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The earth is cracked in paraiba state. The sun burns everything in this remote part of Brazil's Northeast. Despite the many small farms, there is little food. Most people eat once a day, and one person in three is illiterate. The region is the poorest part of the world's most Roman Catholic nation.

But in the tiny town of Itaporanga, the Missionary Baptist Church is holding a fundraiser. A tithe, for most of the church's 25 members, is less than an American dime. Gildário Nevez, the 32-year-old pastor of Missionary Baptist, was born in the village and has never gone to school. "Jesus taught me how to read," Nevez says. "He is sovereign!"

Nevez hosts a radio broadcast on a local station that church members hope to keep on the air with the funds they raise. Radio is the only way church members can regularly hear Nevez preach. Otherwise, many members must walk 20 miles to church in town.

With no cash income, Maria de Lourdes has no tithe to give. Her husband is unemployed. The couple has two young children and rarely enough to eat. She decided to give her rooster, the only thing she owns, as her tithe. But she says, "God has given us so much more."

In a geographical area four times larger than Texas, evangelicals are scattered among the Northeast's 45 million residents. The region has the fewest number of evangelicals among Brazil's 173 million people. Researchers report that 10 percent of the people in the Northeast are evangelical, compared to a national figure of 16 percent. Yet evangelicals are growing most quickly in the Northeast, at 8.67 percent per year in the last few decades. The Brazilian evangelical movement, largely charismatic, has grown sevenfold during the past 30 years.

Economically, though, the Northeast's defining characteristic is poverty: 5.4 million people in the region's nine states live on $1 a day or less. Most people here survive on subsistence farming and animal husbandry. Others rely on money from relatives working in cities. Brazil's government has met limited success in improving the standard of living in the million-square-mile region, in part because of chronic drought and the region's poor soil.

Educational organizations such as the Leadership Training Center (Centro para Treinamento de LídereS, CTLS) have helped new evangelical churches open and grow. The center is an arm of the Protestant Brazilian missions agency, juvep (Juventude Evangélica Paraibana), based in João Pessoa, the capital of Paraiba.

In the last five years, 150 students have graduated from the two-year CTLS program.

Students attend one class every other Saturday at central locations. "Our goal is to prepare local leaders to preach the gospel in their own context," says Pedro Silva, director of CTLS. "We have students who travel 145 miles in the back of a truck in order to study."

The curriculum aims to prepare lay ministers across Protestant denominations to preach and plant churches. It includes courses in ecclesiology, missions, and theology. Portuguese language classes are available for those students who need them. The cost of this training in the major cities is $60 a month. In poor villages such as Itaporanga, the cost is just 25 Brazilian reals ($6.75) per month. Still, most students cannot afford even that. CTLS provides scholarships to a few students. Large churches in the region support others. In a few cases, citizens pool their resources to help sponsor students.

Lack of trained clergy is a longstanding problem in Brazil for nearly all Christian groups. It has been a chronic problem among Roman Catholics, in part because Catholics have lost ground to Protestants (see "Brazil's Christian roots," p. 81). The Catholic share of the national population fell by 10 percent in the 1990s, while evangelicals grew by 70 percent. There are 126 million Catholics and 27 million evangelicals in Brazil, according to recent research. The requirements of CTLS training are less burdensome than training for the Catholic priesthood, which in Brazil includes five years of schooling away from home and a lifelong commitment to celibacy.

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April 2003, Vol. 47, No. 4