Amy Carmichael Biography

(from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Carmichael )

Her Early Life

Amy Wilson Carmichael was born in the small village of Millisle, County Down, Ireland to David Carmichael, a miller, and his wife Catherine. Her parents were devout Presbyterians and she was the oldest of seven siblings.

Amy’s father moved the family to Belfast when she was 16, but died two years later. In Belfast, Amy founded the Welcome Evangelical Church. In the mid-1880s, Carmichael started a Sunday morning class for the ‘Shawlies’, i.e. the mill girls who wore shawls instead of hats, in the church hall of Rosemary Street Presbyterian. Her mission among the shawlies grew and grew until they needed a hall to seat 500 people…Amy continued at the Welcome until she received a call to work among the mill girls of Manchester in 1889, from which she moved onto missionary work. In many ways Amy seemed an unlikely candidate for missionary work. She suffered neuralgia, a disease of the nerves that made her whole body weak and achy and often put her in bed for weeks on end. At the Keswick Convention of 1887 that Carmichael heard Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission speak about missionary life. Soon afterwards, she became convinced of her calling to missionary work. She applied to the China Inland Mission and lived in London at the training house for women, where she met author and missionary to China, Mary Geraldine Guinness, who encouraged her to pursue missionary work. She was ready to sail for Asia at one point, when it was determined that her health made her unfit for the work. She postponed her missionary career with the CIM and decided later to join the Church Missionary Society.

Amy Carmichael’s First Trip Overseas

Initially, Carmichael travelled to Japan for fifteen months. Her first book, “From Sunrise Land” describes her early experiences and impressions there…her struggles with health as well as the spiritual victories. For the first time she encountered what she understood as demon possession, but also saw numbers come to the Lord as the result of praying in faith.

Amy in Japan

But leaving family and friends in England wasn’t easy. She later said “The night I sailed…March 3, 1893, my life, on the human side, was broken, and it never was mended again. But He has been enough.”

After a brief period of service in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), she went to Bangalore, India for her health and found her lifelong calling. She was commissioned by the Church of England Zenana Mission. Carmichael’s most notable work was with girls and young women, some of whom were saved from customs that amounted to forced prostitution. Hindu temple children were primarily young girls dedicated to the gods, then usually forced into prostitution to earn money for the priests i.e. Devadasi.

Carmichael founded the Dohnavur Fellowship in 1901 to continue her work, as she later wrote in The Gold Cord (1932). A popular early work was Things as They Are: Mission Work in Southern India (1903). Dohnavur is situated in Tamil Nadu, thirty miles from India’s southern tip…Carmichael’s fellowship transformed Dohhnavur into a sanctuary for over one thousand children who would otherwise have faced a bleak future.  Carmichael often said that her Ministry of rescuing temple children started with a girl named Preena. Having become a temple servant against her wishes, Preena managed to escape. Amy Carmichael provided her shelter and withstood the threats of those who insisted that the girl be returned either to the temple directly to continue her sexual assignments, or to her family for more indirect return to the temple.

Respecting Indian culture, members of the organization wore Indian dress and gave the rescued children Indian names. Carmichael herself dressed in Indian clothes, dyed her skin with dark coffee, and often travelled long distances on India’s hot, dusty roads to save just one child from suffering.

In 1918, Dohnavur added a home for young boys, many born to the former temple prostitutes. Meanwhile, in 1916 Carmichael formed a Protestant religious order called Sisters of the Common Life.

Amy’s Final days and legacy

In 1932, a fall severely injured Carmichael, and she remained bedridden for much of her final two decades. However, it did not stop her from continuing her inspirational writing, for she published 16 additional books (including His Thoughts Said . . . His Father Said (1951), If (1953), Edges of His Ways (1955) and God’s Missionary (1957)), as well as revised others she had previously published. Biographers differ on the number of her published works, which may have reached 35 or as many as six dozen, although only a few remain in print today.

Carmichael died in India in 1951 at the age of 83. She asked that no stone be put over her grave at Dohnavur.[8] Instead, the children she had cared for put a bird bath over it with the single inscription “Amma”, which means mother in the Tamil language.

India outlawed temple prostitution in 1948. However, the Dohnavur Fellowship continues, now supporting approximately 500 people on 400 acres with 16 nurseries and hospital. Rescued women can leave, or join the community, or return for important occasions, including the Christmas season. The foundation is now run by Indians under the jurisdiction of the C.S.I Tirunelveli Diocese, founded in 1896.