Reformed theology surging in Brazil, Ligonier pastor says

A growing number of Brazilians turned to Reformed theology in the last five years, Brazilian pastor Augustus Nicodemus Lopes said at a Thursday evening session of the 2025 Ligonier National Conference, put on by Ligonier Ministries. Lopes was speaking as part of a session on the state of Ligonier’s global missions. Most of the people who recently became Reformed came from charismatic evangelical backgrounds, he said. He said the change began during the COVID pandemic. When the government shut down churches, many Brazilians began watching videos of Reformed pastors preaching, he said. After the pandemic, Reformed church attendance numbers swelled.

Brazilian Reformed seminaries need support now, Lopes said. Many pastors in Brazil have no theological training. Pentecostal Christians in Brazil are often hostile to seminary training, but in the last few years many have begun approaching Reformed pastors to ask for teaching, he said. Portuguese speakers from around the world are tuning in to online teaching as well—Lopes said he has 4,000 students in his online Portuguese-language theological classes.

How many Brazilians currently identify as Reformed? About 53% of Brazilians identified as Catholic in 2023, while about 23% said they were evangelicals. Less than 1% called themselves Protestant, according to Statista, an online statistics portal and data platform. Even accounting for overlap between those last two categories, Reformed Christians are still a tiny segment of Brazil’s 216 million population. Lopes estimated there were about 1 million Reformed Christians in Brazil in a 2021 interview with Tabletalk Magazine, though their number has grown since then.

What did other pastors say in the session?

• Sherif Fahim, from Alexandria, Egypt, said Egypt has several hundred Reformed Christians—an extreme minority in a country of more than 110 million people. Approximately 90% of Egyptians are Muslims, while about 10% are Christians, with the majority of that number being Coptic Christians, he said. But Reformed missionaries have established a few good seminaries. Fahim said it was important to focus on good doctrine in Egypt because the country serves as an ideal launch point to reach Middle Eastern countries that are closed to many missionaries.

• Seminaries in South Korea are struggling with low enrollment numbers as the country hits a demographic cliff, pastor Joel Kim said. Churches are also less influential, and most are led by aging leaders. About 30% of self-professed Christians in South Korea don’t attend church weekly, he said.

• Both Fahim and Kim said social media has enabled them to easily disseminate solid teaching. Fahim’s series of 52 YouTube videos on the Westminster Confession is now being used for discipleship in many churches, he said.