The Shawlies

“Then the master of the house being angry said to his servant, Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor and maimed and blind and lame.”

— Luke 14:21, ASV

Girls in Shawls

In the Belfast of the 1880s, a woman’s headgear told the world where she stood. A lady wore a hat or a bonnet. A servant wore a cap. A mill girl, who could afford neither, wrapped a shawl around her head and shoulders against the rain and walked to work like that. People called them “shawlies,” and the word was not a compliment.

There were thousands of them. The linen industry of Belfast depended on women and girls, many of whom started work in their early teens, some as “half-timers” even younger. They worked long hours in the spinning rooms and weaving sheds, where the air was hot and wet to keep the flax supple, and where the noise of the machinery was deafening. Their wages were low. Their health suffered from the damp, the dust and the long hours on their feet. Many of them came from families that had moved to the city from the countryside in search of work, and many lived in crowded houses in the narrow streets near the mills.

Few of them went to church. The churches of Belfast were full on Sunday mornings, but they were full of people in hats. A girl in a shawl would have felt out of place in a respectable congregation, and many congregations would have made her feel it. The gulf between the churchgoing classes and the working poor was wide in every British city, and in Belfast it was sharpened by the divisions of class within each denomination.

The First Class

Amy Carmichael noticed them. Exactly how it began is not certain, but by the mid-1880s she was running a Sunday morning class for shawlies in a hall belonging to Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church. It was a bold thing to do. Some members of the congregation were not pleased to see their premises filled with mill girls, and the girls themselves were wary at first of a young lady from a good family who wanted to teach them the Bible.

But they came, and they kept coming. Amy was not much older than many of them, and she seems to have had a gift, from the start, for treating people as people rather than as objects of charity. She taught them the Bible, sang with them, and prayed with them. She also tried to help them in practical ways. The class grew until the hall was too small, and it went on growing.

It is worth asking why. Amy had no training as a teacher or an evangelist. She was shy in some ways, and she would never be a great public speaker. But she cared intensely about the girls in front of her, and they could tell. Years later, in India, people would notice the same thing: that she had a way of making each person feel that she or he mattered to her, and to God. It was not a technique. It was the fruit of the Sunday morning by the fountain, when she had learned that an old woman’s bundle was worth more than other people’s good opinion.

A Hall for the Shawlies

As the class outgrew its room, Amy began to pray for a building of its own. The story of how the prayer was answered is one of the best known of her early life. She saw an advertisement in The Christian, a widely read evangelical weekly, for a building made of corrugated iron that could be put up to hold about five hundred people, at a cost of five hundred pounds. Iron halls of this kind, sometimes called tin tabernacles, were common at the time; they were cheap and quick to erect, and many mission congregations began in them.

Five hundred pounds was a very large sum, far beyond anything the Carmichael family could now afford. But, according to the account handed down, a Christian woman named Kate Mitchell heard of the need and gave the whole amount, and a mill owner gave a piece of land on which to put it, at the corner of Cambrai Street and Heather Street, off the Shankill Road. The hall was built, and it was named the Welcome. Sources differ on when it opened: some give 1887, and others say that it was opened at the beginning of 1889. The later date seems more likely to be the date of the formal opening, though the work had begun some years before.

The name said everything. This was to be a place where the shawlies would be welcome, not tolerated. Amy was firm about who it was for. It was not to become another middle-class mission hall, filled with the respectable poor and the comfortable rich. It was for the girls from the mills.

The Work Grows

At the Welcome Hall the work spread out in many directions. There were Bible classes and Sunday meetings, and, by the accounts that survive, gatherings during the week as well, meant to meet the girls where they were and not only on Sundays. Amy was not the only worker; others joined her, and she seems to have been as good at drawing in helpers as at drawing in the girls. But she was the centre of it, and she poured herself into it.

The hall outlived her by a long time. It still stands in Belfast, now as Welcome Evangelical Church, and a centre in her name tells her story to visitors. It is a modest monument. But there is something fitting about it. The first permanent fruit of Amy Carmichael’s ministry was a corrugated iron hall built for girls who were too poor to wear hats.

What She Learned

The Welcome Hall years taught Amy Carmichael things she would use for the rest of her life. She learned that the gospel was for the poor, and that the poor would come if they were truly welcomed. She learned that faith and practical care belonged together. She learned to organise, to lead others, and to keep a work going week after week. And she learned, perhaps for the first time, the pattern of prayer and provision that would mark her whole life. She had prayed for a hall, she had not asked anyone for money, and the money had come.

That last point needs to be handled carefully. Amy Carmichael came to believe very firmly that the needs of God’s work should be made known to God in prayer, and not to people by appeals. She learned this partly from the example of George Müller of Bristol, who had run orphan houses for thousands of children on that principle, and from Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission. In later years Dohnavur would never make appeals for money, and she would point to its survival as evidence that God answers prayer. But it is worth remembering that the Welcome Hall was paid for by a wealthy woman who heard about it, and that the principle of not asking did not mean that nobody knew. Christians who share her convictions have sometimes been accused of asking by not asking, by telling stories of need in a way that invites a response. Amy was aware of the danger, and she tried hard to avoid it. Whether she always succeeded is a fair question, and one she would have asked herself.

The Feast in the Parable

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from a parable of Jesus about a great supper. The invited guests made excuses and did not come, and the master of the house, angry at their refusal, sent his servant out into the streets and lanes of the city to bring in the poor, the maimed, the blind and the lame. When there was still room, he sent him out again, to the highways and hedges, to compel people to come in, so that his house would be filled.

It is a parable about the generosity of God and about the strange guest list of his kingdom. The respectable, who had every reason to come, stayed away. The poor, who had no claim on the master at all, were brought in. The servant’s job was simply to go out and bring them.

The young woman who built a hall for the shawlies of Belfast had understood that parable. She did not wait for the mill girls to find their way into the churches. She went out to them, and she made a place for them. It would not be the last time. In India, she would go out to the villages, and later she would make a place for children who had nowhere else to go. The Welcome Hall was the first of her houses of welcome. It was not the last.

A Call Beyond Belfast

By 1889 the Welcome Hall was well established, and Amy might have spent her life there. Many women of her background did spend their lives in exactly this kind of work, running mission halls and Bible classes in their home cities, and it was valuable and honourable work. But the Carmichael family’s circumstances were changing again. Their financial troubles had not ended with her father’s death, and in 1889 the family left Belfast. Amy and her mother went to Manchester, where a new opening for mission work among mill girls had been offered to them. She handed over the Welcome Hall to others. She was twenty-one, and she was about to discover that the work she loved could be taken from her as suddenly as it had been given.