The Florida Center neighborhood is the place to go in Orlando if you are a missing Brazilian immigrant. From guarana sodas to brigadeiro sweets, all kinds of goods from the South American country are available in stores and restaurants. Today, there is also Alcance Orlando, a satellite church of a congregation in Curitiba, a city of nearly 2 million people in southern Brazil.
Senior pastor Paulo Subirá moved to Florida with his wife and three school-age children in 2017.
“When I arrived in Orlando, we met in small groups with family and a few friends, like we did before in Brazil,” he says. After a while, the gathering expanded to include friends of friends.
The group grew too large to meet in a home and later outgrew the confines of meeting in a hotel. “We then understood that we had to start a church from this group,” Subirá said.
Alcance Orlando now offers two Sunday services that meet in a 300-seat auditorium. During the week, members meet in 31 small groups throughout the Greater Orlando area. Subirá, whose brother Luciano leads Comunidade Alcance in Curitiba, is currently preparing a young pastor to start a new community in South Carolina with some Brazilian families who left Florida.
Brazilian immigrant church plants in Europe and North America – usually started by well-known local ministries that exist outside of denominational bodies or mission agencies – are new to Brazilian Christianity. These church plants are the result of the confluence of two phenomena: the growth of the evangelical population and emigration.
The rise of evangelical faith in Brazil is well documented. In a 1980 census, 6.6 percent of Brazilians identified as evangelical, rising to 22.2 percent in 2010. Data from the 2022 survey has not yet been released, but a 2020 study by polling firm Datafolha indicated that 31 percent of Brazilians identified as evangelical. Brazilians identified as evangelicals. Demographer José Eustáquio Diniz Alves estimates that evangelicals could outnumber Brazilian Catholics (64.4% of the population in 2010) by 2032. Brazil’s population today stands at 203 million. .
Migration to other countries, meanwhile, has ebbed and flowed over the years, with current numbers peaking. A report from the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs reveals that in 2022, 4.6 million Brazilians lived abroad, the highest number since 2009.
The largest Brazilian communities were in the United States (1.9 million) – Greater Orlando alone is home to about 100,000 Brazilians – and Portugal (360,000), where one in three foreign immigrants are from Brazil.
Migrants from the Global South have also become an engine of growth for Christianity in Europe.
“Latin American migrants have planted thousands of churches in Spain, Portugal and beyond over the past thirty years. It is difficult to find a major European city that does not have a large Spanish-speaking and/or Brazilian congregation. » writing Jim Memory in a recent report.
Historically, in the case of Brazil, however, many of these churches were part of the so-called neo-Pentecostal denominations, such as the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (“Universal Church of the Kingdom of God”, IURD), and were known for their their exorcism rituals and their inclination to preach the prosperity gospel. Starting in the 1990s, IURD expanded to Europe, North and South America, and Africa. More recently, the denomination has lost many members to other denominations and has had to close churchesa lot abroad, largely because of the scandal.
In 2017, nearly 2,000 Brazilian missionaries lived abroad. A report from the Associação de Missões Transculturais Brasileiras noted that the number of cross-cultural missionaries, both domestically and abroad, has increased at a rate of 6.7 percent per year since 1989, a number higher than the growth rate of the evangelical population, 5, 8 percent per year.
In this environment, many local church leaders saw an opportunity to test their model of organization and growth in other parts of the world as their members moved to other countries.
One example is Igreja Batista Atitude (IBA), whose main religious site is in Rio de Janeiro. Today, it has 15,000 members on the main campus and another 14,000 across 60 locations in six countries.
Known nationally as the house of worship for former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro, Atitude (part of the Brazilian Baptist Convention) now has churches in Orlando and Deerfield, Florida, Vancouver, Canada, Lisbon and Porto (Portugal), to Milton Keynes (United Kingdom). ) and Lamego (Mozambique).
Josué Valandro, senior pastor of IBA, says his strategy encompasses two types of church planting. He describes the first type as “intentional”, as is the case in Mozambique. These are traditional places of Brazilian missionary work: the communities bordering the Amazon basin; THE serranejos, or countryside, in northeastern Brazil; and sub-Saharan Africa. Atitude is currently training 17 men and women who will be sent to these sites.
The other type is “organic,” driven by the relationships and travel of its members, such as those who immigrate to other countries.
Two years ago, André Oliveira helped open Atitude in the Príncipe Real district of Lisbon, an artistic and bourgeois neighborhood. Since then, Oliveira has baptized 43 people, an exceptional number by Portuguese standards. According to the Alianca Evangélica Portuguesa (AEP), only 3% of all churches in the country baptized 50 people or more during the 2021-2022 period. Only problem: only four of the baptized are Portuguese. (AEP data shows that 29.3 percent of the country’s evangelical churches have 75 percent or more foreigners in their attendance.)
Touching the hearts of local populations is also a challenge for the Church of Onda Dura. The Mother Church was founded in 2007 in Joinville, southern Brazil, by Filipe “Lipão” Duque Estrada, the great-grandson of Joaquim Osório Duque Estrada, an 1800s poet who wrote the words of the Brazilian national anthem.
Lipão, whose arms are covered in tattoos and who has gauges in his earlobes, did not inherit his ancestor’s poetic talents. Rather, his gift is to reach young people through contemporary language and worship. The name of the church is a statement of sorts in itself and echoes Lipão’s affection for surfing:Onda Dura can be translated as “an enduring wave”, reflecting the idea that “God’s wave lasts forever”.
Onda Dura has 2,700 members on the main campus. “Expansion was in our hearts from the beginning,” he said. After years of planting churches across Brazil, Onda Dura opened official satellite sites in other countries after Brazilian immigrants living abroad asked for more than just being able to stream content.
“People come to us to be trained as disciples and pastors, because they can’t find a healthy church to be a part of,” he said. Onda Dura Online now has a dedicated pastor and team of volunteers to reach seekers wherever they are. They hold weekly discipleship classes focused on biblical training and evangelism.
These leaders then encourage online worshipers to form small groups to watch the service together and meet during the week. Eventually, Onda Dura sends a church planter or regional pastor to lead this community into becoming a full-fledged church.
“The idea behind Onda Dura Online is not to create consumers for our content but to use the digital environment to give birth to a physical church,” Lipão said.
This is the scenario that Onda Dura followed to establish itself in Charlotte in North Carolina (where it now brings together around a hundred people every Sunday), in Chicago (60 people) and in Porto in Portugal (150). . In Sines, southern Portugal, and Suzuka, Japan, new churches are expected to launch in the first half of 2024. Currently, small groups are forming in Italy, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, the -Bas, in Argentina and Kazakhstan.
“Almost all of our members left their entire families to emigrate,” said Subirá of Alcance Orlando. “The Church becomes relevant because it’s the only family they have. » Subirá has heard stories of church members helping each other get a driver’s license or find short-term employment and housing.
A growing population in Alcance Orlando are the American sons and daughters of Brazilian immigrants, who are fluent in English and want to speak the same language they speak in school and church. “The Church must follow them,” he said.
In the United Kingdom, which began its religious activities just over six months ago, Atitude has already launched an English service in addition to its Portuguese programming.
The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants make up a large part of the Brazilian population. Many of the country’s Protestant communities today are the product of the work of foreign church planters, Lipão says, like the German pastors who immigrated alongside the Lutheran farmers who settled in his state of Santa Catarina in the late from the 1800s.
“It worked once,” he said. “Why can’t this happen again?” »
Franco Iacomini is a Brazilian journalist.
