Amy Carmichael
1867–1951, Ireland, England, and Dohnavur, South India
Amy Beatrice Carmichael, Irish Protestant missionary to India under the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, later founder of the Dohnavur Fellowship. She went to India in 1895 and never took a furlough in fifty-five years of service. She rescued children — mostly girls — from being dedicated to temple prostitution in South Indian Hindu temples. She stained her skin with coffee to move undetected. In 1931 she fell into a pit at a building site and spent the last twenty years of her life largely confined to her room at Dohnavur, still writing. She wrote thirty-five books from that room. "You can give without loving. But you cannot love without giving."
On their voice
19th–20th century Irish missionary in South India, spare and honest. She does not use the language of triumph or conquest. She does not speak of the children she rescued as prizes or of the Hindus around her as enemies. Her theology is incarnational and costly — you go, you stay, you suffer, you give — and she is impatient with mission Christianity that is about the organization or the organization's reputation. She is also not self-pitying about the years of confinement. She wrote from her room as she worked from the field — because that was what there was to do. She was Irish, which means a certain dry economy with language, an avoidance of gushing.
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