Just days after posting this item about Brazil’s most popular priest, I found this little nugget, which shows just what the Church is up against down there.

Want to know what’s luring a new generation of Brazilians away from the Church? Evangelical churches offering, among other things, fight nights and tattoo parlors.

From the New York Times:

The atmosphere was electric at Reborn in Christ Church on “Extreme Fight” night. Churchgoers dressed in jeans and sneakers, many with ball caps turned backward, lined a makeshift boxing ring to cheer on bare-chested jujitsu fighters.

They screamed when a fan favorite, Fábio Buca, outlasted his opponent after several minutes. They went wild when Pastor Dogão Meira, 26, took his man down, pinning him with an armlock just 10 seconds into the fight.

With the crowd still buzzing, Pastor Mazola Maffei, dressed in army pants and a T-shirt, grabbed a microphone. Pastor Maffei, who is also Pastor Meira’s fight trainer, then held the crowd rapt with a sermon about the connection between sports and spirituality.

“You need to practice the sport of spirituality more,” he urged. “You need to fight for your life, for your dreams and ideals.”

Reborn in Christ is among a growing number of evangelical churches in Brazil that are finding ways to connect with younger people to swell their ranks. From fight nights to reggae music to video games and on-site tattoo parlors, the churches have helped make evangelicalism the fastest-growing spiritual movement in Brazil.

Evangelical Christian churches are luring Brazilians away from Roman Catholicism, the dominant religion in Brazil. In 1950, 94 percent of Brazilians said they were Catholic, but that number fell steadily to 74 percent by 2000. Meanwhile, the percentage of those who described themselves as evangelicals grew by five times in that period, reaching 15 percent in 2000. A new government census is due out next year.

Despite Brazil’s deep connection to Catholicism, more and more Brazilians want to experiment and choose their own religion, said Silvia Fernandes, a professor at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, who wrote a book about Brazil’s evangelical movement.

She said more Brazilians were attracted to evangelical churches, or Pentecostalism, for the “flexibility of the religious expression.” They see churches like Reborn as places where they can express themselves more freely, and “not only look for solutions to personal problems, but also find a place to meet and socialize.”

Pastor Meira said that for young people seeking salvation, evangelism could fill a void. “Here they enter the church, sometimes to see a fight competition, they receive the word of Jesus Christ, and they begin a transformation. They will get off drugs, start to respect their parents and start to cure the illnesses of the soul, like anxiety, depression, drugs and alcohol, prostitution,” he said.

Read on for more at the link.