Abrams, Minnie F. (1859-1912)
Born in Lawrenceville, Wisconsin, Abrams attended the Methodist-related Chicago Training School for Home and Foreign Missions. She arrived in Bombay, India, in 1887 as a missionary with the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1898, she left the Methodist post to work with Pandita Ramabai at the (undenominational) Mukti mission in Kedgaon.
When word of the Welsh Revival reached India, spiritual awakenings soon occurred in many Protestant mission stations beginning in early 1905. Subsequent events at Mukti became well known through reports of extended times of prayer, public confession of sins, visions, dreams, and a burning sensation felt by those seeking the sanctification and baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Abrams, an advocate of Wesleyan holiness theology, viewed baptism in the Holy Spirit as a separate work of grace occurring after conversion and designed to sanctify and empower believers for evangelism. She traveled widely in India promoting revival, and her holiness views were popularized through a series of articles published in 1906 entitled, “The Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire,” which appeared in two major Christian newspapers in India: The Bombay Guardian (independent) and The Indian Witness (Methodist).
When word of the Azusa Street revival (Los Angeles, California) reached India later that year with news of the restoration of the gifts of the Holy Spirit (e.g. speaking in tongues, prophecy), Abrams and others at the mission prayed that they, too, might receive the fullness of the Spirit. When this new impetus gave fresh life to the revival there, Abrams revised her newspaper articles and published them in book form with the title The Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire (1906). Unlike many other Pentecostals, however, she did not insist on the evidential nature of tongues for baptism in the Spirit.
A year later, Abrams sent a copy of her book to former Chicago Training School classmate May Hoover and her husband Willis Hoover, M.D., Methodist missionaries in Chile. The revival in Chile that followed led to the founding of the Methodist Pentecostal Church and the larger Pentecostal movement in that country.
Abrams died from a fever in 1912 while evangelizing unreached people in India in the company of several other single women missionaries.
Gary B. McGee, “Abrams, Minnie F.,” in Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. Gerald H. Anderson (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998), 3.
This article is reprinted from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, Macmillan Reference USA, copyright © 1998. Gerald H. Anderson, by permission of Macmillan Reference USA, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
Bibliography
Digital Secondary
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Smith, Eugene R. ed. The Gospel in All Lands. New York: Methodist Episcopal Church. Missionary Society, 1887, p. 522. Notes her October 12, 1886 departure from New York for Bombay.
Primary
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_____. “Ramabai’s Work for India’s Widows.” In Missionary Review of the World 24 no. 5 (May 1901): 338-47.
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_____. “A Message from Mukti.” In Confidence (September 15, 1908).
_____. “How the Recent Revival Was Brought About in India,” In Latter Rain Evangel (July 1909): 6-13.
_____. “Battles of a Faith Missionary.” In Latter Rain Evangel (March 1910).
_____. “A New Call to Faith.” In Trust (October 1910).
Secondary
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Hodgkins, Louise Manning. The Roll Call: An Introduction to our Missionaries, 1869-1896. Boston: Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1896.
Lindsay, Effie G. Missionaries of the Minneapolis Branch of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Minneapolis: Murphy-Travis Co. Press, 1904.
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_____. “Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire! The Revival Legacy of Minnie F. Abrams.” Enrichment 3 no. 3 (Summer 1998): 86.
_____. “‘Latter Rain’ Falling in the East: Early 20th-Century Pentecostalism in India and the Debate Over Speaking in Tongues.” In Church History 68 no. 3 (September 1999): 648-66.
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McGee, G.B. and D. J. Rodgers, “Abrams, Minnie.” In The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Eds. Stanley M. Burgess and Eduard M. van der Maas, 305-6. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002.
Miller, Emily H. “The first quarterly meeting of the Minneapolis branch…” In The Heathen Woman’s Friend 17 no. 8 (February 1886): 199.
“Minnie F. Abrams of India.” In Missionary Review of the World 26 (February 1913).
Orr, J. Edwin. Evangelical Awakenings in India. New Delhi: Masihi Sahitya Sanstha, 1970.
Robeck, Cecil M. The Azusa Street Mission & Revivla: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2006.
Robert, Dana L. American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996, esp. 240-54, 411.
“Roll Call Notes.” In Woman’s Missionary Friend 28 no. 1 (July 1896): 195.
Wacker, Grant. Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Links
“The Calcutta Revival of 1907 and the Reformulation of Charles F. Parham’s ‘Bible Evidence’ Doctrine,” by Gary B. McGee. An essay prepared in honor of Dr. A. C. George, Dr. Ivan M. Satyavrata, and the faculty of Southern Asia Bible College in Bangalore, India. http://www.agts.edu/faculty/faculty_publications/lectures/mcgee_lecture_sept02.pdf
McGee, Gary B. “Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire! The Revival Legacy of Minnie F. Abrams,” Enrichment 3 no. 3 (Summer 1998): 86. http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/199803/080_baptism_fire.cfm