After some work we are starting this blog, Help for Reformation Brazil. We are the Puritan Reformed Church at Brazil – a Reformed and Puritan Calvinist church in Brazil (but now with some "stretches" to other parts of South America). We are heirs of the work of the 19th century "Puritan" Rev. Robert Reid Kalley, member of the Church of Scotland, who founded the first Calvinist and Evangelical "Free Church" in Brazil. We are also heirs of the Rev. Robert Murray McCheyne and Rev. Hewitson (both from the Church of Scotland). They were the pastors of our first presbyters, before these presbyters came to Brazil as missionaries. And also we received some influence from Rev. Charles Spurgeon, because the first Brazillian Pastor was a student of his School of Pastors and the congregation of our beloved brother Spurgeon use to sent financial help to our first congregations.
These things ocurred on the 19th century, when the work here was started by Kalley, whom moved to Brazil with his wife and some brothers to preach the Gospel to a nation dominated by the Popish. As soon as Kalley organized the congregations here (after some decades) and departed back to Europe, at the end of the 19th century, these congregations became corrupted by the act of Darbists (and later, by arminians and charismatics) that infected our churches, perverted the children’s minds and made the men leave the pure and simple Gospel of Christ. Our people were perishing because the knowledge of God was removed from their midst. Therefore, after one century of battles, when our leaders and elders started to receive and read some books that were newly published in our country, as some of our leaders and elders learned how to interpret the Bible and how to understand it by the light of the Spirit of God, as some of our leaders and elders became aware of our Puritan and Covenanter Heritage and started to Reform the "Free Church" founded by Rev. Kalley, something started to happen. God had moved men He had set apart for this work, and, in a providential manner, He united our group. Every man was of one mind, with the same doctrinal convictions, with the same thirst for Christ’s Glory. We made Reformed symbols of faith for our people, and God guided us to know more and more about the Puritans and how they rooted their faith in the Sacred Scripture and the Grace of Christ Alone. We rediscovered Kalley’s sermons and the Reformed doctrine. But that denomination didn’t look carefully into it. We cried for Covenant Theology, we cried for deeper Bible studies and for a life that is consistent with our faith in our Savior Christ Jesus. They didn’t like it. So our congregations separated from our old denomination. And then we became the Puritan Reformed Church – our foundation assembly met in December 2008.
We didn’t know at that time, but God was moving hearts to His word in some other places of our country. Now, one year after our foundation, we have received contacts from all the regions of Brazil. We have about 8 congregations now, and that without enough resources – and there are still men calling for us, congregations asking for our help, more and more people whom God is bringing to the Reformed faith and who need our assistance.
When Kalley departed from Brazil, he and his wife started to plan how the Reformed faith would grow here, after the first churches were founded. So, Sarah Kalley, the wife of Robert Kalley, after his death, founded the Help for Brazil Mission, an “agency” that sent missionaries to Brazil. Today we are returning to the memory of the Help for Brazil Mission, because one more time the Reformed faith is growing here. During the 19th century, churches were destroyed by those influences I described above; today, resting in the Word of God, we are not allowing that again – we started the Help for Reformation Brazil, to battle for the growth and progress of the Reformed Faith. We expect to not fail where the original work from the Kalleys failed.
We hope, in the Grace of our Lord, that we will achieve it by adopting three directives:
1) We are asking for help in specific tasks, so the men that God calls to help us will be helping in a way that they will exactly know – we need material help (sometimes we will need financial help to the poor, or money to help a minister that lost his job because of religious persecution against Puritanism inside other denominations, or even to hire a little place to start a new congregation, or to hire a new minister, sometimes we need just books of good puritan writers to our Seminary, etc.). But we also need your partnership in prayer and in fellowship. In each of these tasks we ask you to know our work and to be with us in your heart, loving us in Christ Jesus and desiring with us the progress of the Kingdom.
2) We are not an independent non-denominational agency or para-church organization. We are part of the Puritan Reformed Church of Brazil. We respect the authority of their Councils and we fully subscribe their Symbols of Faith; we are members of their congregations and we will, in Christ and by the Word, offer our service to help the poor and common people of this Church.
3) We will focus on long time solutions, such as founding Seminaries and Confessional Schools and hiring and training pious ministers of the Gospel, as well as establishing contacts between Christians from our churches and puritan Christians from over the world. We hope that good puritan wives from Europe and Asia could write letters to our wives here helping one another in the service of God and in the Christian life, teaching one another about serving their husbands in the Lord, dressing in a sober and feminine manner and fleeing from vanity; we hope that sons and daughters of the God’s Covenant in the USA or Canada could write to our sons and daughters and help one another to be faithful in the midst of this dark generation, teaching one another about the happiness found in reading and studying the Bible instead of watching movies and stage plays, serving and obeying their parents and marrying in the faith (we are becoming really troubled about where we will educate our children, since homeschooling is forbidden here, and about who will marry our daughters, since we are the only one fully reformed church here).
Our situation is very hard here. Everyday we hear of ministers that lost their homes and their jobs, being discarded as trash from Congregational and Presbyterian denominations because they became “too Reformed”; everyday we receive contacts from men whose lives were ruined by the charismatics’ false prophecies, especially the prosperity theology guru’s false promises; we are seeing the public schools (and the private ones) teach the most abominable lies to our children and working to make them stupid with a rotten system of education (as I said, our government forbids homeschooling and we do not have a school to which to send our children); in almost all the cities where we have our congregations we are the only Reformed Church, and the other churches, even Congregational or Presbyterian churches, persecute us from their pulpits. Everyday we receive e-mails and telephone calls from people who want to know the true Gospel all over the country (and even from other countries in South America) but we don’t have ministers to send to them; and, at large, the Brazilian people are very poor, uneducated, exploited by the corrupt politicians and, in some places (I repeat) even starving – and most of the "educated " Brazilians are so blinded by the television, government and false church discipleship that they ignore the deplorable state of their own country, and think we are “in development”!
Oh, people of God from overseas and everywhere! Here are men prompted to work, here are men wishful to give their lives to preach the Gospel and to bring the light of Christ to this country. We need just some help and Brazil will know, and South America will know, for the first time since its discovery, the true Gospel.
We hope that this cry will be heard by some other men, called by Christ to know and love His Glory, some other puritans all over the world. And we hope that some of you out there help us here, so that these white fields will have their harvest-time, before the evil seed grows up again and steals, one more time, the truth from our people.
Pb. Prof. Ademir Moreira
Puritan Reformed Church at Angra dos Reis
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