World Cup Churches: 25. Brazil

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

A few years ago I was going about my business in Wood Green Shopping City a mile or so from where I live.  A young woman was enthusiastically giving away a free newspaper and, either because of something she said or by glancing at the paper, I realised this was a kind of Christian thing.  

The initials UCKG meant nothing to me.  Once I worked out that U stood for Universal I was quite suspicious as for some reason that is a word favoured at the cultic and extreme margins of Christianity.  

As the conversation continued it became clear that the girl was not antagonistic to someone from a Baptist Church (of course not knowing I was a Pastor).  This was a good non-cultic signal.  Yet at the same time she was not remotely interested in my church or anything about it: she was there solely to recruit to whatever the UCKG was.

Curiosity led me to find out later what I had met with - as I still didn't know.  I learned that this was a Pentecostal denomination founded in 1977 in Brazil and part of the great, growing exponentially, get-rich-quick Protestant movement in formerly Catholic Brazil.

Which brings me to a church in Brazil built 2010-2014, the HQ of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, and a larger-than-life rebuild of the Old Testament Temple of Solomon:

The eccentricities of this campus are legendary, but before we dismiss its (unintended) hallmarks of parody we should note that it has been visited by two Brazilian Presidents.  In its homeland it is a serious business.

You may feel that imitating Solomon's Temple is a bit grand, even for a money-spinning Neo-Pentecostal enterprise.  In which case you'd be underestimating the enterprise because this building together with its imitation Ark of the Covenant is way bigger than poor old king Solomon's effort - we are trying to impress a lot more than the Queen of Sheba these days.  Indeed so much bigger that Solomon's original build was more like a large scale model prototype.

This may seem out of step with the supposed founder of its faith, a carpenter from Nazareth.  But it is well in step with the founder-pastor of the enterprise itself who is 'worth' over a billion dollars.  Though we may want to tease out the meaning of 'worth' in this context . . .

And perhaps it is better to remember that Solomon's temple was not a prototype of a church building but of Christ himself and his people.