Amy Carmichael

Amy Beatrice Carmichael (16 December 1867 – 18 January 1951) was an Irish Christian missionary in India who opened an orphanage and founded a mission in Dohnavur. She served in India for 55 years and wrote 35 books about her work as a missionary.

Early life

Amy Beatrice Carmichael, born in the small village of Millisle, County Down, Ireland, in 1867, as the oldest of seven siblings. Her parents were David Carmichael, a miller, and his wife Catherine, both devout Christians. Amy attended Harrogate Ladies College for four years in her youth.

Amy's father moved the family to Belfast when she was 16 years old, but he died two years later. In Belfast, the Carmichaels founded the Welcome Evangelical Church. In the mid-1880s, Carmichael started a Sunday-morning class for the 'Shawlies' (mill girls who wore shawls instead of hats) in the church hall of Rosemary Street Presbyterian. This mission grew quickly to include several hundred attendees. At this time Amy saw an advertisement in The Christian for an iron hall that could be erected for £500 and would seat 500 people. Two donations, £500 from Miss Kate Mitchell and one plot of land from a mill owner, led to the erection of the first "Welcome Hall", on the corner of Cambrai Street and Heather Street in 1887.

Amy continued at the Welcome until she received a call to work among the mill girls of Manchester in 1889, from which she moved on to overseas missionary work, despite suffering from neuralgia. At the Keswick Convention of 1887, she heard Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission (CIM), speak about missionary life; soon afterwards, she became convinced of her calling to missionary work. She applied to the CIM and lived in London at the training house for women, where she met author and missionary to China Mary Geraldine Guinness, who encouraged her to pursue missionary work. Carmichael was ready to sail for Asia, but she was told that her health made her unfit for the work. She postponed her missionary career with the CIM and decided later to join the Church Missionary Society.