This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A Synod formally created in September 1888 granted the Brazilian Presbyterian church independence from the American mission that had planted it a generation earlier. At the moment of that break the young church counted three presbyteries, twenty missionaries, twelve native trained ministers and roughly sixty congregations, modest numbers for a body about to stand on its own.
Growth followed steadily once autonomy was in place. By 1906 the church had reached 77 churches and 6,500 members; by 1957 those figures stood at 489 churches and 161,391 members, a scale the 1888 Synod's founders could hardly have expected from their original sixty congregations.
That growth was not without division. A series of separations split off distinct bodies in 1903, 1956, 1968, 1978, 1993, 1995, 1997 and 2000, and every membership figure after 1903 counts only the largest surviving body descended from the original 1888 Synod rather than the sum of every church that ever carried the Presbyterian name in Brazil.
What the 1888 grant of autonomy changed for Presbyterianism's spread was the difference between a mission and a national church. By 2021 the body that traced its independence to that Synod counted 5,420 congregations, 702,949 members and 4,915 ordained ministers, a national institution grown from the sixty churches it started with.