Faithful, Not Successful

“Here, moreover, it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful.” — 1 Corinthians 4:2 (ASV)

Bangalore, high on a plateau in south India, was a comfortable place for Europeans in 1895. Amy came to learn Tamil, and was soon flattened by fever.

When she recovered, something bothered her more. Many missionaries, as she saw it, lived much like other Europeans, with big houses, servants, tennis and social calls, and kept apart from the Indian people around them. She was young, and not always fair. Missionaries in that climate often broke down because they didn’t rest, and station life was the only support many had. But her unease came from a real conviction: you can’t credibly preach the gospel while living as if the world is your home. She also admitted that the gap could never be closed completely. “No matter how far you may go,” she wrote in Things as They Are, “there is always a distance you cannot cover—yards or inches it may be, but always that fatal hiatus.”

The person who changed her direction was Thomas Walker, a missionary in the Tinnevelly district at the southern tip of India, and a fine Tamil scholar. He agreed to teach her, and in 1896 she went to live and work with Walker and his wife. It became a partnership of sixteen years. Walker was demanding, hated inflated reports, and took her seriously.

Tamil, one of the world’s great classical languages, is hard for English speakers. Amy wasn’t a natural linguist, but she wanted to speak to people directly, without an interpreter. She became fluent, and came to love it.

With a small band of Indian Christian women she began travelling from village to village by bandy, a springless bullock cart. In Tamil they got a name translated as “the Starry Cluster.” Their leader was Ponnammal, a young widow who broke with the hidden life expected of widows to join them, and became Amy’s closest Indian friend. The women could go into homes where a foreigner was unwelcome and speak of their own experience of Christ. Amy believed nothing told more than that “simple witness.”

Her book is often funny. Once the bandy rolled into a flooded pool, and “the water swished in at the lower end and floated our books out quietly.” They fished them out and went on, “somewhat damp, but happy.” A little girl spotted Amy’s sun hat and ran to tell the village: “A great white man is here! Oh what an appalling spectacle!”

But the heart of the book is how hard the work was. Day after day they told the story of Jesus and saw nothing happen. People listened politely, or stared, or wandered off. Amy called one chapter “Humdrum.” “There have been times of late,” she wrote, “when I have had to hold on to one text with all my might: ‘It is required in stewards that a man be found faithful.’ Praise God, it does not say ‘successful.’”

The biggest barrier, as she saw it, was caste: the hereditary communities that gave each person a place, a trade, a family and a web of protection. Becoming a Christian usually meant losing all of it. “Caste and religion!” she wrote. “They are so mixed up that we do not know how to unmix them.” Two fair points belong here. She saw caste mostly from the outside, as bondage, and missed the belonging it also gave. And the Indian churches were not free of caste themselves, which she admitted and grieved over.

She refused to dress up the work for readers at home. “Most days in real life,” she wrote, “end exactly as they began, so far as visible results are concerned.” And yet: “There is joy in the doing of it, there is joy in just obeying.”

We live surrounded by highlight reels. Most people’s real days, Christians’ included, look more like Amy’s: ordinary, slow, apparently fruitless. God doesn’t ask you to be impressive. He asks you to be faithful.

One thing to do this week: choose one ordinary thing you do for God that never seems to show results: praying for a friend, reading your Bible, being kind to someone difficult. Keep doing it every day this week, and thank God that the text says “faithful,” not “successful.”