“Free spiritual counseling.”
So says a banner that Pedro Souza hoists from a church during Brazilian Carnival each year in Ouro Preto’s town square. Known for its colonial architecture, the city of 75,000 hosts one of the country’s liveliest celebrations, drawing thousands of Brazilians from around the country.
Tio Pedro, as he’s better known, sees a missions opportunity. Each year, he and hundreds of volunteers from evangelical churches all around the country travel to Ouro Preto to hang out under a tent in the square, offering prayer and counseling to Carnival tourists.
“Many people enter thinking that they will find someone who reads their palms or tells their future,” said Tio Pedro, who works full-time with YWAM in another city. “Instead, they find Jesus.”
At 63, Tio Pedro has reached out to partiers since 1986, two years after he joined YWAM to run a program to train future missionaries. His ministry is unique; most Brazilian evangelicals flee the city for multiday retreats organized by their churches in the countryside. The further from Carnival, the better.
For centuries, Catholics celebrated Carnival in the weekend preceding Ash Wednesday, attempting to indulge in behaviors the church prohibited during Lent, like eating meat or sweets. (During the Middle Ages, the church also discouraged any kind of physical relations or intimacy.) When Portuguese Catholics brought the festival to South America, it also took on the cultural and musical influence of enslaved Africans and turned into a multiweek extravaganza.
Evangelicals have eschewed the holiday since the earliest days of Pentecostalism in Brazil, uncomfortable with both the rampant drinking and the casual sex and also desiring to distance themselves from the Catholic church.
Tio Pedro gets why many evangelicals feel uncomfortable with the immorality they see celebrated during Carnival. But he doesn’t get why the church physically retreats each winter.
“Out on the streets, we can reach people who would never think about getting into a church,” he said.
Nágila Araújo was one of those people. In 1998, the 24-year-old was at the peak of her professional belly-dancing career and was headlining several upcoming shows. Though raised by a Pentecostal mother, Araújo had stopped attending church because she believed its teachings disagreed with her profession.
That year, Araújo traveled with friends to Ouro Preto. On the first day of Carnival, she saw Tio Pedro’s banner. Intrigued by its offer, she walked inside, holding a beer.
Soon, a young woman came to share the gospel with her. Despite her artistic success, Araújo had been suffering from health problems. When she had confided in her mother and a doctor about them, both encouraged her that turning to Jesus could remove her from a lifestyle where she often drank too much and could heal her body. Hearing the same message preached at Carnival overwhelmed her—and convinced her to accept Christ.
Araújo returned home the next day and began attending a Foursquare church. Two years later, she began sharing her testimony at churches across the country. Earlier this year, she was ordained as a pastor.
Araújo is grateful for Tio Pedro and his volunteers’ “bold” strategy.
“It takes courage for someone to go out on the streets and approach drunk college students sitting on the curb or depressed people in the middle of a party,” she said.
Araújo connected with Tio Pedro’s Carnival ministry just four years after it moved to Ouro Preto from where it had begun in Belo Horizonte, a bigger city in Minas Gerais state, about 60 miles north.
That same year, Tio Pedro began organizing his own bloco de carnaval (an informal group of people, often dressed in costumes, who follow a band playing live music in the streets), naming it Jesus É Bom à Beça (something like “Jesus Is So Good”).
For the past 27 years, he has welcomed hundreds of evangelicals, mostly from Belo Horizonte, who show up with costumes and instruments a couple days before Friday, the first day of Carnival. The other days, the participants serve on prayer, counseling, or street-evangelism teams. But everyone joins the bloco.
This year’s bloco theme is Luz do Mundo (“Light of the World”), a message that the Jesus É Bom à Beça marchers will express through two Christian samba-enredos written by Pedro do Borel, a Rio de Janeiro worship artist.
This year, Jesus É Bom à Beça will sing these two songs on repeat for two hours. But every 100 meters, they will also momentarily stop playing and singing to kneel and pray for the people celebrating Carnival around them. As has done every year with his bloco, Tio Pedro will approach the microphone and read Proverbs 24:11: “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter.”
“It’s not uncommon, after a moment of prayer, to look up and see people crying, impacted by what we are doing,” Tio Pedro said.
Outside of parade hours (Jesus É Bom à Beça will parade on Sunday and Tuesday this year), the group sets up its headquarters at a Baptist church building in the town square. From there, Tio Pedro dispatches people to minister at the tent, perform short theater productions meant to capture the attention of partygoers, give out water bottles to thirsty people, and strike up evangelistic conversations with those celebrating—at all times of the day.
In 2000, one volunteer approached Franklin Cruz, one of the Carnival attendees, as he walked back to his hotel, drunk, in the middle of the night. As the smiling woman made her way down a narrow, steep street on one of Ouro Preto’s famous cobblestone hills, Cruz immediately knew he was in for a memorable night. It just turned out to be unforgettable in a different way than he expected.
When they crossed paths, the woman asked if he was interested in talking to her about Jesus. Cruz listened, intrigued enough that when he returned to his home in Rio, he befriended a Christian who convinced him to find a church. Within a year, he had been baptized, and in 2017, he was ordained as a pastor and planted a church in the city of Volta Redonda.
“My life with Christ started because on an ordinary day, someone decided to do an unusual thing: preach the gospel in the streets during Carnival,” he said.
Despite the testimonies that have emerged from Tio Pedro’s ministry, some still see it as merely providing a cover for believers hoping “to satisfy their carnal desires,” as Rafael Cézar, the pastor of Igreja Resgatar in Pindamonhangaba, accused in a 2023 video.
“It would be interesting if these Carnival evangelists,” he said, “instead of going to Carnival, went to hospitals, to China, or to North Korea.”
Two years ago, Araújo attended a meeting where a group of church leaders called for an end to Jesus É Bom à Beça bloco. When it was her turn to speak, she shared her own testimony and handed out a copy of her book to each person.
“We all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe,” Araújo said, recalling the words of Romans 3:22–23. “We must look with mercy on those who are at the party, but many legalistic people think they just deserve to burn in hell.”
Musician Atilano Muradas heard this kind of criticism when he started composing and playing worship songs in Brazilian rhythms. “Some people listened to these songs and took part in Carnival before their conversion, so they link them with sin,” he said.
Muradas was a leader at an evangelical samba school that paraded from 1997 to 2009 in the city of Curitiba. Ultimately, the initiative ended after losing funding.
While it lasted, Carnival offered the samba school the chance to sing Christian songs for nearly an hour and set up a tent where partygoers could drop by and interact with evangelical participants.
Cruz trusts in this divine interaction. Two years after encountering Tio Pedro’s troupe, he returned to the streets in the Carnival, as an evangelist. “The first year, I was afraid,” he said. “I thought I might be tempted to go back.”
These days, Cruz makes a point of going to the last night of Carnival each year, the very night he first encountered the gospel. He looks for openings for conversations that he hopes will help people come to the realization he once did.
“There are many other Franklins out there waiting to hear a word of hope,” he said. “I want to do for others what was done for me.”
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