Agnes Graham

The train screeched to a halt. Steam swept onto the platform where Agnes waited with her indignant mother. Chile’s first unmarried FMB missionary didn’t get on her train.

The train screeched to a halt. Steam swept onto the platform where Agnes waited with her indignant mother. Chile’s first unmarried FMB missionary didn’t get on her train.

She fled to her brother David’s house, shut the door, and fell to her knees.

Agnes Graham had always been headstrong, and today she was no different. Even when Agnes was 11 years old and her mother questioned her decision to join the church at such a young age, she’d protested, “But, Mother, the preacher said just last night that it wasn’t what we did but what Jesus had already done for us that saves us, and I do know I love Jesus and want to be what He wants me to be.”

At the train station 21 years later, still desiring to be who Jesus wanted her to be, Agnes protested again: “Mother, I’m not going back to the house with you. I’ll go to David’s. Now if you can bring yourself to accept my going, come back and tell me goodbye when the next train comes. If you cannot resign yourself, do not come back, for I must go.”

After much prayer, Agnes returned to the station and walked back out onto the platform. This time, finding her mother in agreement with her decision, she boarded the next train to Chile.

Agnes immersed herself in Spanish and the heavily Catholic Chilean culture. When Colegio Bautista was founded in Temuco in 1922, Agnes became the director. One Chilean educator from a different school said, “That school is shot through and through with the gospel,” in an effort to dissuade attendance. By 1935, there were more than 400 students at Colegio Bautista.

The Commission magazine stated in 1940, “The intense evangelistic spirit of Agnes Graham has permeated every phase of the life and activity of this school, until it has become one of the most fruitful evangelistic agencies in all Chile.”

The Chilean Baptist church also experienced a growth spurt during Agnes’s time in the country. When she arrived, she would have been hard pressed to find a Chilean Baptist church with its own place to meet. Within 25 years, the number of Chilean churches had jumped to over 50. Some of Agnes’s students served as pastors of these churches.

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