Amy Carmichael | Short Biography | Missionary to India | Dohnavur Fellowship |Fiery Irish missionary

A life well lived! True and inspiring story!

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Amy Wilson Carmichael (16 December 1867 – 18 January 1951) was a protestant Christian missionary in India, who opened an orphanage and founded a mission in Dohnavur, India. She served in India for 55 years without furlough and wrote many books about the missionary work there.

Amy Carmichael was born in the small village of Millisle, County Down, Northern Ireland to David and Catherine Carmichael. Her parents were Presbyterians and she was the eldest of seven siblings. Amy’s father died when she was 18. Carmichael was the founder of the Welcome Evangelical Church in Belfast.

Her calling

It was at the Keswick Convention of 1887 that she 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. In many ways she was 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.

A Keswick Missionary


Amy Carmichael with Indian children.
In 1893 Amy Carmichael travelled to Japan for fifteen months where she served as a ‘Keswick Missionary.’ In 1895 she arrived in India where she found her life-long vocation. In 1898 she took in her first woman refugee. 1899 took in first girl refugee. In 1900 she moved to Dohnavur. Dohnavur is situated in Tamil Nadu, thirty miles from the southern tip of India. 1901 Amy rescued her first ‘Temple child’, started a mission, at first an orphanage which eventually became ‘Dohnavur Fellowship’. She was commissioned by the Church of England Zenana Mission.

Hindu temple children were young girls dedicated to the gods and forced into prostitution to earn money for the priests i.e Devadasi. Much of her work was with young ladies, some of whom were saved from forced prostitution. The organization she founded was known as the Dohnavur Fellowship. The Dohnavur Fellowship would become a sanctuary for over one thousand children who would otherwise have faced a bleak future.

In an effort to respect Indian culture, members of the organization wore Indian dress and the children were given Indian names. She 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.

Her life-long ministry was that of saving children from sexual exploitation in Hindu temples. The Dohnavur Fellowship originated out of Amy’s work and grew into a large Christian community where she lived, surrounded by many children and staff and frequent visitors until her death in 1951.

She served as a missionary in India for fifty-six years without furlough.

Amy died in India at the age of 83. She asked that no stone be put over her grave; instead, the children she had cared for put a bird bath over it with the single inscription “Amma”, which means mother in the Tamil.

Taken from: https://www.christianlifeministries.c...

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