Today, Samuel Cruz, M.Div., M.Phil., Ricardo Ramos, M.Div., and Charles Perabeau, M.A., are, with Prof. Maduro, members of the team. Soon, we expect the Rev. Paulo Ayres Mattos, a senior Brazilian scholar and former Methodist bishop, to become part of the team and continue the research on Newark's Luso-Brazilian Pentecostalism initiated by Orivaldo L pes. Newark, again, is a notable instance of all these complex processes.
Several factors are especially notable.
Pentecostalism's frequent and relatively small services offer a personable, supportive, passionate, and non-elitist atmosphere. It is able to adapt to the cultural and linguistic idiosyncrasies of newcomers. It attends consistently to the need for healing, warmth, emotional expression and festive celebration. Pentecostalism also provides certainty, discipline, sustenance and social control, while at the same time focusing deliberately on those despised and marginalized by society. For this population, the traits of Pentecostalism seem to make it one of the few accessible avenues for reconstructing community, integrating healthily into the city, developing coping mechanisms and resources, and for fruitfully overcoming the tests and traps urban life brings to new immigrants and their offspring.