Brazil Youth Missions July 15-23, 2012 Cost per Traveler: $2,950 Download Application
We are completing our plans to conduct another dynamic youth ministry effort to Sao Paulo Brazil. The team will continue the effective ministry of those who labored in the past and will be tasked with working alongside youth ministries to advance the Kingdom of God. Youth can expect to sing and pray in hospitals, prayer-walk, visit families and children in favelas (slums), while facilitating and attending conference classes. Nightly worship services will be an integral part of the youth mission. There is a need for Pastors, Youth, Youth Ministers, Chaperons, Evangelists, Praise dancers, Christian rappers, musicians and a host of other gifted people in the body. Answer to Prayer The sustained increase of evangelicals (from 2 million in 1960 to 512 million in 2010) makes Brazil one of the largest evangelical populations in the world. While not without controversy, their steady forward march is changing the makeup of Brazil’s population and orientation. Challenge for Prayer The nation and government have made great strides but still face massive challenges. Pray about the following: Endemic corruption and cronyism have been addressed aggressively, and idolatrous structures are crumbling. These have come at some cost, but they are moves in the right direction, bringing political accountability and economic transparency, establishing justice and enabling economic opportunity. Pray that future governments would not shirk from the painful but necessary process of excising all that is putrid and corrupt. Poverty still affects tens of millions. Admirable reforms and progress are being achieved, but a significant proportion of dwellers in large cities still live in poverty-stricken, crime-ridden favelas, and the education and health care sectors are in serious need of improvement. The poor, especially street children and indigenous peoples, often suffer terrible discrimination and exploitation. Debt slavery affects up to 250,000 people (the official number is 25,000), especially in the Amazon. Crime is a serious problem. Brazil is the world’s second-highest consumer of illicit drugs and has the world’s highest rate of firearm homicides. Nearly 150 people a day were murdered in Brazil in the years between 2000 and 2010. The police response has been brutally heavy-handed and rife with corruption, and the nation’s prisons are notoriously overcrowded and violent. Unprecedented breakthrough, spiritual and social, is needed to turn this around. Racial differences may not seem an issue in the ethnic melting pot of Brazil, but statistics bear out a different view of Brazil’s complex racial context. While blacks/morenos are 40% of the population, they only account for 3% of college graduates and form the majority of Brazil’s poor. Although nearly half have African ancestry, less than 7% openly claim it on the census. This is, however, more a case of social rather than racial discrimination.