The Assembléias de Deus are a group of Pentecostal denominations in Brazil related to the Assemblies of God.
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The Assembléias de Deus began when Daniel Berg and Gunnar Vingren, two Swedish Baptist immigrants from South Bend, Indiana had the Pentecostal experience in Chicago and departed to Brazil. They came to Belém, Pará, Brazil, where in 1911 founded the Missão de Fé Apostólica, which later changed its name in 1918 to "Assembleia de Deus".
The Pentecostal movement in Brazil had already been started by that time among Italians in São Paulo, by an Italian-American missionary, Louis Francescon, who initiated the Christian Congregation of Brazil (CCB) in 1910. While the CCB spread in the South, the Assembleias de Deus reached the Amazon villages and the semi-arid Nordeste before migrants from the North brought the Church to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the late 1920s.
Initially the Assembleia de Deus was intimately linked to the Scandinavian Pentecostal movement, led by Lewi Pethrus, who financed and sent missionaries to help Berg and Vingren. The Swedish Pentecostals gave autonomy to the Brazilian Assembleia de Deus in a General Convention in 1932. From that time onwards the American Assemblies of God increased their presence, mainly on doctrinal and teaching spheres, on the Brazilian denomination, but retained its independence from their American brethren, as Hollenweger puts it: "In the mission statistics of the North American Assemblies of God, the Assembleia de Deus figure as their mission church. In contrast, the Brazilian Pentecostals regard themselves as an independent church."[1]
Since 1980s the Assembleias de Deus suffered several schisms and splits and many Conventions and Ministérios left using the same name. The most significant are:
Altogether, the churches that bear the name Assembleias de Deus in Brazil had 8.5 million adherents in 2001.[2]
The Brazilian Assembleia de Deus has always sent missionaries abroad, starting in 1913 when a returning Portuguese immigrant was commanded to Portugal. Today, there are Brazilian missionaries in Latin America and in the Portuguese-speaking Africa. There also are Brazilian Assemblies of God among the Brazilian immigrant communities in North America, Japan, and Western Europe, but usually they do not have relations with the local World Assemblies of God Fellowship affiliated national denominations. [3]
In the United States there are a Brazilian Assembleias de Deus, mostly in the Eastern Coast, some are affiliated with the Brazilian District of the Assemblies of God, but the majority of the Brazilian churches are either independent or linked to their ministério back in Brazil.
The Assembleias de Deus have a non-territorial episcopal polity (called Ministerio) [4] where each Ministerio is a directed by a mother-church under a pastor-president (also called bishop or apostle in various Ministerio) with affiliated congregations and preaching points. The mother-church receive tithes and manages the funds of the affiliated local churches, as well as assign pastors for the local congregations. There is a strong influence of pastoral leadership on the decision-taking process, and the members only rubber stamp the Ministerio decisions.
Since it is not a unified movement, there are many variations in doctrine and practice in the Assembleias de Deus in Brazil, but in common they believe in the Bible as the sole source of doctrine, the vicarious death of Christ, in the baptism of adults by immersion in water, in Holy Communion with no wine, the obligation of the tithe [5], the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the premillennial return of Jesus, considerate Christian headcovering for woman in worship and kiss of peace as heresies. [6]
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