Transnational Pentecostal Connections: an Australian Megachurch and a Brazilian Church in Australia Introduction1 I arrived at the Comunidade Nova Aliança (CNA) church on a Sunday, a little bit before the 7 pm service. From the street I could hear loud music playing. When I crossed the front door I unexpectedly found myself in a nightclub: the place was dark, lit only by strobe lights, and there was a stage with large projection screens on each side. People were chatting animatedly in the adjacent foyer. They were all young, mostly in their late teens. A young woman came to chat and asked if I were okay, if I knew anyone. Prompted by me, she took me to pastor Henrique and his wife, Denise, whom I had spoken to on the phone the previous Sunday. We exchanged pleasantries and they excused themselves because service was about to start. We all moved on to the audience seats and five young people climbed onto the stage. There were three young males (a guitar and a bass players, and a drummer) and two female singers. Pastor Henrique asked the crowd in Portuguese: “Who wants to be blessed by God?” Everyone raised their arms and replied “yes”. The band started playing worship music. For an hour there was one song praising Jesus after another. Songs were in Portuguese but real-time telecasts of the band and the song lyrics translated into English were beamed onto the screens beside the stage. Everyone was dancing and singing together with the band. Many raised their arms, some kept their eyes closed, others were crying with their hands on their hearts, a few dropped to their knees overwhelmed by emotion. Denise told everyone to praise the lord as loud as they could. There was intense emotion in the air. After an hour of music and dance, people sat for 20 minutes while Henrique read a passage of the Bible and preached. Again, this was a loud affair: Henrique spoke fast and ran around on the stage, at times stopping to write something on the whiteboard behind him. We were suddenly in a classroom. While the band was climbing back on stage, tithe was collected. Music and the strobe lights resumed. Everyone knew the service was finishing, so they all stood up and moved closer to the stage. They started screaming and dancing, now performing a single routine which resembled Brazilian Axe dancing. After the service, we all got together in the foyer, had minced meat sandwiches, guaraná (a Brazilian soft drink) and coke, and chatted. The women serving the sandwiches told me some kids took the sandwiches for their next day’s lunch. Everyone was very friendly and lovely towards me. I left by 10:30 pm, having met lots of people, with a lingering warm feeling in my heart. This was my first introduction to this kind of “rock concert” service, which has become more common in Brazilian neo-Pentecostal churches in the past decade,2 but which is a key feature of the Australian Hillsong Pentecostal church (Goh 2007: 297). This paper analyses the establishment of a new Brazilian church in Sydney, Australia. Comunidade Nova Aliança (CNA) is an Assembly of God Church created in 2007 by a young Brazilian couple to cater for the increasing number of Brazilian students in Sydney. 1 I am grateful to the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Gottingen, Germany) for a Visiting Research Fellowship which allowed me to write this article. 2 This style of service was established in Brazil by the neo Pentecostal church Igreja Apostólica Renascer em Cristo (IRC) created in 1986 in the city of São Paulo. For more on IRC’s expansion due to its emphasis on Gospel Music, see Dolghie (2004). 1 Scholars have pointed out that by allowing transnational membership, religion presents itself as a map through which individuals, particularly transnational migrants and organisations, attempt to locate themselves amid fragmentation and dislocation generated by mobility (Vásquez and Marquardt, 2003: 53). Indeed, religion is an important aspect in the insertion of migrants in the country of settlement as well in transnational processes (Levitt, 2001; 2007; Tweed, 2002). Diasporic churches, in particular, assist migrants in the process of overcoming nostalgia, homesickness and the challenge of adapting to the new country. As I will show in this article, CNA offers students a space for community building through Sunday services, weekly cell meetings, camping trips, and other communal leisure activities. It also helps them to adapt to the new life by offering basic training courses in barista and cleaning skills to middle-class Brazilian students, most of whom have never experienced paid employment in their lives. In addition, scholars have demonstrated that migrants’ religious practices and beliefs have an influence on the host society by exposing it to religious diversity, and because migration continues to impact on the life of the homeland, these new forms are then carried back to the homeland and are recreated there, a phenomenon that Levitt calls “social remittance” (1999). This article also demonstrates the ways in which Australian Pentecostalism is carried as social remittance to Brazil. By doing so, it shows the polycentric nature of Pentecostalism (Freston, 1999), where Australia can become a centre from where religious flows emanate to Brazil. However, academics have paid little attention to the ways in which religious institutions in the host country may influence rituals and facilitate the establishment of the new church. I argue that churches created by migrants are not established in a deterritorialised diasporic vacuum. Reterritorialisation engenders hybridity. Drawing on participant observation in services, and interviews with CNA founders and followers between 2009 and 2011, this paper demonstrates the ways in which CNA has been supported by the Australian Assembly of God and heavily influenced by Hillsong, an Australian Pentecostal mega-church. As a result, I contend that CNA is a hybrid of a conservative/traditional Brazilian Baptist church and a very informal, rock-concert-style Hillsong church. Pentecostalism in Brazil The fast expansion of Evangelical Protestantism in Latin America prompted David Martin (1990) and David Stoll (1990) to speculate whether Latin America was becoming Protestant. In 2002 Jenkins argued that in the past century Christianity’s centre of gravity had shifted from the Global North to the South. Indeed, Freston noted that “60% of all Christians are in the Third World. But allowing for the high rates of non-practice in the West, it is evident that a far higher proportion of active Christians live in the Third World” (2004: 12). Most of this expansion in the Global South is due to the growth of indigenised Pentecostalism, which is exploding throughout Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia (most recently in China) (Jenkins, 2002, 2006; Freston, 2004; Miller and Yamamori, 2007; Vasquez, 2009; Wesley, 2004). Presently, Brazil is the second largest Protestant country in the world (behind United States only) and the largest Pentecostal one (Freston, 2001: 198, 2004; Mariano, 2010). In the 2000 census, 15% of the Brazilian population declared themselves Evangelical Protestants (which includes traditional Protestants, Pentecostals and Neo Pentecostals), while this 2 number was 9% in the 1990 census.3 A survey conducted by Datafolha in 2007 found that the number of Evangelical Protestants had increased to 22% (17% Pentecostal and 5% Protestant) (Cariello, 2007: 2). Furthermore, the number of young people who are religious in Brazil is large. A survey in 21 countries by the German Bertelsmann Stifung Institute in 2008, found that the Brazilian youth is the third-most religious in the world, behind only young Nigerians and Guatemalans. According to the survey, 95% of Brazilians between 18 and 29 years old regarded themselves as religious, while 65% asserted they were “profoundly religious” (Fernandes, 2009: 66). Pentecostalism is characterized by a strong personal experience of salvation which is believed is given by the Holy Spirit in the form of glossolalia (speaking in tongues), divine healing, exorcism, and prophecy. For these churches, health and wealth are signs of salvation. According to Vasquez & Williams (2005), the explosion of Pentecostalism in Latin America is due to several developments: a precarious transition to democracy, the migration of unskilled workers from rural areas to large cities, neoliberal capitalist policies, poverty, violence, and the consequent generalised sense of insecurity of a small state. In this state vacuum, these religious organisations became spaces of the stability, community support, and hope. Drawing on a Theology of Prosperity, these churches attract the poor and those excluded from the material gains of modernity. However, this study engages with more recent developments in Neo Pentecostal churches in Brazil. New churches such as Renascer em Cristo, Sara a Nossa Terra, and Bola de Neve4 (established in 1986, 1992, and 1999 respectively) are attracting the urban middle-classes (among them politicians, artists, celebrities, athletes, professionals and business people) and the young. This is so for several reasons. These churches do not ask their followers to leave the world and have an ascetic life as traditional Protestant churches would. They do not ask for sacrifices. Followers can have their lifestyle as celebrities or politicians, for example, and continue to be members of the congregation (Mariano, 1999:101-102). For instance, Bola de Neve’s membership is comprised mostly of young people between 20 and 35 years old who practice radical sports (surfing, skating, jiu-jitsu), and who enjoy the informal services in which worship is done to the sound of pop, rock and reggae bands. Its churches are decorated with beach and surfing themes. Most of the congregation sport piercings, tattoos, and informal clothes (T-shirts, shorts and sandals). To be sure, it does preach celibacy before marriage and prohibits the intake of drugs and alcohol (Dantas, 2010:55-56).