Day 434

This week, we talked with a record number of people who said "our pastor doesn't let us interact with other religions". People seem to have a lot of faith in the pastors, lots of people seem to talk about their pastor (usually known by first name) with lots of enthusiasm. We also witnessed a pastor "speaking in tongues" while we were passing by on the street. In practice, it seems like he takes 3 words and mixes up the parts of those words. At one point he actually started shouting this: "RA-TATA-TATA-TATA-TATA" rapidly and repeatedly and the whole time there's dramatic music playing in the background. So that's a first.

Here, there are churches that are more or less what you'd expect at a church, the Catholic and Presbyterian and some other sects are less eccentric. But others go *all out*. And it's all based on the idea of getting the audience riled up through rising and falling action, like a storyline. A pastor will stand up in front on the stage and begin by talking at regular volume, steadily increasing until *everything* he says is shouted, ending with some phrase or motto screamed at maximum volume into the microphone. And the process continues. The crowds go wild, often a lot louder than the pastor, so everybody's screaming and you can't hear anything that anybody says, and even a block away you're still hearing all of this.

I can see why maybe the Church of Jesus Christ might seem a bit less... exciting?

This week, we'll try to work more with our long-term investigators who still haven't taken the step to be baptised. We're planning on reading President Nelson’s final talk from the most recent General Conference. I feel like we haven't been demonstrating the importance of having a living prophet in concrete ways (our area, even mission). I think it's actually *very* rare for an investigator to read something written by a living prophet, so this will be a nice change of plans.

I've chosen my team, Grêmio. It's also the first jersey I bought while in the MTC, so I guess it was fate.