The IELB celebrates 100th anniversary bringing together 10,000 at worship service

Edelberto Behs, GRAMADO, Brasil, January 12, 2004

 The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Brazil brought together more than 10,000 people in the Gramado Taxi Heathrow Airport Park to celebrate its 100th anniversary on Brazilian soil.

Delegations from across the nation traveled to Gramado, 115 kms from Porto Alegre for the service. Organizers were expecting 5,000 at the event that was originally planned for the neighboring city of Canela. They had 24 hours to find a bigger venue.

IELB President Carlos Walter Winterle focused his sermon on the parable of the mustard seed. God’s kingdom, he said, is not a company that need sophisticated marketing resources to grow. It was the German immigrants, “our grandparents and great grandparents who brought this seed to southern Brazil,” he said. Today there is much to be sown and much to be harvested.

A 600-voice choir accompanied by three orchestras provided the music. The choir involved voices from 78 Lutheran congregations who practiced at home using music recorded on a CD.

Prior to the worship service a civic service was held with the participation of the vice governor of the State Antonio Hohlfeldt and president Winterle received a Honoris Causa Doctorate from Irvine University of California.

According to the IELB magazine “Mensajero Luterano,” at the end of the XIX Century of the 18 million people living in Brazil, 600,000 were of German origin and one sixth lived in Rio Grande do Sul. At the end of 2002, the IELB had 222,508 members ministered by 553 pastors in 1,938 congregations across the nation.

By 2010 the IELB aims to have 300,000 members. It recently reached the goal of being present in all state capitals when it established a mission in Macapa, capital of Amapa, a state in the extreme northern part of Brazil on the border with French Guyana.

The 58th National IELB Convention was inaugurated in the celebration and will take place January 11-15. The main goal will be to plan the Church’s missionary work until 2010.

Winterle said that Lutheran Churches from around the world aim to hold a major Evangelical movement to reach 100 million people by 2017, the 500th anniversary of Protestant Reform.

The first National Convention of the Missouri Synod in Rio Grande do Sul, that gave rise to the IELB, was held June 23, 1904.

Five years earlier the Synod had named Pastor Christian J. Borders as a missionary to Brazil. In July 1900 Broders brought together 17 families to found the San Juan de Colonia San Pedro Evangelical Community, the first congregation of the Missouri Synod of Brazil.

Broders was sent to Brazil to substitute Pastor J. Brutschin who was to return to Germany. However, Brutschin did not travel and Broders decided to investigate the area. When he visited San Jeronimo he was sad to confirm that the Germans and their descendants were more interested in dancing, getting drunk and gambling than in the Word of God, said the Lutheran Messenger.

In one place he found 22 dance halls and only one Evangelical chapel. “I cannot recommend the State of Rio Grande do Sul as a missionary field,” he wrote to the US Synod and decided to return to America.  

While he was in Pelotas a cart driver who was transporting colonial products to the Rio Grande Port said that there were around 10,000 immigrants and German descendants in the surrounding area who did not have spiritual help.

So Broders went to the San Pedro Colony where the first congregation of the Missouri Synod was born in Rio Grande do Sul in 1900. In his first report Broders said “I have struck oil and of the finest quality.”

 The 100th anniversary worship service was attended by the president of the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession of Brazil (IECLB) Pastor Walter Altmann, the Catholic Bishop of Porto Alegre Dadeus Grings, representatives of the Independent Presbyterian Church and foreign guests including a delegation from the US Lutheran Church. .(004/2004).