Erasmo de Carvalho Braga was born in Rio Claro, São Paulo, Brazil on 23 April 1877.

He graduated from the Presbyterian Seminary in São Paulo, was ordained in 1898 and became a pastor near Rio de Janeiro.

[2] In 1916 Braga attended the Congress on Christian Work in Panama City, where he embraced evangelical concepts.

This was a branch of the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America, established after the Panama congress and led by Robert Elliott Speer and Samuel Guy Inman.

He believed that the evangelical churches in Latin America should inspire the people, as they had in Europe, to embrace ideals of ethics, democracy, education and social and economic progress.