Over the last few years many immigrants have come to Britain seeking a better life. Many of them have come from Catholic countries where the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) is strong and they have come bringing fervour and passion for Christ with them. As a result in London many non-English speaking charismatic prayer groups are springing up.

ALEX CHAVES (32) from Brazil talks to Kristina Cooper and tells something of his own personal faith story, about the CCR in Brazil and what his experience in London has been.

I come from Sao Paulo in Brazil. My family has always been very devout and both my parents have been involved in the CCR for a long time. My father almost died in a car accident when my mother was pregnant with me and I was born prematurely at 7 months. As a result I was very sickly with many health problems and my mother got very worried about me. She went to the church and promised Our Lady that if I survived she would give me to the Church and the missions.

As a child I used to go to church regularly with my family but things changed when I was 15. My passion was karate, which I had done since I was 5, and I was a black belt and twice had been champion of Brazil. But then I had an accident and broke my shoulder and couldn’t do karate for a long time. It felt like I had lost everything as my whole life was geared round my sport – the training and my friends were my reason for living. It can be very hard when you are a teenager to find your direction in life, and unfortunately, at this point I fell in with the wrong crowd. Thus even though I came from a nice church-going family I started using drugs and getting into violence. I was like this for about six years until I was 21 years old.

Strangely although I didn’t believe in God, I loved reading and I still read the bible. In fact I must have read it about six times all the way through and, because I have a photographic memory, I could remember a lot of it. But it didn’t help me in my life. I felt empty. Then when I was 21 I had another accident. I was driving a car and I accidently hit a little girl who ran in front of the car as she was crossing the road. She was only six years old, the same age as my little sister. This incident totally traumatised me. She didn’t die but she could have done, and I got very depressed. This was possibly the darkest time of my life.

Give me a chance to change your life

I remember one day cleaning my gun. As I put the bullets in I thought about the different problems in my life. Each bullet seemed to represent a misery. All in all I put in 17 bullets. At the end it occurred to me that as my life was so terrible and hopeless, I might as well kill myself. So I put the gun to my head, intending to blow my brains out. At that moment, however, I heard a voice from God, which said, “Give me a chance to change your life.” I wondered if I was going crazy, but I decided to give God a chance. So the following Saturday when my mum asked me to go to church with her, as she always did, I agreed to come. She couldn’t believe it.

Although I started going to church, initially I still didn’t really believe but I decided to give Jesus a chance. Then one day I went to a charismatic prayer group. An old lady said to me, “Can I pray for you.” She then asked for the Holy Spirit to come down on me. I felt a fire burn in my heart and I started to cry. I was born again and started to speak in tongues. I couldn’t work out what happened. But then the woman leading the prayer meetings suddenly announced, “God is doing something special today in this group. Who wants to say something.” I had never spoken in public before but I found myself standing up, without even realising what I was doing as if some kind of inner force was propelling me forwards. When I got to the front I just told the people what was in my heart and how I wanted to change my life and be a witness for Christ for the rest of my life.

From that day on my life changed and I became a new person with new interests and I just wanted to serve God. Together with six other young people we started a new charismatic group in the parish. I knew God would help us and within a fortnight we had 20 people coming to the group, within a month, 50 people and within three months 300 people were coming, the majority of whom were young people.

I felt God’s pain for the lost

There is a big difference when you read the bible just as a book and when you read it with the Holy Spirit. Then it becomes alive and the words can bring about miracles. One of the words that really spoke to me was from Genesis 6.6 when it talks about how God felt when he saw the wickedness there was on the earth. “He (God) regretted that he had made man on the earth and his heart grieved.” It was as if after my baptism in the Holy Spirit I felt God’s pain for the lost and I cried and cried. I realised that God was alive and had feelings and could be grieved and I wanted to do something to take away his pain.

I found God had given me the charism of preaching and as well as preaching in my group I started to be invited all over. I started a radio programme too, preaching the gospel. In Brazil the CCR is very organised and there are many opportunities for training, depending on what your gift is – music, preaching, prayer, communications media etc – and I used to go every day to different kinds of classes to grow in my understanding and knowledge. We have many good preachers in Brazil and I would go and listen to them too. Eventually I became a trainer of preachers. Not everyone is called to preach to big crowds, but everyone is called to share the gospel on a one to one level and often people need help to know how to do this”.

Why do you rush so much?

Alex met his wife Viviane when they were both at university studying marketing. They were friends for a long time before they realised their relationship was becoming more serious. Vivane recalls, “I remember he was always very busy rushing around. I would ask him, “Why do you rush so much?” He told me “We don’t have time. People are dying. They need to belong to my Lord.” He invited me to a charismatic gathering and I was amazed to see all the people there. He told me “If you want us to be together you have to be prepared to serve my God and put God first in your life.” I agreed to try.” They have been married for 7 and a half years.

Things were going well for them, but then Alex lost his job as a supervisor in a belt making factory. He comments, “We wondered what we were going to do. Brazil is a good place. The weather is amazing, people are warm and the church life is amazing but if you want to build a family it is difficult. The gap between the poor and the rich is very large. The poor are very poor and the rich are very rich. A pair of shoes can cost three months salary and it is hard to get a good education for your children.” Friends in London encouraged them to try their luck in England. As Viviane has dual Italian/Brazilian nationality through her grandfather they didn’t have the normal visa trouble that many Brazilians face coming to England seeking to better their lives. But they still didn’t find it easy. Alex comments, “The language is different and it is hard to adapt. I worked in an Indian restaurant as a porter for six months, then in a laundry for a year and now that I have passed my driving licence I do night shift work as a driver for a bank doing deliveries.”

Be like Abraham - leave your family and go to another land

He doesn’t regret coming, however, and believes that God has a plan in it all. “We were a bit afraid to come, but I felt the Lord saying to me, “I will be with you. Be like Abraham, leave your family and go to another land because I have something different for you.” Living in London, he said, can be very difficult for Brazilians. “They think they will be happy here, they will be important and rich. The real situation is very different. The language is difficult to learn, the climate is difficult, the life is difficult. In Brazil the enemies of the Christian faith are seduction and violence, these kind of sins. Here in England the danger is forgetting about God. Here you have money to buy everything you need and money becomes the God. Some Brazilians when they come here, start to forget about God too, they get sucked into bad things, prostitution, false identity cards etc, but others because of their sufferings start turning to the Church, as they realise money doesn’t bring them happiness.”

The couple live in Willesden and the first thing they did when they arrived there was to go to the parish, where there is a regular Brazilian Mass and look for a charismatic prayer group. There wasn’t one, but the Brazilian chaplain Fr Joseph Mario, suggested Alex start one. Their group which has about 50 people is non-English speaking and meets after Brazilian Mass between 3-5pm. As time went on they began to realise there were other Spanish speaking and Brazilian speaking groups in London. Alex comments, “We found out there are groups in Whitechapel, Brixton, Fulham and Stockwell, and the Shalom group is here too. We decided why don’t we put our resources together to organise something big like in Brazil bringing together all the Latin American people we are linked with.”

Together we are strong

Thus last September they set up a Latin American CCR committee in London to organise a big charismatic event on 8th -10th May 2009 at St Anne’s Church in Whitechapel. Alex adds, “We realised that when we are alone we are weak, but together we are strong. We are committed to helping each other in whatever way we can with the different resources and expertise that we have. We meet every two weeks or so and as we are communicating almost every day about the details of the conference, we are getting to know each other better.” The Latin American community have recently brought out a free monthly Catholic newspaper which is supported by secular advertising and this is also helping Catholics to keep in touch. The committee are busy fund-raising to pay for the flights of the speakers, who include Neil Velez of the Missionaries of Jesus from Puerto Rico and Flavinho from Cancao Nova from Brazil. Alex himself, is the third on the line up. He comments, “This is just the beginning. We believe God is going to do great things here in England and we want to be part of it.”

For more details of the Hosana Conference contact www.hosanalondres.com and for details of the charismatic prayer groups contact www.cblondres.co.uk