SÃO PAULO, Brazil – While Brazil is famous for soccer, samba, and the Amazon, it’s also becoming known for something else: sending missionaries. In fact, Brazil is now second only to the United States in terms of sending missionaries out into the world.
Their approach is far from typical, as these missionaries use everyday jobs and personal connections to carry their faith across borders.
CBN News traveled to São Paulo to see firsthand how the people behind this global movement are redefining what it means to serve.
From bustling São Paulo to small villages half a world away, Brazilians are being called to spread the message of Jesus Christ.
They include 45-year-old Daniele Silva from the city of Belo Horizonte. “I’ve known about missions since 2005, but I decided to answer this call in 2014,” Silva, a Brazilian missionary to Asia and the Middle East, told CBN News.
Instead of preaching from a pulpit, Silva serves coffee. She opens small cafes in the Middle East and Asia – places where traditional missionaries aren’t often welcome.
“In addition to generating income for that nation and generating local jobs, I can build relationships with people, right? With each person who enters, in my case a coffee shop, it’s an opportunity to make friends, to strengthen relationships, and over time, share the love of Christ with others,” said Silva.
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She has faced plenty of barriers, such as new languages, strange foods, and unique cultures.
“In the beginning, I had a lot of difficulty communicating,” admitted Silva. “I didn’t know the language. The food was another shock. It was very spicy compared to what I’m used to in Brazil. I also traveled to very remote areas where there were no roads, and the conditions were so tough.”
Marcelo Crivella, a well-known evangelical pastor turned politician, once served in several African nations, including South Africa.
“The Brazilians can connect. I was the only White person in the middle of this great crowd in the time of Apartheid, when Whites and Blacks couldn’t talk to each other. It was forbidden by law,” he recalls.
He remembers those days with fondness. “I would love to go back there.”
Crivella says Brazil’s warmth, hospitality, and cultural diversity help its missionaries connect across borders like never before.
“Here in Brazil, we are not red, we are not white, we are not yellow, we are not black, we are Brazilians,” said Crivella, who now serves as a Brazilian Congressman. “We are a mix of everything, that’s why we can go and be accepted in all these countries.”
Today, 400,000 missionaries are deployed around the world. The United States is the number one missionary-sending country, deploying roughly 127,000 of those missionaries.
Brazil comes in at number two. Each year, about 38,000 Brazilians travel around the world for the Gospel.
Dr. Todd Johnson, a leading religion researcher at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, says Brazilians have a deep understanding of God’s command to go into all the world and make disciples.
“Brazilians have done a wide variety of things from planting churches to working in hospitals to doing aid work of various kinds in some of the toughest places in the world, and it’s really a story that’s probably not known by most people,” Johnson told CBN News.
And they’re also changing how missions are done.
“Brazilian churches want to grow and expand to other nations, so they realize the traditional way of doing missions needs to be challenged and reshaped,” said Breno Vieitas, with Last Call.
Vieitas spent 13 years serving in Mozambique and Spain. He says the old model of raising support can be tough, especially on families.
“I remember being so concerned about raising funds as a missionary,” said Vieitas. “We had so little, and what little we had, we shared with the Mozambican missionaries.”
Now, he’s leading a national push for churches to encourage missionaries to work regular jobs while also serving in ministry. The goal? Make missions smarter, more sustainable, and more effective.
“I’ve returned to Brazil now from the field to mobilize our churches for this new vision,” said Vieitas. “My goal is to spend the next several years raising a new generation of Brazilian missionaries who can be more effective in the field.”
That includes reaching for tough territory, even in places like Europe.
“No, Europe is not dead, we are just getting started,” insisted Rebeca Teixeira, a Brazilian Missionary to Europe.
Teixeira is part of this new generation. With the Brazilian Foursquare church, her family has planted churches in Portugal for years.
Now, she travels across the continent, encouraging young believers to reclaim Europe for Jesus.
“My heart is to empower and encourage these young leaders wherever they are, if it’s in Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, I don’t care, a place is just a possibility to see the action of God,” Teixeira told CBN News. “This is what South Americans really think of: legacy, enduring, lasting, legacy throughout families and generations.”
In 2020, Brazil made history when 140,000 young people packed three stadiums for The SEND, a 12-hour rally to mobilize a new wave of missionaries. Nearly two million more joined online.
One of the most powerful moments came as tens of thousands of Brazilians lifted their shoes in the air as a symbolic pledge to take the Gospel to the nations.
“Missions is done in the following way: It is with the hands of the ones that give, the knees of the ones that pray, and with the feet of the ones that go,” said Teixeira.
From coffee shops in Asia to churches across Europe, this new wave of Brazilian missionaries being trained to work bi-vocationally is blazing a path not just about passion, but about sustainability as they carry Christ to the nations.
