The Legacy of Amy Carmichael

nels of the Holy Spirit, by which to work amid one of the world's great peoples. Meanwhile, in the Western homelands of the missionary What is needed is not less movement, a powerful secularism verges toward alienation and reason but, as John nihilism. A renewed mission to Western culture is often envis aged as a crusade against the Enlightenment. But to fight against Robinson said, more light modern expressions of reason, the most central of which is and truth. science, is to mistake the enemy. Whatis needed is notless reason but-John Robinson once again-more light and truth. Less doc trinaire rationalism, either of religious fundamentalism, reduc the West open to both the past and the future. The best in two tionist scientism, or culturally correct cynicism about the tradi thousand years of Christian heritage needs to be combined with tional values of Western civilization. More critical and inclusive a critical appropriation of whatever God is teaching us about reasonableness, sensitive to the whole range of human experi being human, made in God's image, in the year 2000. Mission ence-physical, mental, spiritual, not only of the West but of the with those aims will have the best chance of truly converting not other cultures that increasingly interact with the West. only the West but also those other peoples toward whom the Christian mission must pray and work for a conversion of historic missionary enterprise has been directed. The Legacy of Amy Carmichael Eric J. Sharpe my Carmichael, known in South India as Amma The clear implicationwas that mostpeople notonthe spotdid not A ("mother" in Tamil), died in January 1951 at the age of know how things actually were. The book came as an unpleasant 83. She had come to India in 1895 as a missionary of the Church shock to romantics and triumphalists alike. But it demanded to of England Zenana Missionary Society, that formal connection be noticed. Eugene Stock, in his preface, could not have sounded being terminated in 1925. Her chief source of support, however, the note of urgency more clearly than he did: "God grant that its had always been the Keswick Conventions, which had originally terrible facts and its burning words may sink into the hearts of its commissioned her for service. During the whole of the more than readers! Perhaps, when they have read it, they will at last agree .fifty-five years of her missionary service in India, she never took that we have used no sensational and exaggerated language a furlough, and one suspects that she never even contemplated when we have said that the Church is only playing at missions!'? taking one. From 1931, when what at the time seemed a fairly The first chapter of Things As They Are ends with a quotation minor accident had crippled her, she was an invalid, confined to from a verse of Charles Kingsley, the last three lines of which her room in the Dohnavur orphanage she began in 1901.She was read: not inactive during those twenty long years, when she orga Be earnest, earnest, earnest; mad if thou wilt: nized, counseled, and wrote. Do what thou dost as if the stake were heaven, By the end of her long life, Amy Carmichael had published And that thy last deed ere the judgment day.' between thirty and forty books and had been translated into at least fifteen languages. Add to that a considerable body of verse That degree of earnestness is always going to make lessermortals and a vastcorrespondence, and one is left slightlybreathless. Her nervous. Matthew Arnold had called himself and his generation "Light half-believers of our casual creeds.":' Amy Carmichael subject matter was unvarying: the practical work of a practical mission. Probably no active missionary has ever published so was nothing if not earnest. Nothing about her was, or ever had much; possibly no missionary has ever writtenbetter, in point of been, light or casual. style. Onefeels thatshe nevercommitted to papera word she had Amy Beatrice Carmichael was born on December 16, 1867, in not instinctively weighed and measured; her style, while obvi the village of Millisle, on the east coast of Northern Ireland, not ouslya gift of God, was also a craft to be worked on. "Words far from Belfast. The Carmichael family came originally from should be like colors," she once wrote, "each one a dot of color Scotland, as had most Northern Ireland Protestants. Amy's supplying a need, not one over."! father, David Carmichael, was the head of a flour-milling firm: Amy Wilson-Carmichael, as she was known, for reasons her mother, Catherine Jane, nee Fison, was the daughter of a soon to be explained, first came to the attention of friends of respected local doctor. Amy, the eldest of seven children, was missions in the spring of 1903 with the publication of a book, impulsive, headstrong, and tomboyish. Taught at first privately by governesses, she later attended for three years a somewhat bluntly called Things As They Are: Mission Work in Southern India. prim Wesleyan Methodist girls' boarding school in Harrogate, Yorkshire, where she was remembered as having been "a rather Eric J. Sharpe has been Professor of Religious Studies in the University of wild Irish girl who was often in trouble with the mistresses" and Sydney since1977. His chiefinterestis in thehistoryof ideas, especially those as "something of a rebel."? having to do with the encounter of Europe and Asia in the nineteenth and In 1885 David Carmichael died at the age of only fifty-four, twentiethcenturies. His books include Not to Destroy but to Fulfill, Com his business having failed. Amy, still not out of her teens, had by parative Religion: A History, Faith Meets Faith, andThe Universal CHa. this time passed through an evangelical conversion; she was as July 1996 121 impulsive as ever, living her life in a whirlwind of good works was to suffer great loneliness, though always withoutcomplaint. for instance anl0ngthe"shawlies," working-class girls of Belfast, He was too Christian not to give Amy his full support. She so called from the waytheydressed. And thenin September 1886, offered her services to the China Inland Mission first of all, and while on a visit to Scotland, she attended "a convention on it was in this connection that he asked that she identify herself in Keswick lines."6 her candidature papers as Amy Wilson-Carmichael. She was never officially adopted, however. She was still using the hy Role of the Keswick Conventions phenated name as late as 1912, even though Wilson himself had died seven years earlier. For most of the year Keswick, a small town in the English Lake From this point on, for a few years Amy's life can be de District, is dedicated to country life and tourism. But for a short scribed only as chaotic. First, the China Inland Mission declined while each summer it is transformed into a center of evangelical her services, apparently for health reasons. Back again in devotion, under the watchword of holiness. This is not the place Broughton, her thoughts turned to Japan. Without proper con to elaborate on the history of the Keswick Conventions, except to tact havingbeenestablished, and withouttraining of any kind, in say that they began in 1875 and that they have always laid March 1893 she simply set off. Although well received, and soon particular emphasis on holiness in the Wesleyan sense-that is, busy in Matsuye, on Japan's west coast, she was not there long the possibility of the Christian's living a life of faith free from the enough to acclimatize or to learn more than a smattering of stain of sin-and on missions. Often holiness Christians were Japanese. In July 1894, suffering acutely from what may have also dispensationalists, which further strengthened their mis been a type of migraine, she left Japan for a period of recupera sionary resolve,on the lines of Matthew 24:14 ("And this gospel tion in China, only to become convinced while there that God actually wanted her in Ceylon (Sri Lanka)! Without officially notifying anyone at home of her intentions, still less asking Amy became the first Keswick permission, she simply left for Colombo, assumingno doubt that everyone at home would immediately see things her way. That missionary, though not at once her precipitate action might be seen as irresponsibility seems and not without conflict. hardly to have crossed her mind. Amy's time in Ceylon was even shorter than her time in Japan had been; late in November news reached her that Robert Wilson had had a stroke, and she of the kingdom will be preached ... and then the end will come"). returned at once to Broughton Grange. There she prepared for Their confidence in the word of Scripture was simple and total. publication the first of her manybooks, From Sunrise Land (1895), Holiness Christians did not generally behave differently than based onher letters from Japan. Her brief and turbulent mission other evangelical Protestants, but they behaved with greater ary career seemed to be over-and she was still not thirty years intensity and (in a High Victorian sense) earnestness. old. In actual fact it had barely begun. In 1886 and 1887 Amy Carmichael attended Keswick-style meetings in Glasgow and Belfast, and there she found her future. To India with the Zenana Missionary Society On the second of these occasions, two Keswick celebrities were present. One was James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905), founder of The Keswick holiness movement set little store by denomina the China Inland Mission; the other was Robert Wilson (1825 tionalism.

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