Revival continues worldwide – Africa and Brazil

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Revival continues worldwide – Africa and Brazil

Guinea Bissau: Revival unfolding in majority Muslim country

A move of God of ‘biblical proportions’ is taking place in Guinea Bissau, reports missionary David Hoffman.

Guinea Bissau is a northwest African country with a population of two million people. Somewhere near 70% of the population is Muslim and 11.7% of the country identifies as Christian. Right now, Islam is making a strong push for religious and cultural dominance, but at the same time, God is moving powerfully.

Recently World Harvest, a ministry led by evangelist Jacob Ebersole, held several outreaches across Guinea Bissau. The Muslim president of the country intervened personally to help get the stage into the country. He also attended the first night of the Gospel crusade.

Guinea Bissau falls within the 10/40 Window which is a geographical area of countries that are the most unreached with the Gospel. With the current ‘Islamic evangelisation’ push into Guinea Bissau, Christians are beginning to rise up in boldness to proclaim the Gospel like never before while they still have the opportunity and freedom to do so.

One example of this occurred after a prayer meeting on the crusade field when thousands of teenagers spontaneously began to take to the streets in the capital city of Bissau. They proclaimed the Gospel and sang worship songs from one end of the city to the other.

The first night of the crusade was a massive success. “Thousands came far and wide to hear the Gospel. Some even traveled in canoes and boats on rough waters from islands off the coast to be a part of this. I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Ebersole said. “We’ve had the privilege of being on the front row witnessing a move of God that seemed impossible at every turn. Night after night, tens of thousands cried out to Jesus in repentance and faith. There were over 18,477 documented decisions for Christ.”

Ebersole said he’s not interested to lead people into emotional decisions, and took steps to make sure the numbers reported are accurate and not over-inflated. As the Gospel campaign across the nation continued, hundreds of young people spontaneously traveled to the next town to help with the next crusade.

One influential businessman said that no one would come to a Gospel crusade because the city is almost 100% Muslim, plus it was during Ramadan. After the crusade, he was shocked seeing that many Muslims cried out to Jesus. What he thought would be the ‘Lions Den’ turned into a great victory.

Sources: Jacob Ebersole, David Hoffman

Brazil: Young people are hungry for a deeper faith

According to a recent Barna report, nearly 75 percent of Brazilian teenagers say they want to learn more about Christ.

At just 14 years old, Lavínia Fernandes competes with the other young people in her church, located in Recife, Pernambuco, northeast Brazil, to see who can bring the most friends from school to the Saturday services. There are now more than 10 people from her class at school who started attending church through her. “My friends comment that I became kinder and happier after I became a Christian and that they can see God in my life,” said the teenager.

Like Fernandes, millions of other Christian teenagers throughout Brazil and other Latin American countries are experiencing something special in their journeys of faith. Recent research by the Barna Group reveals that Latin America is home to a “connected, digitally enabled generation” that is committed to their faith, engaged with the Bible, and hungry to learn more about Jesus.

The number of evangelical churches in Brazil has jumped from 17,033 in 1990 to 109,560 in 2019, an increase of 543 percent, according to the latest data available. In 2019 alone, an average of 17 new evangelical churches opened per day in Brazil, according to researcher Victor Augusto Araújo Silva, at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Long a country dominated by Catholicism, the arrival of Baptists, Lutherans, and Calvinists to Brazil at the end of the 19th century helped usher in the arrival of the evangelical movement. In the 20th century, missionaries from the US brought the Pentecostal movement, predominantly to the north and southeast parts of the country. By the 2030s, evangelicals may outnumber Catholics, projects demographer José Eustáquio Diniz Alves.

For Nathan Zortéa, a youth pastor at the CCvideira church in Fortaleza, Ceará, a congregation in the northeastern part of the country, Brazilian teenagers reap the fruits of evangelical churches whose reach crossed socioeconomic and racial lines. “The social inequality that exists in Brazil ends up showing our teenagers that the gospel is good news of justice and righteousness, of a God who is for you and not against you. Our churches have played a fundamental role in presenting these teenagers with a gospel that invites them to live something new,” said the leader of the A13, a youth ministry that currently has an average weekly attendance of more than a thousand teenagers.

Teens in Latin America are highly motivated by a sense of social justice. The more the teenagers are engaged with the Bible, the more they feel motivated to seek justice. For pastor Lucas Nagib, from Lagoinha Baptist Church in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, one factor that has led young Brazilians to stand out in relation to those from other countries is these teenagers’ high commitment to expose their faith with their peers and friends through social media.

Sources: Lavínia Fernandes, Nathan Zortéa, José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, Lucas Nagib, Barna Group

Joel News International # 1318,  October 5, 2023  view on the web

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Revival continues worldwide – Africa and Brazil

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