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Portrait of Amy Carmichael
Aishwarya A · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Missionary Century

Amy Carmichael

1867–1951IrishAnglican missionary

The Irish missionary who spent fifty-five years in India getting children out of the temples and never once came home.

Summary

Amy Carmichael lived 1867–1951, and was Irish. This wing places Amy Carmichael in The Missionary Century, 1790–1910.
  • Lived 1867–1951, Irish.
  • Stood in The Missionary Century (1790–1910).
  • Hangs on The Missionaries.
  • Tradition: Anglican missionary.

The life

Amy Carmichael went out to Japan, was invalided home, and went out again to India in 1895, where she stayed fifty-five years without a single furlough. The work found her: a seven-year-old named Preena ran to her having escaped being given to a temple, and Carmichael learned what that meant for such children. She began taking them in, wearing Indian dress and darkening her skin with coffee so she could move at night and ask questions where a European woman could not.

The community that grew up around her at Dohnavur eventually cared for around a thousand children. In 1931 she fell, broke her leg, and spent her last twenty years largely bedridden, which is when most of her thirty-odd books were written. She left instructions that no stone be put over her grave; the children set a birdbath there instead, with one word on it: Amma, mother.

What was happening while he lived5 moments · 1790–1910
  1. 1865The China Inland Mission and the Salvation ArmyIn June, walking the beach at Brighton in anguish over inland China, Taylor wrote in his Bible that he was asking God for twenty-four workers, a mission that would ask no one but God for money. The same summer William and Catherine Booth opened a mission in London's East End; it took the name Salvation Army in 1878.
  2. 1873Livingstone dies on his kneesHe was found on the morning of May 1 at Chitambo's village, kneeling by his bed. His African companions Chuma and Susi buried his heart under a tree, dried his body, and carried it roughly a thousand miles to the coast so England could bury him in Westminster Abbey.
  3. 1885The Cambridge SevenSeven young men from Britain's most privileged circles, including the cricketer C. T. Studd, gave up sport, money, and careers and sailed for China with the Inland Mission. Their farewell tour of the universities sent a wave of students into missions on both sides of the Atlantic.
  4. 1904Clouds gathering over WalesIn the autumn a young miner named Evan Roberts began meetings at Loughor, and within months chapels across Wales were full night after night. Reports of about a hundred thousand converts in a year are the era's own estimate, not a count, but the world was watching, and the next era was already breaking.
  5. 1910EdinburghIn June, some 1,200 delegates met in Edinburgh for the World Missionary Conference under the chairmanship of John R. Mott. For the first time since the apostles the church could look at a map and say it was genuinely worldwide, and the delegates from the younger churches asked, politely and firmly, when they would be treated as equals.

The Missionary Century: the whole era→

Go further

Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.

Search Amy Carmichael at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites

Why this one hangs here

Stayed fifty-five years in India without a furlough, taking in children sold to the temples, and asked for no gravestone.

Hangs on The Missionaries: The ones who looked at a map and could not stay home.

Standing beside himThe Missionary Century · 29 on this stretch of wall

Portrait of William Carey
William Carey1761–1834

A village cobbler who expected great things from God, attempted great things for God, and opened the missions era.

Portrait of Adoniram Judson
Adoniram Judson1788–1850

Survived Burma's death prisons and buried his family there to give the Burmese the Bible they still read.

Portrait of George Müller
George Müller1805–1898

Housed ten thousand orphans in Bristol and never asked anyone but God for a penny.

Portrait of David Livingstone
David Livingstone1813–1873

Walked Africa open for the gospel, shamed the slave trade in print, and died on his knees.

Portrait of Horatio Spafford
Horatio Spafford1828–1888

Wrote 'it is well with my soul' on the deck of a ship crossing the exact water where his four daughters had drowned.

Portrait of William Booth
William Booth1829–1912

Built an army out of the people no church wanted, with soup, soap, and salvation.