“Go Ye”

“And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to the whole creation.”

— Mark 16:15, ASV

13 January 1892

Amy Carmichael remembered the date for the rest of her life. On 13 January 1892, a winter evening at Broughton Grange, she was alone in her room when, as she later described it, the words “Go ye” came to her with a clarity and authority that she could not mistake. She had heard the great commission read and preached all her life. She had heard missionary speakers at Keswick and in Robert Wilson’s drawing room. She had read reports from China and India and Africa. But this time, she said, the words were addressed to her.

It is worth being careful about what this means. Amy Carmichael was not given to claiming visions or voices, and she was suspicious of Christians who were. She did not say that she heard an audible voice. She said that a familiar command of Christ became, on a particular evening, a personal command, impossible to evade. Many Christians have known something similar: a verse read a hundred times that suddenly becomes alive, and will not let go. For Amy, it was the words of the risen Jesus at the end of Mark’s Gospel: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to the whole creation.”

A Letter to Her Mother

The next day she wrote to her mother. It must have been one of the hardest letters she ever wrote. Her mother was a widow, living with reduced means, and Amy was her eldest daughter. Her father’s death had made the family depend on one another, and Amy had been her mother’s right hand. Now she was asking her mother’s blessing to go to the other side of the world, quite possibly never to return.

Catherine Carmichael’s reply has been preserved, and the biographies print it. It is a remarkable letter, from a woman who had already lost a great deal. She did not try to hold her daughter back, and she did not lay her own needs before her. She gave her daughter up to God, freely and with thanksgiving. Amy kept the letter for the rest of her life.

The willingness of Christian parents to let their children go has always been one of the hidden costs of missionary work. The missionary gets the stories and the honour; the parents get the empty chair and the long silences between letters. Catherine Carmichael would die in England in 1913, and the daughter she had given up would not be with her. Her letter of 1892 was an act of faith as costly as anything her daughter did.

The Dear Old Man’s Grief

Robert Wilson found the news harder to bear. He had come to depend on Amy, and he loved her as a daughter. He was growing old, and her going would leave his house empty again. There were friends who told Amy plainly that her duty lay at Broughton Grange, and that it was wrong to leave an old man who needed her. Some of them thought she was being selfish, dressing up a desire for adventure in the language of a divine call.

Amy felt the force of these arguments. She did not leave lightly, and she suffered over the decision. But she was convinced that the call was real, and that to refuse it would be disobedience. In the end, Robert Wilson himself gave his consent, though it cost him a great deal to do so. He would continue to support her, write to her, and pray for her for the rest of his life, and she would continue to call him her father.

It is easy to tell such stories as if the right choice were obvious. It was not. Jesus himself spoke of the duty to care for parents, and condemned those who used religious language to evade it. Amy Carmichael was choosing between two goods, and she knew it. That she chose to go does not mean that those who urged her to stay were wrong to care about the old man. It means that she was convinced, after much prayer, that God was asking her to go, and that he would care for Robert Wilson in her absence. Whether she was right is a question that only faith can answer. She believed she was, and the rest of her life was the evidence she offered.

The China Inland Mission

Her first thought was of China. She had heard Hudson Taylor speak, and she had been moved by his appeals for workers for the vast interior of China, where there were millions who had never heard the gospel. The China Inland Mission was the kind of mission that appealed to her. It accepted workers from different denominations, it made no appeals for money, it asked its missionaries to wear Chinese dress and live as close to the people as possible, and it expected them to trust God for their needs. Everything about it matched her convictions.

In 1892 she applied to the mission and went to London to its training home for women candidates. There she shared in the life of the house, studied, and prepared to sail. But the mission required its candidates to pass a medical examination, and Amy did not pass. The doctors judged that her health, and above all the neuralgia that so often laid her low, made her unfit for the rigours of life in inland China. The door was closed.

It was a severe disappointment. She had been certain of the call, and now the very mission whose principles she most admired had turned her down. She went back to Broughton Grange, uncertain of what to do next. It must have seemed to some of her friends that the matter had been settled: she was not strong enough, and she should stay at home. But she did not believe the call had been withdrawn. She believed only that one door had shut.

The Keswick Missionary

The next door opened from an unexpected direction. The Keswick Convention had been discussing for some time whether it should support missionaries of its own, and it now formed a committee to do so. Amy Carmichael became the first missionary it sent out. Arrangements were made for her to join the work of Barclay Buxton, an Anglican missionary of the Church Missionary Society who was leading an evangelistic work in western Japan, around the town of Matsue. Buxton was himself a Keswick man, and the connection was natural.

It was, in some ways, an odd arrangement. Amy was not a member of the Church Missionary Society, and she was not formally attached to any mission board. She was going out on the support of a convention, to work alongside a mission whose structures she did not belong to. Her health had just been judged unequal to missionary life by one of the most experienced missions in the world. Some observers must have thought it unwise. But she was sure that she was meant to go, and those who sent her shared her confidence.

She sailed for the East in March 1893, travelling with a small party of women missionaries bound for China. She was twenty-five. She had never been further from home than England, and she had no training in languages or in cross-cultural work. What she had was a conviction that she had been sent, a faith that had been tested by loss and illness, and a capacity for love that had already been proved among the shawlies of Belfast and the mill girls of Manchester.

Single Women Abroad

It is easy now to forget how new it was for a single woman to go overseas as a missionary in her own right. For most of the nineteenth century the Protestant missionary was a man, often accompanied by a wife who worked as hard as he did but whose work was rarely recognised. Single women began to go out in significant numbers only from the 1860s onward, and at first they went mostly to teach in schools or to visit women in their homes, the so-called zenana work, in societies where a male missionary could not enter the women’s quarters of a house. Societies were formed especially for this purpose, among them the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, founded in 1880, which Amy Carmichael would one day join.

By the 1890s the numbers were growing rapidly, and in some missions single women outnumbered the men. But their position was still uncertain. They were often paid less than men, they were usually excluded from the councils that made decisions, and they were expected to defer to the senior male missionaries of their stations. Many of them found ways to do remarkable work within these limits, and a few, like Mary Slessor in Calabar, found ways to step outside them. Amy Carmichael would prove to be one of the few. But in March 1893 she was simply a young woman of uncertain health, going out under an unusual arrangement to a country whose language she did not know.

Go Ye

The great commission at the end of Mark’s Gospel is addressed to the eleven disciples, but Christians have always heard it as addressed to the whole church. “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to the whole creation.” It is not a command to be successful. It is a command to go, and to tell.

Amy Carmichael would later write, in Things as They Are, of the long days of village work in which nothing seemed to happen, and she would hold on to that commission as the reason for going on. “He said ‘Go, tell,’” she wrote, “and we have come and are telling, and we meet Him as we ‘go and tell.’” The last part of that sentence is the key to her whole life. She did not go out of a sense of duty only, though duty mattered to her. She went because she believed that the one who sent her would be found on the road. She had found him on a winter evening at Broughton Grange, and she would look for him in Japan, in India, and in every village and nursery she ever entered.