For weeks, Tárik Rodriguez had been working on bringing a guest preacher and worship leader from across the country to assist his church have fun its third anniversary. In 2021, Rodriguez and a small team launched Viela da Graça Igreja in Novo Hamburgo, a small city in Brazil’s most southern province, Rio Grande do Sul.
Then, it began raining.
The floods have done greater than interrupt the small Reformed congregation’s celebratory plans. They’ve devastated the community. The storms that began at the tip of April struck Rio Grande do Sul’s most densely populated areas and have killed a minimum of 116 people. Around 130 persons are still missing. The high water has closed roads and even the airport, which has grounded flights until May 30. As of Friday, May 10, nearly 400,000 people have been displaced from their homes and 70,772 are in public shelters.
Some of those have found their method to Viela da Graça, which is positioned on higher ground and has been largely protected against a water breach. Since May 4, Rodriguez and members of the 75-person congregation have been hosting around 50 people in a two-bathroom, 3,500-square-foot constructing.
“As Christians, we wanted to open our doors,” Rodriguez says. “And that’s what we did.”
Beyond the toilet constraints, the situation has been lower than ideal. There are frequent power cuts (1.2 million people have been affected by outages) and the constructing has lost access to each running and potable water since the sanitation company cannot treat the dirty floodwaters. A close-by residential condominium, which gets its water from a well, has provided drinking water and showers.
Though Brazil’s evangelicals are known worldwide for his or her megachurches, flood relief efforts have highlighted the impact that small churches can have in serving their communities within the country’s most secular state.
“It’s just like the offering of the widow in Luke 21,” said Egon Grimm Berg, executive secretary of the Baptist Convention of Rio Grande do Sul. “They are giving every little thing they’ve.”
Or sometimes, much more.
Igreja em Reforma, a congregation founded three-and-a-half years ago by pastor Emanuel Malinoski in Quarto Distrito, a classy neighborhood in Porto Alegre, has 80 members. When the nearby Guaíba River overflowed last week, it flooded the primary floor of the church constructing. The water could take weeks to recede.
Nevertheless, since last Sunday, the church has been cooking, cleansing, and providing donations for 82 people in an improvised shelter, offered up by a church family within the neighboring city of Canoas, that was a warehouse until a month ago. Now the state’s civil defense is sending flood refugees there.
“None of [those being served] are evangelical,” said Malinoski, who was within the church constructing attempting to avoid wasting furniture when the waters began rising. “We are giving a vital testimony to our community.”
Rio Grande do Sul has the smallest percentage of evangelicals amongst Brazil’s 26 states. The capital, Porto Alegre, had 11.6 percent evangelicals based on probably the most recent census in 2010, the bottom proportion amongst all 27 Brazilian capitals. Most churches have fewer than 80 members, based on Ricardo Lebedenco, the senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Ijuí.
Located 300 miles west of Porto Alegre—ground zero for the disaster—Lebedenco’s 600-member congregation is sending supplies to distribution hubs in the town of 1.3 million.
Though they are only one in all quite a few organizations sending resources to victims, many secular leaders are encouraging people to prioritize working with churches in the case of donating and distributing clothes, bottled water, food, and money.
“They say we’re more organized and more mobilized,” said Tiago Gomes de Mello, pastor of Igreja Batista Boas Novas in Novo Hamburgo.
This is the second tragedy that Gomes de Mello has witnessed firsthand. In 2014, a storm’s strong winds damaged the church to the purpose where the constructing needed to be rebuilt. During the reconstruction process after which later throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the previously 500-person church lost 90 percent of its members. Gomes de Mello took over as pastor in 2022 with a mission to revitalize the now 51-person church.
Around 5 a.m. on Friday, May 3, he began receiving requests for help. He left his home in Porto Alegre to open the church to 2 families—only to seek out he couldn’t return.
Water had flooded the streets and surrounded his home. His wife, Thaís, and their children Ester, 16, and Josué, just over a 12 months old, were rescued by boat on Monday and brought to a relative’s home. Gomes de Mello finally reunited together with his family on Tuesday, but only after 4 days of relentless work on the church, which now houses 45 people.
The sacrificial service of churches stems from people’s love of God, says Marco Silva, pastor of the Primeira Igreja Batista de Montenegro, which sits 55 miles from Porto Alegre and has been sending support to smaller churches within the region.
“When we prepare a meal, after we exit by boat to take food, after we fold blankets to take to the displaced, each of these items is an act of worship,” he said.
For church members, then, the main focus will not be on suspended worship services but on the chance to place their “theology into practice,” said Rodriguez. On Tuesday, the Viela da Graça pastor recorded his sermon from his front room and can upload it to YouTube for people to look at on Sunday. It shall be a condensed program, with two praise songs, announcements, and a sermon on Jude 20–21, verses which have served as his personal reference in these difficult times: “But you, dear friends, by constructing yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying within the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to everlasting life.”
Igreja Batista Boas Novas is one in all the few churches within the affected region that has managed to carry in-person services. In fact, they’ve even expanded their number. Gomes de Mello has preached on Sunday, Saturday, and Wednesday.
On Sunday, the message was about Psalm 121: “I lift up my eyes to the mountains—where does my help come from?”
Many of those attending were aware that the weather forecast for the region was calling for more rain and that temperatures can be continuing to drop as winter begins in a number of weeks in one in all the coldest areas of the country.
“The church knows that our help comes from the Lord,” said Gomes de Mello, who took the chance to do an altar call on the service. “And after the rain comes the harvest.”
