A Fellowship and Its Cost

“And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and soul: and not one of them said that aught of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.”

— Acts 4:32, ASV

Sisters of the Common Life

In March 1916, in the middle of the war and the year after Ponnammal’s death, Amy Carmichael gathered a small group of the Indian women who worked with her into a fellowship she called the Sisters of the Common Life. The name was borrowed from a late medieval movement in the Low Countries, the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life, from which had come Thomas à Kempis and The Imitation of Christ. Amy did not intend to found a religious order in the Catholic sense. There were no lifelong vows. But the Sisters committed themselves to a life of simplicity, prayer and service at Dohnavur, and to remaining unmarried for as long as they felt called to it, so that they could give themselves wholly to the children.

It was a remarkable step for a Protestant missionary in South India. In a society where marriage was almost universal for women, and where an unmarried woman was regarded as an anomaly, Amy was offering Indian Christian women a recognised way of life outside marriage, with dignity and purpose. Many of those who joined were women who had come out of Hindu homes, or who had grown up at Dohnavur, and for whom marriage within the Christian community was not always easy to arrange. For them the Sisters offered a family and a calling.

It also raised questions. Some Indian Christians, and some missionaries, were uneasy about a Protestant community of unmarried women under a foreign leader, and wondered whether it was healthy for young women to be encouraged not to marry. Amy was clear that she did not regard singleness as superior to marriage, and that the girls who grew up at Dohnavur were free to marry if they chose. Many did. But she believed that some were called to a single life of service, as she had been, and she wanted to give that calling a shape.

Leaving the Society

For nearly thirty years Amy had worked in India as a missionary of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, though in practice she had long run her own work with a great deal of independence. As Dohnavur grew, the arrangement became more awkward. The Fellowship included workers of many denominations, men as well as women, and Indians as well as Europeans. It had its own principles, its own way of life, and its own leader. It made no appeals for money, while the Society, like all mission societies, depended on them. Amy did not wish to be bound by the rules and decisions of a committee in London that knew little of Dohnavur.

In 1925 the connection with the Society was ended by agreement, and Dohnavur became fully independent. In 1927 it was registered as the Dohnavur Fellowship, with its own constitution and its own governing structure. Amy remained its leader, and it was clear to everyone that the Fellowship was, in large measure, what she made it.

The independence had obvious advantages. Dohnavur could follow its own principles without compromise, and Amy was free to lead as she believed God was leading her. But it also had costs. An independent work, led by a strong founder, without outside oversight, was vulnerable to the weaknesses of its leader. Decisions that might have been questioned by a committee were not questioned. And the question of what would happen when the founder died, always a hard one for such works, became more pressing.

Stephen Neill

The most painful episode of these years, and one that Amy never mentioned in her own history of the Fellowship, involved a young man who would later become one of the best-known missionary scholars of the century. Stephen Neill was a brilliant young Cambridge graduate, a fellow of Trinity College, who came to India in 1924 to work at Dohnavur. His parents, both doctors, came out too for a time. He had read Amy’s books, and he came, it seems, with high hopes of working under her.

The partnership did not last. Within a year or so Neill and Amy were at odds, and in November 1925 he left Dohnavur. The reasons are not entirely clear, and the surviving accounts reflect the views of the people who gave them. A historian who has studied the episode, Dyron Daughrity, has described it as a bitter parting. It seems that Neill disagreed with Amy over the treatment and upbringing of the boys, including the degree to which they should be allowed outside the compound, and that he did not easily submit to her authority. Amy, for her part, seems to have felt that he was undermining the work and the unity of the Fellowship. Neill’s mother blamed the friction partly on Amy’s religious outlook, and Neill himself, in an autobiography published after his death, wrote critically of his time at Dohnavur.

Neill went on to a distinguished career. He became bishop of Tinnevelly, the very diocese in which Dohnavur lay, and later one of the most respected historians of Christian missions in the world. The episode tells us something about both of them. Neill was young, gifted and sure of himself, and he may have been difficult to manage. Amy was a strong leader who did not easily share authority, and who could not always distinguish disagreement from disloyalty. A wiser handling on both sides might have kept him. Amy’s silence about him in Gold Cord, her own history of the Fellowship, suggests that the wound went deep.

Healing

One of the needs that Amy had prayed about for many years was a hospital. The children of Dohnavur were often ill, and so were the people of the villages around. The nearest proper medical care was far away, and many children had died who might have lived with better treatment. With the coming of doctors and nurses to the Fellowship, the hope of a hospital became a reality. By the end of the 1920s the Fellowship had its own hospital, which Amy named, in Tamil, the Place of Heavenly Healing. It served not only the Fellowship but the surrounding villages, Hindu and Christian alike, and it became one of the most valued parts of Dohnavur’s work.

The hospital was also, in Amy’s eyes, a place of witness. She wanted the people who came for treatment to see the love of Christ in the care they received, and to hear the gospel if they wished. She was careful that no one should be pressured, and that treatment should never depend on willingness to listen. But she believed that healing of the body and healing of the soul belonged together, as they had in the ministry of Jesus.

Books from Dohnavur

Through all these years Amy went on writing. Her books were one of the main ways in which friends at home learned about Dohnavur, and since the Fellowship made no appeals, they were also, without being designed for it, one of the ways in which friends came to share in its life. In 1922 she published a life of Thomas Ragland, the Cambridge scholar who had pioneered itinerant evangelism in the villages of North Tinnevelly in the 1850s, and whose letter about the worth of a single soul she had quoted twenty years earlier. In 1924 came Mimosa, the story of a girl from a Hindu family who spent only a short time at Dohnavur as a child, heard there that God loved her, and went home to hold on to that one truth for years with almost no Christian teaching at all. The book is a quiet one, and many readers have found it among her most moving. It is a story about the power of a little light, and about the faithfulness of God to a child whom no missionary could follow.

She also wrote songs, many of them in Tamil, for the children to sing, and verse in English, some of which was gathered into books. Her writing in these years became more devotional and less polemical than Things as They Are. She was writing less to rouse readers at home than to strengthen those who were already committed, inside and outside the Fellowship, and to set down what she had learned about prayer, suffering and obedience. That shift would become even more marked after 1931, when writing became, for a time, almost the only work she could do.

One Heart and Soul

The verse at the head of this chapter describes the earliest church in Jerusalem: “the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and soul,” and they held their possessions in common. It is an ideal that Christians have tried again and again to live out, in monasteries and religious orders, in communities and households, and it has never been easy.

Amy Carmichael tried to live it at Dohnavur. The Fellowship owned its property in common, its members received no salaries, and they shared a life of work and prayer. Unity was one of her great concerns. She wanted the Fellowship to be of one heart and soul, and she believed that disunity was one of the most dangerous threats to its life. That concern lay behind much of her strictness, and behind her difficulty with people like Stephen Neill who did not fit.

The ideal was a good one, and it produced a community of rare devotion. But the danger of such an ideal is that unity can come to mean uniformity, and that the leader’s will can come to be identified with the will of God. Amy was not blind to this danger, and she warned against it. But she did not always escape it. The story of the Fellowship in these years is the story of a remarkable community, held together by love and by a powerful leader, and it is also a reminder that even the best communities need ways of hearing those who disagree.