Brazil, 1910 and 1911

Louis Francescon reached Chicago on 3 March 1890 and helped found the First Italian Presbyterian Church there. Paul Palma writes that on 25 August 1907 he was reportedly baptized in the Spirit on a visit to William Durham's North Avenue Mission.

With Giacomo Lombardi and Lucia Menna he reached Buenos Aires in October 1909 and São Paulo the next March. Vincenzo Pievani took him inland to Santo Antônio da Platina, and his own letter says three families and two youths were saved there.

Palma says a priest there reportedly plotted to have him killed, and the editor of his letter dates persecution to the night of 12 to 13 June. At a Presbyterian church in the Italian quarter of São Paulo known as the Brás he preached in Italian, was ordered out, and took a large number with him.

Vingren, a Swedish Baptist pastor in the United States, names Adolfo Ulldin as the man who spoke at South Bend. Pará is the northern state whose capital is Belém. His diary adds that the same word foretold his marriage to a woman named Strandberg, and that detail is told after the event.

Daniel Berg received his call at a later meeting at Ulldin's that summer. Vingren left South Bend on 12 October. At Durham's church in Chicago, he says, he gave his ninety dollars to Durham's paper, and they sailed from New York on the Clement on 5 November.

The Methodist Justus Nelson took them to the Brazilian Baptist Church at Belém, and they lodged in a basement at the pastor's house. Erik Nilsson, a Swede in Baptist service in Amazonia since 1897, told them to leave out the verse on Spirit baptism, by Vingren's report. Vingren wrote of him as of an enemy, and he is a party here.

Celina de Albuquerque, a Baptist Sunday school teacher, was healed of a disease of the lips at prayer in her home, by the diary. She then spoke in tongues for two hours from one in the morning. Conde dates that to 2 June and a paper in the journal Azusa to 10 June.

The break came within days, and the witnesses tell it three ways. The new body met on 18 June at Siqueira Mendes 67 and called itself the Apostolic Faith, and it registered the name Assembleia de Deus only in 1918.

Frida Strandberg, a Swedish nurse and editor, married Vingren and preached and wrote for the church's paper. Brazilian workers of the Northeast met at Natal without any Swede on 17 and 18 February 1929 and decided to be autonomous of the Swedish mission.

The convention at Natal met from 5 to 10 September 1930, by the diary, Jan-Åke Alvarsson, Ulrich and Isabela Oliveira; Conde alone puts it in July. It handed the work to national pastors, and Alvarsson calls that the pretext. Claudete Ulrich and her colleagues write that Samuel Nyström organized it and that it ruled that women could not take leadership in the churches.

That ruling went against Gunnar Vingren's own stated view. The church's published diary calls the meeting one of perfect harmony. It prints the declaration that sisters may testify and teach when needed, but a sister is not to be pastor or teacher of a church, save in exceptional cases where no capable brothers are present.

Frida Vingren's name left the paper's masthead in 1931, amid rumours of an affair. Ulrich and Valéria Vilhena call the rumour the trump card Nyström needed to put her out of his way. Alvarsson writes that she fell in love with a young man in 1931 or 1932, and that in all likelihood she never entered into sexual relations with him. Neither reading proves a fault.

Vingren died on 29 June 1933. She was kept from returning to Brazil and died in 1940, and the Swedish paper Evangelii Härold printed no obituary, Alvarsson writes.

Osiel Carvalho counts one federal deputy of the Assemblies between 1911 and 1985 and thirteen elected in 1986. He quotes Freston, who ties that change to a book that turned Scripture to electoral use.

Eder Santos writes that Nilsson himself wrote a leaflet against them and expelled them. Eduardo Alves says only that they were dismissed.

Vingren and Conde call Celina the first in Brazil to speak in tongues. A note in the paper of Rimilla Araújo and her colleagues reports that Araújo in 2014 and Alencar in 2000 contest it. It records Paulo Malaquias, a Baptist pastor baptized in the Spirit at Ramada in 1908, so she stands first in this church's memory.

Conde says Natal joined the two papers to avert a division. The diary records the joining and the ruling on women together, and Alvarsson, Ulrich and Vilhena say the women's question was the real issue.