History
The Assembléias de Deus began when Daniel Berg and Gunnar Vingren, two Swedish Baptist immigrants from South Bend, Indiana had the Pentecostal experience in Chicago and departed to Brazil. They came to Belém, Pará, Brazil, where in 1911 founded the Missão de Fé Apostólica, which later changed its name in 1918 to "Assembleia de Deus".
The Pentecostal movement in Brazil had already been started by that time among Italians in São Paulo, by an Italian-American missionary, Louis Francescon, who initiated the Christian Congregation of Brazil (CCB) in 1910. While the CCB spread in the South, the Assembleias de Deus reached the Amazon villages and the semi-arid Nordeste before migrants from the North brought the Church to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the late 1920s.
Initially the Assembleia de Deus was intimately linked to the Scandinavian Pentecostal movement, led by Lewi Pethrus, who financed and sent missionaries to help Berg and Vingren. The Swedish Pentecostals gave autonomy to the Brazilian Assembleia de Deus in a General Convention in 1932. From that time onwards the American Assemblies of God increased their presence, mainly on doctrinal and teaching spheres, on the Brazilian denomination, but retained its independence from their American brethren, as Hollenweger puts it: "In the mission statistics of the North American Assemblies of God, the Assembleia de Deus figure as their mission church. In contrast, the Brazilian Pentecostals regard themselves as an independent church."
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