According to Elder Jeffery R. Holland, Brazil is “a nation on the move.” As further stated by lds.org, “Brazil is on a strong, upward trajectory in terms of Church maturity. It has to be considered one of the strongest areas of the Church as we move into the 21st century.”
Davisson Oliveira, a sophomore double majoring in computer science and information technology from Brazil, said he asked the missionary who was teaching him, “‘How many people have you baptized?’ He said, ‘I don’t remember, but you are next.’”
Oliveira was born in Brazil, where he didn’t know the Church at all. “When I was young, like 16 or 17, I used to ask a lot of questions,” he said. “I started to look for any kind of church that could help me. I needed answers. One day, a friend told me he was just baptized in the LDS Church. At the time, I thought the churches only wanted your money.”
A couple of days later, Oliveira attended an activity at the church building for the first time. He said, “They made me feel like I was important. I felt like I was being prepared without knowing it.”
Even with opposition that brought him to the point where he had to choose between church and family, he said he saw God’s hand in his life. “I knew only one person could give the answer, so I prayed,” he said.
“I felt just like how the missionaries told me I would feel. I never felt so at peace. To be baptized was the second best thing I did in my life. After I met the gospel, my eyes just opened. A year later, I left on my mission.”
Recounting a miracle from his last area in his mission, Oliveira said he saw how the Lord saved him in order to save others. A mother told him and his companion how she had prayed long before for God to send her family angels, and said, “You guys are the angels God sent to us.”
“We are really the missionaries of God, the angels he sends to help people out there,” said Oliveira. “We really have the power to change people’s lives if we want to.”
However, the Church has not always grown so smoothly in Brazil. Timothy Richardson, professor of Spanish and Chinese, recounted a personal story from over 30 years ago while he was living in the very city Oliveira would be baptized in more than two decades later. “In Sete Lagoas, there was only one branch. The very first Sunday I attended, the branch president was excommunicated. The mission president made me the new branch president, and I served there for almost a year.”
Richardson remembered the lack of priesthood brethren available at that time. “It would have been the best to have a senior couple there,” he said. “The elder could have helped with the priesthood functions and the sister with the teaching of the Relief Society. The branch was in a rough state.”
As of today, Sete Lagoas is about to be split into two stakes, according to Justin Anderson, a junior in biochemistry from Washington who served his mission in Brazil.
“When I joined the church in 1972, there were only three stakes in the country,” explained Brazil-born Marcus Martins, professor of Religious Education and a former mission president in Brazil. “We didn’t even know what a stake was. I remembered my father asking, ‘So what’s the difference between a stake and a district?’ A district was all I knew. We were recent converts.”
Martins continued, “All the way to 1978, there was not that much growth. Then the revelation on the priesthood came. That’s when you started to see that explosive growth.” He said the revelation giving all worthy men the priesthood allowed mission presidents to send missionaries wherever they felt.
“A lot of those regions they sent missionaries [for the first time], were regions with a very heavy presence of Lamanites – and they are the believing blood. It was in the north where missions baptized thousands of people a year. That’s when you see the church population going from 50,000 in 1978 to over a million by 2010,” said Martins.
Anderson said, “The city where I lived has 6 million people. Almost everybody lives in the city. People just want to be around people. They are really religious. We would ask people at lunch time, ‘Hey, do you know what street this is?’ and they would respond, ‘Hey come on, eat lunch with us. Please come inside.’ So you say a prayer with them and they just love everything about Christ.”
Oliveira said, “People look for the hope that Jesus Christ can sustain them.”