant advance in evangelism.2275 What is needed, is not mere preaching, but the witness of true Christian lives.
A new day dawning
The past is gone. In the long process of making the Indian churches self-governing after India got independence in 1947, the days of White British Christian paternalism were fast disappearing. Many changes marked the end of an eventful mission enterprise era. The way of life and thinking in the first decades of the 21st century is completely different from the life 100 years ago. We are aware that the happy period when the missionary could move freely without let or hindrance, is over. Yet, we deceive ourselves if we think the past is utterly gone. Is not the past ever present with us? The old pioneers are tucked away in their graves – the grass may wither and the flower fade and fall to the ground, but as the petals fall they become the nourishment for new growth – the Gospel seed sown by them into the hearts of many brings forth fruit.
Our present is the harvest of the past. In today’s mission work something sentimental has gone with the past, there is even vastly greater potentiality in the present. This book mainly recalled experiences from the past, and when we reflect on the past, we often wonder that life has unfolded in the way it unfolded before our eyes. In today’s mission circles, there is the inclination to focus more upon the activities of the church in other countries and in other cultures with the result that theological reflection in mission thinking is shifted to the second rate. And as one has noted that ‘in some British ministry initiatives the subject of mission in the Church has not only been ignored but sometimes actively avoided’.2276 Missionary work cannot be done without reflecting on the Bible.
2273. Cf. nowadays the promising work of Dr Martin Visser with ‘Globalrize’. This organisation is for spreading the Gospel via the Internet.
2274. In demographic studies it is difficult to give a good estimation on the total of Christians living in India. In 1964 a total of five million is mentioned; in TKW of 1954 the number is eight to ten million Christians. The data of the 2011 census in India are 79,8% Hindus, 14,2% Muslims, 2,3% Christians (http://www.firstpost.com/category/india).
2275. TKW (1964), 143.
2276. See C. Wigram, ‘Make sure biblical reflection infuses all you say and do’, East Asia’s Billions (July–September 2007): 22. See, also in the same, the contribution of Rose Dowsett, in which she warns us of the end results of Godless mission.
Global thinking – heart searching
Is it possible in this high-tech era to use the mission concepts and policies of several decades before? To use Edward Dayton’s words: ‘mission politics designed for a steamship era seem strangely anachronistic in a jet age’.2277 The tactic used by mission societies and missionaries might have been not correct in today’s opinion, but most of them had sincere intentions, in obedience to God, to evangelise those who had not yet heard the Good News of Jesus Christ. Nineteenth century mission enterprise has often been described as a Christian way of imperialism and missionaries grown up in Victorian and post-Victorian time were often seen as hypocrites and being after personal welfare. Nowadays these anti-colonial passions belong to history. However, it is time to do justice to the missionaries of the Victorian and Edwardian era! Constrained by the love of Christ they went with sincere intentions, mostly done as ‘crucified’ people and receiving many wounds in this battle. It was they who accepted discomfort, loneliness, disease and the danger of violence. Families were confronted with the death of their children, and many young women gave their precious lives during pregnancy or in childbirth; others were killed during riots and persecutions. They went through all of this just for the sake of the Gospel. By them the Cross was planted from Greenland to Cape Town, from Indian settlements in America to the Aboriginals in Australia and to the tiniest islands in far-away oceans. In short: all over the world!
The second part of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th – when there were ‘giants in the land’ – the expansive sweep of mission enterprise in many parts of the world uncovered the deep dark deeds of Satan and this has to be the real concern today in our 21st century world and materialistic generation. Motives might differ a little bit, but ultimately it was the exceptional love for God that made them to go and save their fellow men from sin and death and proclaim full salvation in Jesus Christ. The results of their work were often unlike the dreams with which they had set out, but these men and women, and Amy Carmichael was one of them, did more than any group in all preceding history.
It is this that made – and makes today – others dream. Come down, Holy Spirit, revive your work, your church, and young men and women will be seized by the love of Christ to go and tell the Good News to the millions who daily die without Christ. It is for us now to go! ‘Mission field’ will not be recognised as the vocabulary of the past. We only have touched the fringe of heathenism in Asia and of the big cities with their millions of inhabitants in all parts of the world. Amy Carmichael and many others have set ideas in operation, which are wide and comprehensive schemes, which may alter the destinies of millions of people. About the romance of the ‘mission field’ and the ‘mission station’, we can do without. But we cannot do without the spirit, the burning flame which fired men and women of those times. The Church should not look like an ‘exhausted volcano’,2278 and let no cloak of silence settle between the Church and the millions who have not yet heard the Good News. It was at the Keswick Convention in 2010 that the warning words of the chairman sounded: ‘Our Christianity can easily become institutionalized or routine, lacking the spiritual vibrancy and devotion that we know as the essence of living faith’.2279
Take up this charge, before the doors may close. Believers today must ‘catch up on the past’ or forfeit the blessings God entrusted to previous generations. In its frantic search for ‘something new’ mission organisations today are fast in cutting loose from their historic moorings and abandoning their rich
2277. In World Vision (1970). Quotation in Lyall, A World to Win, 61.
2278. The expression is of Oswald Chambers (in The Complete Works, 83).
2279. A. Hull (ed.), Christ-centred Renewal, (Keswick: Authentic, 2010), VII. One of the speakers, Peter Maiden said: ‘It is a tragedy that two thousand years after Jesus issued His command, more than 40 per cent of the world’s people are still saying, “Come,”’ (p. 196).
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spiritual resources for weak human substitutes. Writing these lines I saw what Rosalind Goforth’s had written about lost opportunities and the way she dealt with it:
I shall pass through this world but once.
Any good, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness I can show to any human being, let me do it NOW - for I shall not pass this way again.2280 Seeing the need, Amy stretched out two hands to help. Her life was an offering of love. The work done counts and Amy did not like the praise she received. Reluctantly she accepted the medal awarded to her by the government. God calls us to concentrate upon the present. The foundation of the future is in the present, and in Dohnavur they will follow the signs, knowing that life’s whole path for everyone is mapped before God and he can draw back the veil when he wants us to see where next.
Amy gives us inspiration and her work and writings are a wake-up call to those who think about God’s plan in their life and if they have a future in cross-cultural ministry. And the goal? The children saved by God’s mighty hand from a life worse than death will grow up to love him above all else, and to count it life’s highest joy to bring others unto him. These innumerable, saved children are Amy’s real monument. What emerges at the end of this book is the account of one woman’s journey of faith, of her walking, through disappointments and discouragements, in Jesus’ footsteps. A story of God’s ways, in which we see, through the things seen, into the things unseen, the whole amphitheatre, which reveals his glory and grace continued to filter through. Among all who love the Lord, as long as they will go out in this world to tell the precious name of Christ Jesus, is the name of this Irish woman, Amy Beatrice Carmichael. She was, without question, a shining God-given servant of the outgoing 19th and first half of the 20th century. She started her life work nearly in the middle of nowhere, as in a desert where she met many adversities and not being comprehended by many about her real motives; in this ‘desert’ she was like a tree planted by the rivers or waters, her life rooted deep in God. What when the storms break out and a flash of lightning suddenly cracks across our ‘porcelain world’? This question put forward by Amy’s friend, Edith Buxton, 50 years ago comes anew to us today. Where are they who impersonate the apostolic abandon?2281 Going to places, countries where ‘the mist hangs about the mountain’. Men and women who want no mists, must be content with the plains, but they want the mountains! It will be but a little while, and the mists will evaporate, the mountain will stand out in all its grandeur. He will take away the burdens, for, in acceptance, they will become the pillow upon which in service they can lay their head.
We followed her from Millisle to Dohnavur, to what? To a discipleship fearless, costly, wholehearted, willing to die, to be a ‘corn of wheat’. To a missionary activity, which cannot rest contentedly until the Gospel has reached and is preached to every creature. To a missionary passion out of the rut of established method, adaptable, mobile, fixed in faith yet sufficiently flexible in its presentation in the first decades of the 21st century by new means. To a charity which flows over the lesser reefs of liturgical, denominational, or interpretational differences, ready to unite ‘all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity’. From the Scraps, in which she raised her voice as a novice in mission affairs, and after the words of weight of the veteran nearly 70 years later it is as if God’s voice today to us is: ‘Have you considered My servant Amy Carmichael, an upright missionary, one who fears God and shuns evil?’2282
2280. In R. Goforth, Climbing, 29.
2281. E.J. Sharpe ‘wonders whether there are anywhere still to be found such all-or-nothing missionaries’, in ‘The Legacy of Amy Carmichael’.
2282. Expression according to Job 1:8.
Global thinking – heart searching
We thank God for the beauty of this Cross-crowned life, who lived in living community with God and in the full stream of the power of the Holy Ghost. A life, which did not bother about itself; it was altogether devoted to God’s interests in others. What makes her so great in our eyes is not what she achieved, but what she strove for and believed. The whole trend of this life is to make us admire and worship God. Let this remembrance be left: Amy Carmichael was true to God, her confidence fixed on Jesus despite the ever-changing world around her.
Amy’s unique and arresting way of bearing testimony of her life’s message and deeds is a plain pointer to the fact that in every generation there are consistent witnesses of the Lord, of which some belong to his spearhead troops, the corps of pioneers. As a real missionary role model of stature, Amy was one of them. She heard the call to which she responded with a peculiar dedication. She would not agree, even would not allow us to see her as a great missionary. Sharing Christ’s sufferings, she shared his saving ministry. Side by side with him she fulfilled the deepest principle of the Cross, the law of harvest – that only the corn of wheat, which falls into the ground and dies brings forth much fruit. Having a heavenly vision and a divine imperative, she counted all things loss for Christ. She broke her alabaster box of precious ointment and with it humbly anointed the feet of the Lord in the slums of Belfast and Manchester, and from Matsue in Japan to Ceylon and to south India, and transfigured lives have risen for half a century. We marvel at the miraculous ways in which the Lord used her to pierce the shadows of the Hinduistic landscape of south India with his love.
There are still young and older people who live by the promise of God, with a vision and great expectation of what God is doing and who are praying to be involved in his work worldwide. The last words of David Livingstone in his address at Cambridge University in 1857 were: ‘do you carry out the work which I have begun. I LEAVE IT WITH YOU!’ Volleys of cheers followed this address.2283 Many people were inspired by his words and went out into the mission field. Who follows? Who will reckon, likewise Moses, that the reproach of Christ is greater riches than the treasures in Egypt? Who for others of the unevangelised millions of the world will say: ‘Here am I, Lord, send me’? Let the challenge be accepted became a slogan of the AIM in 1908 to accomplish the very purpose for which this mission organisation was founded. By the hundreds new workers spread all over Africa to preach the Gospel. They were asking God for men and women whom they urgently needed for this immense task:
To reach new fields and to strengthen those already occupied, we need strong men. Every man here feels the need of better men than we are; men of greater ability and better training, men of strong devotion and unselfishness, who will not hesitate to pour out the last drop of blood, the last ounce of strength, the last cent of money for their work; men who believe in the thing they came to do, in the people they came to help and in God with whom they work; men with patience enough to bear with resistance until it is displaced with helpfulness, men who ask for no reward but the satisfaction of work well done.2284 It is remarked that nowadays the church of India – and many of Amy’s children belonged to it – has produced its share of influential servants and preachers of the Gospel who make a real impact within and beyond the subcontinent. They represent their country in many international conferences and teach in American and British universities. They equip leaders and impact opinion makers worldwide.2285
2283. See Chamblis, The Life and Labours of David Livingstone, 314.
2284. G. Stauffacher, Faster Beats the Drum (Pearl River, NY: AIM, 1978), 72.
2285. See M. Poccock, G. van Rheenen & D. McConnel, The Changing Face of World Missions, 4th edn. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008) 140.
Chapter 20
Since 1900, women have played a crucial part in the spread of the Gospel through overseas missions.2286 In many annals of missionary enterprise, Amy’s name will be mentioned as a missionary pioneer par excellence. Those who were in leadership in Dohnavur after Amy had passed away, heartily endorsed her mission views having the same enterprising spirit and jealousy for the work of the Gospel in India. We hear from this book the clarion call to our generation to see the signs of the times, to learn from the lessons of the past and be attentive to the indications of the future; to listen to the call still going on, ‘Go Ye!’ As missionaries looking forward and claiming this world for Christ, we who live on the verge of Christ’s return have to keep our hands at the plough, not looking back, but forward ‘looking upon Jesus the author and the finisher of our faith’2287:
Depressed eras have a way of turning into Christian resurgences that regain lost ground and move beyond it to embrace a larger area with purer expressions of the Gospel. […] Actually there are some indications that we are entering the greatest period of opportunity for the spread of the Gospel which the world has ever seen.2288
2286. For an example of women’s contribution to mission, their faithfulness and compassion, see Valerie Griffiths’s Not Less Than Everything: ‘We meet ordinary women of extraordinary guts, faith and tenacity’ (in the foreword, p. 9).
2287. Hebrews 12:2.
2288. R.F. Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life (Exeter: The Paternoster Press, 1981 [1997]), 425.
Take this book in Thy wounded Hand,
Jesus, Lord of Calvary;
Let it go forth at Thy command;
Use it as it pleases Thee.
Dust of earth, but Thy dust, Lord,
Blade of grass in Thy hand a sword-
Nothing, nothing unless it be
Purged and quickened, o Lord, by Thee.
O Lord our God, we bring to Thee
The things our hands have wrought,
Unless Thou touch it graciously
It will do less than nought.
O touch, inspire and purify,
We lay it at Thy feet,
Let all of earth about it die,
Turn it to corn of wheat.
O blessed be the love that takes
This that we offer Thee,
And out of our poor nothing makes
Seed for Eternity.
Prayers of Amy Carmichael after a ‘Dohnavur’ book was released (Gold Cord, 28; Wings, 103, A.103; Paper Books, 147).
What I shall write here is for the glory of God. I cannot strike so strong and sweet a note, but I can say that, so far a man may know his own heart, the motive was the true missionary one, containing through it generally has various influences, but in which one predominates and acts as the combining element which gives solidity to the whole. This is all that need to be said about motive, important as it is in missionary life and in the history of
missionary effort. John Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides.