A Reader’s Guide to Amanda Berry Smith

Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul. PSALM 66:16

Amanda Smith left one book, and it is a large one. Her Autobiography runs to some five hundred pages in its first edition, and it reads as she spoke: warm, direct, rambling, full of hymn verses, names, prayers and Hallelujahs. It is not polished. It is alive. Read it with patience and it will repay you as few spiritual autobiographies do.

Begin here

An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist (1893). In the Ochorus library. Do not try to read it straight through at first. Begin, using the chapter titles of the Ochorus edition, with the chapters on her early life and conversion — Birth, Parentage, and Deliverance from Slavery; Marriage and Conversion — then go straight to The Blessing of Sanctification, the heart of the book. After that, read His Presence and My Obedience and Learning Thy Will Be Done, which contain much of her best teaching, and The Call to Go to England, her great struggle with fear.

Read also Bishop Thoburn’s introduction, which gives a rare outside view of her ministry in India from a man who worked beside her.

The later chapters

The Autobiography becomes a travel diary in its second half. The chapters on England and Scotland show her among the holiness circles of Keswick and Perth. The chapters on India and Africa are long and uneven, full of names, dates, fevers and meetings, but they contain some of her sharpest observations — on temperance, on missionary pay and practice, on Liberia and emigration — and some of the passages about African and Indian peoples that call for the careful reading described in this book. The chapter Return to Liverpool, and Faith Healing sets out her mature judgement on healing and the use of means, and includes the story of her bonnet.

For younger readers

Ochorus also hosts retellings of her life for teenagers and for children, based on the Autobiography. They are a good way to introduce her to a family. For her teaching in her own words, adults should go to the original.

About Amanda Smith

Marshall W. Taylor’s The Life, Travels, Labors, and Helpers of Mrs. Amanda Smith (1886) is an early account written while she was in Africa, useful for the way she was seen in her own time. Adrienne M. Israel’s Amanda Berry Smith: From Washerwoman to Evangelist (1998) is the standard modern biography: careful, sympathetic, and good on her place in the holiness movement and in Black church history, and on the later years that the Autobiography does not cover. A modern reprint of the Autobiography appeared in the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (1988), which helped bring her back to wide attention.

The older account is admiring and uncritical; modern treatments are sometimes more interested in her as a pioneer than in the God she preached. Let her own words have the last say.

Approach with care

Her accounts of inward voices, signs and visions. Read them as the testimony of a sincere woman whom God used, not as a method. Test them, as she learned to test them, by Scripture.

Her teaching on entire sanctification. Receive her hunger for God and her confidence in His power to cleanse. Where she describes holiness as a single second crisis, weigh it against the wider witness of Scripture and the church.

Her descriptions of Africa and India. Read them with charity for a woman of her era, and with discernment about where she confused the gospel with the culture she came from.

Companions

Hannah Whitall Smith, whose Bible readings Amanda heard at the door of a Philadelphia meeting and whom she later called her dear friend, wrote The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, in the Ochorus library, which comes from the same holiness world and can be read alongside her. Catherine Booth, whose closest friend was Amanda’s hostess in London, taught many of the same things from a very different life; Ochorus has a companion to her in this series.

Three counsels for reading her

Read her slowly and aloud; she was a speaker and a singer, and her sentences come alive in the voice. Read her for the lesson in each story; she almost never tells an incident without drawing one, and the lessons are where her theology lies. And read her with the Bible open, as she always did, checking her against it as she would have wanted.

Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy. PSALM 107:2