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Severino Inácio da Silva was born on Sítio Cipó, a small farming community of 200 in the city of Santana de Mangueira. Four years ago, he was the first person to become a born-again believer in Sítio Cipó. Four months later, he entered the CTLS program and started a congregation. After three years, 35 people in Sítio Cipó regularly attend worship services. Inácio's Beth Shalom Baptist Church recently moved into a building beside a 100-year-old Catholic chapel. "The [Catholic] priest comes here once a year, while here at our church, people are accepting the Lord," Inácio says.

His experience shows that investing in local leadership works. "These people know how to live in adversity," Silva says. "They never give up. That's why we have had great results."

As evangelicals in the Northeast have expanded their ministry beyond evangelism to social outreach, they have won new respect from Catholics. As a result, longstanding tensions between Catholic and Protestant neighbors are easing. Discrimination and harassment of evangelicals, common in the 1950s, is largely a thing of the past. Christian leaders have condemned extreme religious intolerance coming from either side. Caio Fabio, a leading evangelical, rebuked a Pentecostal pastor in 1995 when he destroyed an image of the Virgen Aparecida, a revered Marian effigy, on live television.

Recent research shows that 80 percent of people in the Northeast respect and admire evangelicals for their religious message. "Our biggest challenge is not to fight Catholicism, but poverty," Silva says.

A recent research project sponsored by Diaconia (an organization that brings together 11 evangelical denominations) found that 60 percent of 443 churches in Brazil's Northeast are engaged in some kind of social work. For example, Seventh-day Adventists are heavily involved in combating HIV/AIDS in the interior of Bahia state. Sérgio Andrade, coordinator of Diaconia's social programs, says this effort is just a beginning. "It's an advancement, but the problem is that the works are isolated," Andrade says. "The various churches are not working together."

While the average annual income in relatively prosperous southern Brazil is about $5,000, in the Northeast it is only $1,200. The United Nations reports that the South has a standard of living comparable to that of Belgium, but the Northeast standard of living is closer to that of India. Because of the Northeast's poverty, help must come from wealthier churches elsewhere, according to Serguem Silva, national director of World Vision Brazil.

"The churches in the major centers have a big responsibility for those in the interior," Serguem Silva says. "We are just a bridge."

Bridge-building involves developing programs to fight childhood malnutrition and other social ills. Because of the ministry of CTLS, World Vision is planning to implement two programs in Itaporanga: one to feed 2,000 children and another to build cisterns for local residents.

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April 2003, Vol. 47, No. 4