Amy Carmichael grew up in a devout Christian family in Ireland, the eldest of seven children. As a young woman, after helping a poor woman carry a bundle through the streets of Belfast, she was struck by a verse about what remains when fire tests each person’s work. She decided then that only the eternal would be worth living for.
In 1887, at the Keswick Convention, she heard Hudson Taylor speak about China and felt the call to missions. She went to live in the home of Robert Wilson, one of the founders of that gathering, who became like a father to her. In 1893 she left for Japan, her first missionary experience.
Frail health forced her out of Japan and cut short a brief stay in Ceylon. In 1895 she arrived in southern India with the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society. There she learned Tamil and began traveling with a group of Indian Christian women in itinerant evangelism through the villages.
In 1901 a seven year old girl named Preena fled a Hindu temple, where she had been given over to serve as a devadasi, and sought refuge with Amy. That encounter changed the course of her work: from then on, rescuing children from religious exploitation in the temples became her central mission.
This was the beginning of what would become the Dohnavur Fellowship. Over the decades, more than a thousand children were taken in there, many rescued from temples, others handed over by families unable to support them. Amy was called Amma, meaning mother, by everyone at Dohnavur.
Her leadership was strict and, at times, too harsh: she demanded strict obedience and used disciplinary methods now recognized as severe by today’s standards for children, which caused friction with coworkers. The most documented case is that of the missionary Stephen Neill, who arrived at Dohnavur in 1924 to help with the work among the boys and, after theological disagreements and disputes over disciplinary method, left the mission at the end of 1925. Elisabeth Elliot’s biography, A Chance to Die, records this more authoritarian and difficult side of her personality, one largely unexplored by the older, more admiring biographies.
On October 24, 1931, she suffered a serious fall, fracturing her leg and twisting her spine, which left her nearly bedridden for the next twenty years, until the end of her life. Even so, she kept writing, producing about fourteen of her 35 books during that period of confinement, receiving visitors and guiding the mission from within her own room.
She died at Dohnavur in 1951, having never returned to Europe since arriving in India 55 years earlier. She asked that no headstone bear her name over her grave, only the word Amma. The Dohnavur Fellowship continues to operate to this day.
