Is Brazil’s Universal Church of the Kingdom of God a field hospital or a marketplace?

I was doing a hospital visit as a newly ordained Presbyterian minister in Brazil. It was late at night when I encountered Sergio at the edge of his terminally ill mother’s bed. (All names of interviewees have been changed to protect their privacy.) After 30 hours of travel, Sergio was still cheerful. I was aware that he was part of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (IURD), which he’d encountered after moving to the city in search of job opportunities. While his mother died as a Presbyterian, before her last breath she also received a prayer from an IURD pastor.

Years later, Sergio told me that the IURD is “like an emergency room of heaven”: open 24 hours a day, easy to find and identify, and ready to receive desperate people. A fast-growing neo-Pentecostal organization with headquarters in São Paulo, the IURD is present in almost every Brazilian municipality, even small towns with no hospital.

Local IURD churches present themselves as welcoming, faithful communities. Obreiros—deacons—are a constant presence at the door. As de facto emergency rooms, they respond to people’s basic concerns: health, employment, security, family. They neither give people fish nor teach them how to fish. Instead, they teach people to believe that the fish are there, under the water, ready to be received as a divine gift.