Amy Carmichael

Amy Wilson Carmichael
Amy Carmichael with children in India
Born	(1867-12-16)16 December 1867 Millisle, County Down, Ireland
Died	18 January 1951(1951-01-18) (aged 83) Dohnavur, Tamil Nadu, India
Venerated in	Anglican Communion
Feast	January 18

Amy Wilson Carmichael (16 December 1867 – 18 January 1951) was a Protestant Christian missionary in India, who opened an orphanage and founded a mission in Dohnavur. She served in India for 55 years without furlough and wrote many books about the missionary work there.

Amy Wilson Carmichael was born in the small village of Millisle, County Down, Ireland in 1867; her parents were David Carmichael, a miller and his wife Catherine. Her parents were devout Presbyterians and she was the oldest of seven siblings. One possibly apocryphal story claims that as a child, Amy wished that she had blue eyes rather than brown, and often prayed that Jesus would change her eye color and was disappointed when it never happened. She loved to pinch her brother's cheeks to make the prettiest color blue in his eyes. But she always repented afterwards for hurting her brother. As an adult, however, she realized that her brown eye color probably helped her gain acceptance in India.

Amy's father moved the family to Belfast when she was 16, but he died two years later. In Belfast, Carmichael 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 and grew until they needed a hall to seat 500 people. 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 missionary work, although in many ways she seemed an unlikely candidate for missionary work, suffering as she did from neuralgia, a disease of the nerves that made her whole body weak and achy and often put her in bed for weeks on end. But at the Keswick Convention of 1887, she heard Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission speak about missionary life; soon afterwards, she became convinced of her calling to missionary work. She applied to the China Inland Mission 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. She was ready to sail for Asia at one point, when it was determined 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.