Swedish Missionaries Establish Pentecostalism In Brazil

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Swedish Pentecostal missionaries Daniel Berg and Gunnar Vingren founded the Missao de Fe Apostolica in Belem, in the state of Para, in 1911, carrying the movement they belonged to in Sweden into northern Brazil rather than arriving by way of any stated link to the Los Angeles revival the wider Pentecostal movement traces its beginning to. Seven years later, in 1918, the mission took the name it would become known by, Assembleia de Deus, a Brazilian identity replacing the mission's original Portuguese name.

What Berg and Vingren started in one city in the Amazon did not stay confined to it. The organisation they founded grew to become the largest Pentecostal body in Brazil and one of the largest anywhere in the world, a scale of growth that outpaced its own modest beginning as a single mission run by two foreign missionaries in a provincial capital far from Brazil's larger southern cities.

What this founding changed for Pentecostalism's spread was Latin America itself: Assembleia de Deus became part of the movement's twentieth century transformation of Christianity across the region, a transformation carried into Brazil not from North America directly but by Swedish missionaries acting on a Pentecostal conviction they had already held before they ever set foot in Belem, and one that would go on to reshape Brazilian Christianity far beyond its Amazonian starting point.