Fight Nights and Reggae Pack Brazilian Churches

Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times New members of Bola de Neve Church awaited baptism at the swimming pool of the Palmeiras soccer club in São Paulo, Brazil.

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — The atmosphere was electric at Reborn in Christ Church on “Extreme Fight” night. Churchgoers dressed in jeans and sneakers, many with ball caps turned backward, lined a makeshift boxing ring to cheer on bare-chested jujitsu fighters.

The church, whose name means snowball in Portuguese, was founded 10 years ago by avid surfers. It now claims some 100 chapters and has thousands of members.

They screamed when a fan favorite, Fabio Buca, outlasted his opponent after several minutes. They went wild when Pastor Dogão Meira, 26, took his man down, pinning him with an armlock just 10 seconds into the fight.

With the crowd still buzzing, Pastor Mazola Maffei, dressed in army pants and a T-shirt, grabbed a microphone. Pastor Maffei, who is also Pastor Meira’s fight trainer, then held the crowd rapt with a sermon about the connection between sports and spirituality.

“You need to practice the sport of spirituality more,” he urged. “You need to fight for your life, for your dreams and ideals.”

Reborn in Christ is among a growing number of evangelical churches in Brazil that are finding ways to connect with younger people to swell their ranks. From fight nights to reggae music to video games and on-site tattoo parlors, the churches have helped make evangelicalism the fastest-growing spiritual movement in Brazil.

Evangelical Christian churches are luring Brazilians away from Roman Catholicism, the dominant religion in Brazil. In 1950, 94 percent of Brazilians said they were Catholic, but that number fell steadily to 74 percent by 2000.

You have to connect with people, and you have to do it in a real way. If you do what you do just to get over on them, they’ll smell it, and it will have the opposite effect from the one intended.

People are drawn to happy people, and they are drawn to people who know what they are about. How do you connect with people? By living your life and living it in a big way, and as you do it you keep God front and center.

This isn’t, or should not be viewed as a competition between catholics and evangelicals; if it is, it misses the point. The competition is between the people who know God and the people who want to know him. Catholics who know God aren’t leaving the catholic church, nor are evangelicals who know God abandoning their faith. The people who want to know him are the mission field. If they want to know you they’ll inevitably want to know God, as you draw them into your life you’ll be drawing them into the central focus of your life.

You can’t win people by preaching to them alone; they have to see God modeled in you. If they see that they’ll be drawn in. If they don’t see God in the lives of happy, brave people then no way are they going to want what you have or want what you are.

One of the things I keep saying (to myself as much as to anyone else) is that one of the most important things we have to do is build the culture we want to live in. Churches that are doing that are seeing tremendous growth. A lot of people look only at what happens during the sunday service and they miss a big part of whats going on. These people are a good example of what can be done. They are into sports, surfing, music, living large and holding God front and center as they do it; its a seven-day-a-week church full of people who like each other, and people are beating down the door to join them.

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