The gift of life, the gift of giving

03-01-2023

McCormick’s Giving Day is March 22, 2023. Your support matters! Your giving impacts, transforms, and helps not only our students but also those they minister. We are grateful for Robert Abrams, who in 1956 started writing checks to support the work of McCormick. Today, at age 99, he’s still writing them. 

After serving in the Navy, earning a business degree from Ohio’s Miami University, marrying Wanda Humphries, and working as a credit manager for a distribution company, Robert Abrams heeded the call to attend seminary. He left his hometown, Peoria, Illinois, where he was serving as a deacon at Westminster Presbyterian Church and found himself on Chicago’s North Side, where McCormick’s campus had been located until 1975. 

“We lived in Fowler Hall, near the corner of Halsted Street and Lincoln Avenue,” recalls Rev. Abrams, B.D.’54. “I was impressed by our faculty and how dedicated and personable they were. They were not restrictive in their thoughts about ministry. They helped us to see that our theological education could be used in a diversity of professions.” 

Soon after his McCormick graduation, Rev. Abrams was called to the United Presbyterian Church in Oxford, Ohio. McCormick’s records show that he started to make contributions in 1956 while with this church. He served that congregation for five years, leaving to take a post 8,000 miles away. “There was a need in India for someone with a business background, theological training and pastoral experience,” says Rev. Abrams. “I met those requirements, and we [the family now included two pre-school children] left for Bombay, India.” Mrs. Abrams helped other Americans start a school, and Rev. Abrams assisted missionaries in several Indian states with their financial affairs until he was expelled from the country in 1964. “We had 30 days to get out,” Rev. Abrams remembers. Despite the few years of uncertainty there, he made contributions to McCormick from India.

Upon returning to the U.S., Rev. Abrams served churches in Pittsburgh and helped coordinate a 1968 tour to Colombia that was being taken by a Catholic and Protestant youth choir that would sing at the first papal visit to the western hemisphere. By 1978, he was leading mission tours to Cameroon, Kenya, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Korea, and Japan. “We wanted to help people get to know the people and countries where there were opportunities to serve and opportunities to give,” says Rev. Abrams. In 1980, he took teams to Nepal and India, the country he had been forced to leave 16 years earlier. From places around the globe, he’d send financial support to McCormick. 

During his nearly 70 years of ministry in the U.S. and abroad, Rev. Abrams has made it a point to give to McCormick. “It wasn’t ever a lot, and I wasn’t always consistent,” says Rev. Abrams, “but I did what I could because I believe in what McCormick is doing. I appreciate what I learned...it gave me a broader worldview and helped me to be open to anyone I’d meet.”

Rev. Robert Abrams
B.D. 1954