100 Books Like Amy Carmichael

Though this book was first published in 1971, its message of courage in the face of tyranny and forgiveness in response to evil remains stunning to this day.

I have read this book twice, twenty years apart, and both times I came away with a sense of awe that because of their strong faith, Corrie ten Boom and her family were willing to risk their own lives to protect those who were being hunted down by the Nazis.

Even when caught and sent to a concentration camp where they endured unspeakable cruelty, Corrie ten Boom and her sister, Betsie, did not lose their faith but instead ministered to the women around them.

I can only hope that I would have the same courage if I were in Corrie’s shoes.   

This is the best missionary autobiography I have ever read.

In These Strange Ashes Elisabeth Elliot is so brutally honest about being a missionary. She complains about humidity and wrinkled clothes. She endures loneliness and times of deep discouragement in the jungles of Ecuador. And the ending! I won’t spoil it.

While I’ve read other books by Elliot, including her famous memoir about losing her husband Jim, this one stayed with me. It asks, why do we serve God? What happens when the result is not stellar? Does it mean we failed? I wasn’t eager to sign up for a trip to the jungle after reading her story, but it helped me see my life from a new perspective.

Joni Eareckson’s life seemed over forever when she dove into a lake and suffered a traumatic head injury, but God used her tragedy for His glory.

I first saw Joni’s story at the movie theatres in 7th grade, and since then she has become a personal hero as I saw her overcome trauma and live bravely for God. Joni was at the peak of her life—strong, attractive, athletic—when a diving accident changed everything. In the days and weeks following the accident, unable to move, Joni sank into deep depression and bitterness.

God helped Joni find new ways to live, love, and serve Him. She is one of my personal heroes, helping others with physical disability find hope and purpose in God.

As a young girl, I loved missionary stories about women like Gladys Aylward who left their comfortable homes and traveled to remote countries to tell people about Jesus.

In 1930, Gladys traveled across Siberia by train to a remote town in northwest China. There, as an independent missionary, she shared God’s love and stood up against time-honored traditions that were harming young girls. This book is full of adventure, and doesn’t shrink from stomach-wrenching details.

I’ll never forget the vivid descriptions of foot-binding, and how Gladys fearlessly confronted and corrected this painful procedure, no doubt impacting lives forever.

After my struggles to find a printer for The God Squad in 1988, it is refreshing to see how receptive readers are to this brave memoir by Maureen Sullivan, subtitled “My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries”.

When twelve years old, Sullivan told a teacher she was being sexually abused by her stepfather. A day later she was incarcerated in a Magdalene Laundry. The nuns promised to educated her. Instead she became their indentured slave, washing and scrubbing, with little food or water and subjected to beatings.

The title comes from how the nuns kept her hidden in a tunnel when government inspectors came. Novelists can try to imagine these worlds, but only a survivor (and campaigner for other survivors) like Sullivan can really capture that purgatory.

Elisabeth Elliot’s approach to faith and to missiology was heavily influenced by 19th-century Irish missionary Amy Wilson Carmichael. Carmichael moved to India in her twenties and spent the rest of her life there, working to rescue children from exploitation and abuse. She also wrote poetry, biography, meditations on missiology, and books about her experiences.

Elliot was introduced to Carmichael’s writing by the headmistress of her high school, and over the next several years, she devoured everything of Carmichael’s that she could get her hands on, even writing to Carmichael to thank her for her work. Carmichael died at age 83, when Elliot was 25. More than three decades later, Elliot traveled to India to research and write this book, the story of the woman she called her spiritual mother. 

This book builds a well-constructed bridge from biblical foundations and educational theories to a multitude of practices in which every person in a congregation is involved in the Christian discipleship of children. The team of diverse writers are bridge builders who have crossed this bridge many times as insightful teachers and well-tested practitioners. From engaging children with age-sensitive and creative ideas for dealing with the ABC's of the gospel to often-neglected areas of children's ministry like grief, disappointment, and racial prejudice, this book will help educators, teachers, leaders, and volunteers in children's ministry give children a head start at lifelong discipleship.

I think of myself as an adventurous traveler, but Dervla Murphy travels in a way that I would never even consider.

So, it’s a pleasure to sit in a comfortable chair and read about places I’ll never visit and people who I’d love to meet, but never will. Murphy writes so vividly I feel as though I am right beside her as she fends off wolves, struggles to drag a bicycle uphill through mountain snow, and shares tea with nomads.

This was her first book and every book that follows is equally compelling.

Part of what I love about this novel is that its basic premise–an English pastor is sent to a distant planet to preach the Christian gospel to aliens–sounds so absurd that it’s hard to imagine it feeling real. But Faber does a wonderful job of taking the glamor out of space travel and foreign worlds.

The atmosphere of this novel is all empty cafeterias and unpleasant humidity–I love the banality of it all! In its portrait of a loving but strained marriage (with the husband getting excited over aliens and the wife struggling to hold it together on a dying Earth), the novel is dryly funny while also being genuinely moving.

Besides captives, missionaries were another major group of Americans who visited the Mediterranean. They worked in the Middle East (Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey) in what was, at least initially, a fairly futile effort to convert residents to Protestantism. 

Heyrman does a fantastic job of humanizing two young missionaries and probing their views of the locals and of Islam. As a bonus, she’s written a follow-up describing a romantic triangle among the missionaries (Doomed Romance: Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in 19th-Century America).