Fire

“Yea and on my servants and on my handmaidens in those days Will I pour forth of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.” — Acts 2:18 (ASV)

The Boston Association had promised to support a neutral school for ten years. By 1898 its own committee wrote that the school had become “a Christian institution,” and Ramabai had taken in hundreds of famine girls without asking. Had she been straightforward? Honestly, she had changed, and so had her work, and she had not asked permission first. She went to Boston and told them plainly. Forty-eight girls had chosen baptism. She gave an account of the money and offered back the buildings and farm it had paid for. Then she told them not to build on her: “Ramabai is dead. ... Do not concentrate your interest in one person, for that person will die and be gone.” A new association was formed, and it supported her for the rest of her life.

On her way home she spoke at the Keswick Convention in England. “Five minutes were given me to speak, and I made the very best use of them.” She asked them to pray “that 100,000 men and 100,000 women from among the Indian Christians may be led to preach the Gospel to their country people.” Women as well as men.

Seven years later, the answer began. In January 1905, after news of a revival in Wales, she asked who would meet every morning to pray. About seventy came forward. They prayed “for the true conversion of all the Indian Christians, including ourselves.” Including ourselves. They did not treat revival as something other people needed. By June, Dyer records, five hundred and fifty were meeting twice a day.

Late in June, an older girl woke the American missionary Minnie Abrams: another girl had received the Holy Spirit. “I saw the fire, ran across the room for a pail of water, and was about to pour it over her when I discovered she was not on fire.” The next evening, while Ramabai was teaching quietly, the whole congregation broke into prayer so loudly that she had to stop. Girls wept and confessed their sins. Stolen things were returned. Girls who had come out of famine and abuse were filled with joy. A worker wrote of a twelve-year-old whose plain face had become radiant without her knowing it: “She is occupied with Jesus.”

Ramabai prayed with them, but quietly. She did not lead the dramatic side of the revival, and she did not stop it. She took a band of girls to Poona and confessed in public that she had “neglected her opportunities of preaching Christ boldly.” Then praying bands went out across western India, and in time more than twenty-nine thousand people were being prayed for by name at Mukti. “When we were Hindus,” she explained, “we used to repeat one or two thousand names of the gods daily. ... Why should we not, as Christians, be able to pray for many hundreds of people by name?”

The Mukti revival began nearly a year before the famous Azusa Street meetings in Los Angeles, often counted as the start of Pentecostalism. Speaking in tongues came to Mukti only later, after news of Azusa Street arrived. Ramabai never made it a test of anything:

Love, perfect divine love, is the only and most necessary sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Peter, quoting Joel, said God would pour out his Spirit “on my servants and on my handmaidens.” In the world Ramabai grew up in, a woman was forbidden even to study the Vedas. At Mukti the Spirit fell first on famine orphans and former child-widows, and they went out to pray and preach.

Real revival, the Mukti kind, starts with “including ourselves.” It looks like confession, giving back what you took and praying for people by name. Its sign is not noise but love.

One thing to do this week: write a list of five people you want God to work in, and put yourself on it. Pray for each one by name every day this week.