A Chance to Die Elisabeth Elliot (electronic reader .txt) 📖

was visiting Madras was asked whether he was Church of England, Wesleyan, Baptist, or what.

“I am a Christian,” he answered.

“But what sort of Christian?”

“I am just a Christian.”

Nobody had prepared him for such a question. Until 1925 Amy Carmichael had belonged to the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, but many who joined her in the work had other labels. Like those nicknamed “Plymouth Brethren” she wanted to practice as literally as possible whatever she found in the New Testament. She found no denominations there. “We can do far more for the Kingdom by being as we are,” she wrote to an Anglican priest who was thinking of joining her, “loving all, belonging to all who love our Lord Jesus in sincerity. . . . We have a welcome everywhere—all societies all over South India welcome anything we can give, for all know that we are not out to harm any.” When the mission in Ceylon had asked her to stay and join them she took Psalms 119:63: “I am a companion of all them that fear thee, and of them that keep thy precepts” as the word given to her then. She had held onto that ever since.

The boy’s reply, “I am a Christian,” was just what Amma would have wanted him to say. It was what Peter the Fisherman surely would have said, she thought, and who could improve on that? They belonged to the Household of God. Any who belonged to that belonged to Dohnavur. What else was needed? “The least intrusion of the ‘I and mine,’ an overemphasis on ‘my views/ would be like a pebble striking a pane of glass,” shattering the love that made them one. One way, wrote Amy, is shown to be eternally right—that of 1 Corinthians 1:10, “be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.” Any other way is eternally wrong.

For years the Family had attended the Church Missionary Society’s church next door to the compound, but things got too crowded (perhaps not only physically?) and the pastor asked that they arrange their own services. The arranging was according to Amy’s eclectic tastes, incorporating some of the silence of Quaker Meetings the D.O.M. has taught her to appreciate, some of the liturgy which she selected from the Anglican service, and some of the freedom of the Free Churches. In early years an ordained man was usually in charge. Later it was more often someone who had received only “the mighty Ordination of the Pierced Hands.”1

The break with the Anglican church was timely. When Stephen Neill went on to become the bishop of Tinnevelly, the thought of his being in a position to influence the children growing up under Amy’s care was distressing. She explained things later: “When the local bishop has been a friend whose coming we felt would help towards the spiritual life of our company, we have asked him to come to us from time to time, and when he was not we have not.” Had they been a part of the Anglican mission they would not have had that choice.

Among things that did not matter to Amy Carmichael were the method of baptism and the interpretation of certain Bible passages which scholars disagreed on. “Of one mind” need not mean identity of opinion, but “a community of sympathetic kindness.” Three things mattered: the verbal inspiration of Scripture, the power of God to deal with His enemy, and loyalty to one another.

The “living bond,” or gold cord which held the Family together was love. Always remembering that bleak walk along Japan’s coast in the fog and rain with one who seemed to take for granted the lack of love among missionaries, Amy never slackened in her efforts to see that Dohnavur was different. She succeeded. Not that all who lived there demonstrated what she called “Calvary love.” She herself, as her little book If so piercingly shows, felt sometimes that she knew nothing of that love. Some of the Family were openly rebellious. But Amy succeeded in creating a different climate in the place, odiously different to some. Did she think her way was the only way for Christians to live? No, she said, not at all. “We are sure it is the way meant for us,” because prayer “is the core of our day.”

Amy, at fifty-seven, in 1925.

It was a charitable effort, meant to thread its way delicately between condemnation of all other ways and the view that one way is as good as another. Where prayer is not the core, unity is not required—but of course Amy would not have called that Christian. There was no getting around it—“her” way was the only way that could be called Christian. “How can you pray—really pray, I mean—with one against whom you have a grudge or have been discussing critically with another? Try it. You will find it cannot be done.”

The committee of the CEZMS in London was responsible for the guidance of their missionaries. The board had asked questions she could not answer: How much did they plan to expand? What financial liabilities would they incur? “We soon passed the place where we could look to any for counsel except the One who was near enough to us to tell us what to do from hour to hour. It was His word which had caused the work to begin and only He (we write reverently) knew what we should do.” So it was obvious that London was simply too far away. Geographical distance made communication difficult. Other distances made it impossible. There was her temperament—mystical and impractical it must have seemed to the men trying to monitor her activities, her disclaimers notwithstanding. And there were the less definable spiritual differences, such as an amorphous ecclesiology and a do-it-yourself creed.

On July 6, 1925, the group in Dohnavur severed all ties with the societies to which they had belonged. They needed a new legal identity in order to hold property, so they were officially registered in