Lording It

“neither as lording it over the charge allotted to you, but making yourselves ensamples to the flock.” — 1 Peter 5:3 (ASV)

In March 1916 Amy gathered a small group of the Indian women who worked with her into the Sisters of the Common Life. There were no lifelong vows, but they committed themselves to simplicity, prayer and service, and to staying unmarried for as long as they felt called, so they could give themselves to the children. In a society where almost every woman married, it offered single women a recognised life with dignity and purpose. Some people were uneasy. Amy said plainly that singleness was not better than marriage, and the girls raised at Dohnavur were free to marry. Many did.

In 1925 the link with the Zenana Society ended by agreement, and in 1927 the work was registered as the Dohnavur Fellowship. Its members received no salaries, and it made no appeals for money. Independence let Amy lead as she believed God was leading her. It also meant nobody outside could question her decisions.

That matters for what happened with Stephen Neill. He was a brilliant young fellow of a Cambridge college who came to Dohnavur in 1924, having read Amy’s books and hoping to work under her. It went badly. They seem to have disagreed over how the boys should be brought up, including how far they should be allowed outside the compound, and Neill did not easily accept her authority. Amy seems to have felt he was undermining the work and the unity of the Fellowship. In November 1925 he left. A historian who has studied the episode, Dyron Daughrity, calls it a bitter parting. Neill later wrote critically of his time there. Amy’s own history of the Fellowship doesn’t mention him at all.

Neill went on to become bishop of Tinnevelly, the very diocese Dohnavur lay in, and one of the best-known historians of Christian missions in the world. It’s worth being fair to both. He was young, gifted and sure of himself, and may have been hard to manage. She was a strong leader who didn’t easily share authority and couldn’t always tell disagreement from disloyalty. Wiser handling on both sides might have kept him. Her silence suggests the wound went deep.

Some observers said something similar about Dohnavur’s walls. In the early years, guarding the children was plainly necessary, because people who saw them as property might try to take them back. Later, some wondered whether the walls, real and invisible, had stayed higher than they needed to be, and some of the children who grew up there found it hard to make their way in the world outside. What some saw as love, others saw as control.

That isn’t the whole story. In these same years doctors and nurses joined the Fellowship, and by the end of the 1920s it had its own hospital, which Amy named in Tamil the Place of Heavenly Healing. It served the villages round about, Hindu and Christian alike. She wanted patients to see Christ’s love in their care, but nobody was to be pressured, and treatment never depended on being willing to listen. And she kept writing, including Mimosa (1924), about a girl who spent only a short time at Dohnavur, heard there that God loved her, and held on to that one truth at home for years with almost no other teaching.

Amy wanted the Fellowship to be “of one heart and soul,” like the first church in Acts. It was a good aim, and it produced a community of rare devotion. The danger is that unity slides into everyone agreeing with the leader, and the leader’s will gets mistaken for God’s. Amy warned against that. She didn’t always escape it.

Peter tells leaders not to lord it over people but to be examples. That’s hard for strong people, and if you’re a natural leader, it’s written for you. Being sure you’re right is not the same as being right, and someone who disagrees with you is not automatically disloyal.

One thing to do this week: think of someone who disagreed with you recently, in a group project, a team, a family argument or at church. Ask them to explain their view again, and listen without defending yourself. If you were wrong, say so.