• Resources for Your Church
  • Christian Formation Resources
  • NetsforLife® Inspiration Fund
  • Special Church Campaigns
  • US Disaster Resources
  • Online Store
  • Worship Resources
  • Request a Speaker
  • Newsletters
  • Stories from the Field
  • Episcopal Media Center
• Christian Formation Programs
• Volunteer Opportunities
• Link to Us
• Lent

City of God

by The Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

5/25/2007

Acts 2:1-212 or Genesis 11:1-9
Psalm 104:25-35,37
Romans 8:14-17
John 14:8-17 (25-27)

And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. -- Genesis 11:2

Cidade de Deus was an idea whose heart was surely in the right place -- a Rio de Janiero suburb created in the 1960s by the Brazilian government as a community that could receive families displaced by flooding and be a home near their places of employment for low income workers, a planned alternative to the favelas, informal shantytowns that fringe almost all Brazilian cities.

But more and more rural people streamed into Cidade de Deus, thousands more than it could handle. Like the unplanned favelas, Cidade de Deus was soon overrun with many urban ills: disease, crime, overcrowding, limited legal access to utilities, to education. Still, to the faveladors, it is home, and they want to live there, desiring to make their community a safer and more human place to raise their families.

Episcopal Relief and Development and the Diocese of Rio de Janiero have built a community center in Cidade de Deus, providing holistic health care education, care and support for people with HIV/AIDS and other illnesses, support for young people and families traumatized by drug and gang violence. This uniquely creative partnership has enriched life in this teeming urban setting in many other ways: dance, art and theatre for young people, community gardens tucked into alleyways, so that faveladors can raise needed fresh vegetables for their families and to sell to other families, health education in school and church buildings -- even in a beauty school!

Migration of the poor to the cities is a fact of life in Brazil, as it is in most developing countries. Cidade de Deus is not as its planners hoped it would be, but it is a place where people from rural areas have come to stay. Bit by bit, it is becoming better than it was, and it will be better than it is. It is, after all, Cidade de Deus -- Portuguese for "City of God."