Biography
Minnie Abrams was born in 1859, in Minnesota, in a family of modest means. She grew up in the American Midwest and was educated in the schools of the area. She was a woman of intelligence and strong will. As a young woman, she felt a call to the mission field and trained at the Chicago Training School for city, home and foreign missions, run by Lucy Rider Meyer. She was a Methodist deaconess. In 1887, she was sent to India, where she worked in the city of Pune, in the west of the country, with the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society.
In Pune, she met Pandita Ramabai, the famous Indian scholar and reformer, who had converted to Christianity and who ran a home for widows and orphans, called Sharada Sadan. Abrams joined her work. She served as a teacher and an evangelist. In 1896, Ramabai started a new mission, called Mukti, at the village of Kedgaon, about thirty miles from Pune. It took in famine victims, widows and orphans. Abrams served as a teacher at Mukti and as the leader of a group of young women who were trained as evangelists. She was a devoted worker and became a close friend of Ramabai.
In 1905, a revival began at Mukti. It started with a prayer group of young women, who prayed for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Minnie Abrams was among them. She had been reading about the Welsh Revival, and she had a longing for a similar movement in India. In June 1905, the young women experienced a deep conviction of sin. They cried out and wept and confessed their sins. They saw visions of fire. They spoke in tongues and prophesied. The revival spread through the mission. It lasted for months, and hundreds of girls and women were affected. Many of them went out as evangelists to the villages.
Abrams wrote an account of the revival and sent it to Christians abroad. In 1906, she published a book, The Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire, in which she described what had happened. It was an important document of early Pentecostalism. It drew on the experience of the Indian revival and taught that the baptism in the Holy Spirit is for all believers and is a source of power. The book was widely read and was influential in the early Pentecostal movement. She sent a copy to the Methodist Episcopal Church in Chile, where it was read by a Methodist missionary named Willis Hoover.
She also sent a letter to the churches in Chile in 1907 and, through the book, she influenced Hoover and his congregation at Valparaíso. They began to pray for revival. In 1909, a revival broke out in the Methodist church at Valparaíso, with the same marks of the outpouring of the Spirit, and it led to the formation of the Pentecostal Methodist Church of Chile. It was one of the largest Pentecostal churches in Latin America. Her work was thus one of the links between the revival in India and the movement in Chile.
Her later life was spent in India and in the United States. She was a missionary in Mukti and then moved to other posts. She was a woman of strong faith who was willing to go against convention. She had to face the opposition of some in her church, who were suspicious of the revival. She also faced the strain of ill health. In 1910, she was present at the Edinburgh Missionary Conference. She died in 1912, in India, at the age of fifty-three.
Her life shows how a single missionary may link two continents. A teacher in a small mission in India helped to light a fire that spread to Chile.