Ashbel Green Simonton, first Presbyterian missionary to Brazil and his wife Helen Murdock Simonton, n.d. (RG 360, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia).

José Manoel da Conceição, the first Brazilian to become an ordained Presbyterian minister, 1865. From Presbiterianismo no Brasil, 1859–1959 (São Paulo, Brazil: Casa Editôra Presbiteriana, 1959), 7.

The original building of the First Presbyterian Church of
São Paulo, where Eduardo Carlos Pereira was minister
(Presbiterianismo no Brasil, 13).

Eduardo Carlos Pereira, leader of the movement that resulted in the formation of the Independent Presbyterian Church in 1903. From Flavio Pereira de Magalhães, ed., Eduardo Carlos Pereira: Seu Apostolado no Brasil (São Paulo, Brazil: Livraria e Editora Pendão Real, n.d.), cover

Brazil’s “Brazil Plan”

In 1907 missionaries of the CBM, having withdrawn from the presbyteries of the PCB, proposed to the Brazilian Presbytery of Bahia-Sergipe a new form of relationship. It was a plan of considerable vision that recognized the autonomy of the Brazilian church over all Presbyterian work in Brazil and looked to the eventual withdrawal of the expatriates. In this scheme, the missionaries would continue to cooperate with the PCB but would no longer participate in leadership roles. Two years later the General Assembly of the Brazilian church approved the Modus Operandi plan, very similar to the one proposed by the CBM, and the missionaries ceased being members of the national church’s presbyteries.

     The adoption of Modus Operandi, also known as the Brazil Plan, was seen by some as the emancipation of the Brazilian church. It was a significant step and would eventually lead to much bolder ones, but they would be decades in coming. Though they were no longer members of the presbyteries of the Brazilian church, North American workers continued to be members of the North American Missions, which were in effect parachurch organizations composed entirely of foreigners.

At this point there were five Missions: the Central Brazil Mission and the South Brazil Mission of the PCUSA and the West Brazil Mission, East Brazil Mission, and North Brazil Mission of the PCUS. The Missions received financial resources for their work from their mission boards in the United States. With no more direct contact with the Brazilian presbyteries, however, they were becoming increasingly isolated from what was happening in the Brazilian church. The terms of the Modus Operandi plan prohibited a missionary’s serving as pastor of a church under the jurisdiction of a Brazilian presbytery. The geographical areas already occupied by the Missions were considered their own legitimate fields of action, and they were permitted to open new ones. In these mission fields the missionaries were allowed to organize new churches, receive members, and exercise discipline over them, all in the name of the PCB. The understanding was that they would transfer organized churches, once they
had became mature, to presbyteries of the PCB.

     With the laudable purpose of coordinating the Missions’ work with that of the PCB, and also to administer provisions of the plan, a Modus Operandi
Commission was set up with six representatives of the American churches and six from the PCB, to meet annually. Decisions were to be made by the body as a whole using parliamentary procedure. Certainly the commission was a good idea, but the indifference of both parties is revealed in the fact that it never actually met until 1941—twenty-four.

     The lack of effort at coordination between Missions and national church during a period of twenty-four years is an indication of the separation that existed between missionaries and Brazilians and their respective work during the period of the Modus Operandi. years after the plan was instituted!

Delegates at the first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Brazil, 1910 (Presbiterianismo no Brasil, 11).

The lack of effort at coordination between Missions and national church during a period of twenty-four years is an indication of the separation that existed between missionaries and Brazilians and their respective work during the period of the Modus Operandi. The Missions worked separately from the Brazilian presbyteries, even to the point of preparing their own statistical reports (number of members, churches, etc.) which were sent to the General Assembly of the PCB and published along with that of the PCB.
     Modus Operandi propelled the missionaries to Brazil’s hinterlands, where the national church presbyteries had little or no presence, forcing the Missions to ignore the dense coastal population. This contributed toward a stagnation of the Presbyterian work in mushrooming urban centers and, for the long run, was probably a strategic mistake. Excluded from the presbyteries and often living in areas where there were no pastors of the PCB, missionaries participated very little in the life of the national church and knew little of its problems and concerns. In the 1930s the idea began to form among leaders of both groups that it was necessary to end this isolation and begin a dialogue to avoid misunderstandings and bring about a true cooperation. In 1941 the Modus Operandi Commission was activated and finally met. There was no lack of ideas for improving relations between the Missions and the PCB. A carefully-worked-out plan to replace Modus Operandi was circulated by a pastor of the PCB at the General Assembly in Botucatu, São Paulo, in 1942. It would have transferred to the PCB, within a two-year period, total jurisdiction over the fields maintained by the North American Missions, and the ordained missionaries (now a distinct minority) would have again become members of Brazilian presbyteries.6 The proposal was amply and hotly debated, but it did not have sufficient support for approval. It would not be long, however, before such support would be forthcoming.

Latin American Missions. From Brazil Missions: 1837−1937 (New York: Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1937).

     Many, however, including the Board of World Missions of the PCUS, were not convinced by these arguments. The PCUS noted its policy to “consult with the Missions in the fields concerning all programs which affect their operations.” 8 It feared that the use of finances and personnel from the United States by councils of the national church would restore a situation of dependence and rob the young church of its autonomy. The board, as well as some missionaries, doubted that financial resources from the U.S. would be used in a wise manner, and felt that disputes would arise among leaders for control of these resources. Others feared that the expensive pioneer work now done by the Missions would no longer receive adequate support. Integration was opposed by many Brazilians for whom the Modus Operandi was a symbol of their own nationalism. They feared that foreigners, once inside their church councils, would pressure the church to go in directions that were against its wishes.

     The controversy soon took the form of a debate about whether the Modus Operandi plan should be jettisoned. The PCUS board in Nashville, little influenced by the International Missionary Council’s pronouncements, defended the status
quo while the PCUSA board in New York pressed for radical changes. In its report to the General Assembly in 1951 the New York board opposed the continuation of Mission organizations separate from the national church: “The work is one and it is not fully effective when carried on as two independent, parallel movements.”9

     Most of the missionaries of both the PCUSA and PCUS were against integration. From their viewpoint it appeared that the New York board had decided what was best for Brazil and was determined to put it into practice at whatever cost. The opposition of the missionaries was also related to their reluctance to end the old American Mission structures which seemed to have worked well for almost a century. Full integration would mean that the missionaries, should they be invited by the national church to stay, would be entirely under the jurisdiction of agencies of the PCB. Many felt that the church (as well as they themselves) was not ready for this.

The Inter-Presbyterian Council Compromise

     Searching for a solution, the Modus Operandi commission called for an inter-Presbyterian conference with the participation of representatives of the PCB, the PCUSA, the PCUS, and the North American churches’ Missions. That conference, held in Campinas in 1954, opted to retire the Brazil Plan, and initiated a transition toward a new kind of relationship between the partners, looking to giving the PCB direction of all cooperative work in Brazil10 through the establishment of an Inter- Presbyterian Council (IPC) composed of twelve representatives of the PCB and six each from the PCUSA and the PCUS. Again, decisions were to be made by the body as a whole, following parliamentary procedure. The IPC would promote deeper cooperation between the American and Brazilian churches and also serve as an agency to give direction to the Presbyterian Missions’ work in Brazil. While the adoption of the IPC plan,which was built on a Modus Operandi foundation, meant the rejection of integration as understood by the New York board, some of the Whitby Conference’s progressive missiology was reflected in it. The IPC did envision a partnership, though not exactly the kind suggested by the Whitby document Partners in Obedience. But it was a significant step in that direction since for the first time both of the American churches signed an affirmation that their goal in Brazil was the eventual transfer of all of their work to the Brazilian church.

Front page of Presbyterian Church of Brazil’s Brasil Presbiteriano, March 1958, with headline “Marching Toward the Centennial of Presbyterianism in Brazil.”

All agreed that the newly formed IPC faced an enormous challenge. The PCB was not growing as rapidly as it had been before and it was obvious that a new strategy was necessary. At its first meeting the IPC approved a series of recommendations presented by the Missions aimed at closer coordination of their work with that of the PCB. Among them was a cautious suggestion of the idea that missionaries may be assigned to urban areas. Among the other decisions: that the churches in the Mission fields send their tithes to the General Assembly as did the churches under the jurisdiction of the Brazilian presbyteries, and that the Missions submit annual reports from their fields, including statistics. It was a beginning, but much autonomy was still held by the Missions, which continued to use their considerable funds exclusively for projects they administered without having to report them to the IPC. But the IPC would soon begin to consider requests from agencies of the PCB for U.S. funds for their projects. That would affect the Missions’ pocketbooks. The period of change had indeed begun. As Nashville saw it, the IPC was only a reaffirmation of Modus Operandi with some modifications. The Board of World Missions’ report to the General Assembly of the PCUS in 1954 recognized that its own task was not to establish Southern Presbyterian colonies in the world but, at least with regard to Brazil, it insisted that “missions and the Brazilian churches still need each other.”11
     The New York board, with a determination born of the conviction that its idea was the wave of the future, held a major a conference in the spring of 1956 at Lake Mohonk, New Jersey, to discuss once again the implementation of its integration policy in its missionary fields around the world. The outcome of the conference was foreseeable. It called for full integration of all the PCUSA Missions within five years.

The Beginning of Limitations on Mission Autonomy

     Although Whitby-style integration had been rejected, the Brazilian church through the IPC lost no time in introducing its own kind of changes in the cooperative work aimed toward bringing the North American Missions’ work more under the control of the national church. For example, first steps were taken looking toward the eventual transfer of Mission-owned properties to the PCB, and a procedure was established whereby the Missions would annually submit their plans for the development of their fields to the IPC. Initiatives like these were important steps toward the new goals for cooperative work in Brazil but some missionaries resented what they saw as the growing intervention of the PCB in what they considered as their own work. The time for change had arrived, however, and it was not to be stopped. Even the PCUS recognized that. In its annual report to the General Assembly in 1960 the Board of World Missions said, “Indeed the day has passed when the Christian expression in such lands can be interpreted primarily in terms of missions and missionaries.

     By 1962 even the missionaries opposed to complete integration recognized the inevitability of an eventual transfer of the Missions’ power to the national church although many hoped this would be done not all at once, but rather in progressive steps. The Montreat consultation on missions became a turning point for the PCUS and the introduction point for a new mission policy. Its major conclusion concerning the relationship between the mother church in the U.S. and its daughter churches around the world was that “the structure of this relationship should be determined individually by the national churches in consultation with the PCUS.”16

     The PCUS had opened the door for radical changes and in many parts of the world they were not long in coming. After Montreat the partner churches of the PCUS held their own conferences and many of them opted for new relationships eliminating the parallel structures with the American Missions, placing responsibility for the evangelization of their people entirely in the hands of the national church. Those kinds of proposals received the approval and full support of the Board of World Missions of the PCUS. The end result was the integration of the North American forces with the churches they had planted. Dr. Street saw these changes as part of a paradigm shift—a replacement of the “mission based” structure by a “church based” one. In this system, wrote Dr. Street, “No plan is provided for an autonomous mission. … No longer are there parallel programs, but one program—the church’s program. The church in the land becomes the base and channel of the missionary effort of the sending church.”17

     The Montreat conclusions were intended to apply to all PCUS partners overseas, but in Brazil there were no immediate changes. In July of 1964 a Presbyterian Latin American Conference met in Campinas with the participation of representatives of Presbyterian churches in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Brazil. The delegates refused to endorse a single model to be rigorously applied in each of their countries. They agreed that the form of partnership should be the responsibility of the national church in each country together with the PCUS, as determined at Montreat. The Brazilian church, satisfied with the pace of recent progress toward sovereignty through the IPC, defended the continuation of the agreement already in force.

     The transfer of Mission-related churches to Brazilian presbyteries now became a source of even livelier discussion among the partners. The tendency of the Missions was to be in no hurry to make the transfer, alleging that the churches needed to be better prepared. At times there was direct confrontation over specific cases as with the Anápolis church, whose transfer to the jurisdiction of the presbytery had been specifically requested by the IPC. The West Brazil Presbyterian Mission resisted, insisting that the church was not ready yet. The IPC felt it necessary to remind the Missions of both North American denominations that transfers must be carried out “whenever a congregation, church or field met the necessary conditions.”18 It was obvious that the national church felt that it could and should determine whether those conditions had been met. From its point of view the missionaries were “dragging their feet” in hesitating to turn over churches which the national church felt should already be under the jurisdiction of the presbyteries. Nationals often felt that “Mission churches” which were not yet able to support a pastor financially were not contributing at the level of which they were capable, because they felt that under the leadership of American missionaries they did not need to. From the Anápolis case and others like it, it was clear that the power and authority of the Brazilian church in cooperative work was increasing while the Mission’s was diminishing. Without fanfare, integration, Brazilian style, was gradually happening.

     The Missions responded to their lessening autonomy by simplifying and unifying their own structure. A major step in this direction was taken in 1951 when the PCUS Missions (North, East, and West Brazil) were replaced by a single organization called the Brazil Mission, which covered all of Brazil. It was then subdivided into four geographic regions, each with its own administrative apparatus. The former internal structure remained much the same but at least the national church now only had one Mission to deal with.

     The streamlining of the Mission in Brazil was not enough to satisfy the Nashville board of the PCUS. Now it began to question the continuing existence of a missionary structure parallel to the national church. The missionaries could see the handwriting on the wall and argued for the continuation of some form of missionary organization. But it was now too late to stem the incoming tide from Brazil and the policy changes from the U.S. As control gradually passed to the national church the need for a missionary bureaucracy decreased, resulting in fewer committees, shorter meetings and less business to transact. For the old Missions, time was running out.

Organization of the church of Cachoeira Grande in the interior of Maranhao, 1969
(photograph from author’s collection).

The Brazilian Church Breaks with the New York Board

     While the PCUS’s newly consolidated Mission sought to adjust to the transfer of power that was taking place in Brazil, in the PCUSA camp the changes were coming even more rapidly. In 1958 the PCUSA merged with the United Presbyterian Church of North America, creating the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPCUSA). The friction which had already existed between the PCUSA and the PCB intensified.19 There had been serious differences between the long-time partners over the integration issue and the transfer to the PCB of educational institutions founded by the missionaries. But at the heart of the tensions between the two churches were the basic issues of what should be the message, the mission, and the ecumenical connections of a church in the twentieth century.20 The conservative Brazilian saw itself as being much more concerned with evangelism than its American counterpart. In addition it disapproved of what it perceived as the UPCUSA’s too-cozy relationship with Catholics. The ongoing friction had resulted in an almost total lack of mutual trust between the leaders of the two churches.

     By the end of the 1960s COEMAR, the UPCUSA successor to the Board of Foreign
Missions, had drastically reduced the number of its missionaries in Brazil, and in 1971 it dissolved the venerable Central Brazil Mission and set up the Brazil Advisory Committee (BAC). This meant, in effect, the end of the missionary structure of the UPCUSA in Brazil. The IPC, at its 1971 meeting, sent an inquiry to New York, asking about the nature of the BAC: “is (it) still a Mission and therefore participates in the IPC?”21 The Brazilian members of the IPC wanted a definition, since if it were not a Mission they would doubtless have asked for its exclusion. Confrontations such as this soon led to the collapse of the fragile relationship between the PCB and the UPCUSA. The Brazilian church, having already declared two of COEMAR’s missionaries persona non grata, requested that four other couples leave their fields. The UPCUSA dissolved its BAC in 1972 and in that year sent no representatives to the regular meeting of the IPC. In 1972, for the first time since its inception, the IPC did not meet at all. In February 1973, the executive committee of the PCB’s General Assembly declared that its relationship with the UPCUSA was terminated, and in an article written by the moderator of the church in March of the same year, the news was made public. The article cited a “series of incidents and disagreements that date from the beginning of the century” to explain the break and stated that its relationship with the UPCUSA “after the unilateral act, without consulting us, of the dissolution of the Mission, was de facto non-existent.”22

Missionary members of the North Brazil Mission at their Annual Meeting in Recife, 1966 (photograph from author’s collection).

The Executive Committee of the Brazil Mission (PCUS), Campinas, São Paulo, 1970     (photograph from author’s collection).

    Given the differences already mentioned, the breakdown in communications, and the climate of intolerance between the leaders of the two groups, the end of the formal relationship between the PCB and the UPCUSA was probably a relief for both. On the other hand, the end of more than a century of partnership was not easy for the missionaries in Brazil who had to abandon their fields of work, nor for the many in the PCB who acknowledged the debt of gratitude they owed to the northern church and to the missionaries of the Central Brazil Mission. The PCB action did not mean the end of the UPCUSA’s work in Brazil. At the invitation of presbyteries of the Independent Presbyterian Church
of Brazil, a number of missionaries continued their work under the direction of that denomination.

The PCUS Goes it Alone

     Not surprisingly, the Inter-Presbyterian Council did not survive the break between the Brazilian and American churches. In the beginning of 1973, with the UPCUSA out of the picture, the PCB and the PCUS signed a new bilateral cooperative agreement to be coordinated and supervised by a brand new Permanent Commission of Presbyterian
Cooperation (PCPC) composed of members of both churches. During the thirteen years of the PCPC the changes were to be more rapid than in any other period in the long history of the relationship of the Brazilian church with North American Presbyterians, and they were to end with another unilateral move by the Brazilian Presbyterians.

While the PCB was happy to establish a bilateral relationship with the PCUS after the abrupt end of relations with the UPCUSA in 1973, it insisted on new rules. After the formal consultation with the PCUS representatives which resulted in the establishment of the PCPC, that new entity met in March to prepare its bylaws. They contained important innovations. After defining the participation of the American church in cooperative projects in Brazil as “transitory” and the service of the PCB “permanent,”23 the PCPC bylaws affirmed that it is the duty of the PCUS “to facilitate the transfer of fields and churches to the PCB.”24 This had already been a part of the previous agreement administered by the IPC. New was the supervisory power that the PCPC reserved for itself as well as its right to initiate the process of the transfer to the PCB of all the remaining mission fields that were still under control of the North American Missions. It also reserved for itself authority to terminate PCUS collaboration with the PCB in any cooperative project. The PCPC bylaws not only prohibited missionaries who were members of North American presbyteries from being members of Brazilian presbyteries as well, but also prohibited them even from pastoring churches in Brazilian presbyteries.25 Under the new regulations the missionaries could no longer employ PCB pastors on a permanent basis in missionary fields. In addition the PCPC was now to decide on the validity of new invitations to missionaries for cooperative work and would have to approve, on an annual basis, the work assignment of missionaries already in Brazil.26 The new agreement was church to church, reflecting the intention of the American church to end its practice of leaving much of the administrative responsibility for its Brazilian partnership to the missionary personnel. Taken together these items represented significant changes for the PCUS, whose missionaries, until that moment, still enjoyed considerable freedom of action within their few fields. With the advent of the PCPC that freedom of action would become increasingly limited and eventually non-existent.

Brazilian Presbyterian worker with Bible Institute training leading a service by gaslight on the Trans-Amazon Highway, 1980 (photograph from author’s collection).

     One of the provisions of the agreement now governing cooperative work gave the missionaries something new to worry about. The bylaws of the PCPC contained a clause, proposed by the Brazilian delegation, that in the event of the union of either of the partner churches with another denomination the agreement would automatically be terminated. Rapid progress was being made in the effort to reunite the PCUS and the UPCUSA, and in 1974 there seemed to be a high probability that the reunion would soon take place. With the new clause in mind, the executive committee of the Mission sent a document to the Division of International Mission in Atlanta (successor to the Board of World Missions in Nashville), suggesting that such a reunion would have an adverse effect on missionary work in Brazil. The document came across as a warning and it was not well received by mission leaders in the United States, which saw it as unwanted pressure against union. That episode reinforced the reactionary image that many already had of the missionaries in Brazil.

     In succeeding meetings of the PCPC the changes leading in the direction toward total PCB control of PCUS missionary activities became even more open and intentional. Significantly, a process was begun to transfer to the PCB ownership of the properties of all the educational institutions founded and maintained by the Mission. In 1975 the general secretary of the Mission wrote to the missionaries: “our relationship with the PCB is in a phase of rapid change. … For many years we have been accustomed to having complete liberty to make decisions. It appears to me that that period is rapidly coming to an end.”27

     In 1975 the executive committee of the Mission decided that it would stop reacting to the rapidly changing circumstances, accept the inevitability of Brazilian control of all Presbyterian work in Brazil, and help bring it about with the least upheaval possible.

Pioneer settlers gathered for Sunday schools along the Trans-Amazon Highway, 1981 (photograph from author’s collection).

     In 1980 the partner churches decided to hold a formal meeting to reflect on all the changes that had taken place during the eight years of cooperative work under the supervision of the PCPC. The beautiful conference center at Montreat was chosen for the setting. This meeting was the first ever to be held outside Brazil in the more than a century of cooperative relationship between the American and Brazilian churches.

     Important new elements came out of the Montreat consultation. It was agreed that cooperation should become truly mutual and include Brazilian participation in projects in the United States. The 1980 agreement stipulated that the church in whichever country the cooperative project existed would have full jurisdiction over that project.

     The process of transferring to the Brazilian church the direction of what was done in Brazil by American missionaries was nearing its end. Integration, pushed by the PCUSA but rejected by the PCB in the 1950s, was being implemented three decades later with the assent of the PCUS. But the Brazilian church still rejected missionary membership in its own presbyteries. It wanted integration,
but not too much.

        By this time the great majority of the missionaries were in agreement with the transfer to the PCB of those fields and properties which had previously been “theirs.” The PCUSA Field Secretary for Brazil in his annual report for 1981 attempted to help the missionaries see the change in historical/missiological perspective and wrote that what was happening “should not be seen as a sudden development with negative inferences, but rather as the natural conclusion of a relationship between two churches that began when Ashbel Green Simonton baptized the first Brazilian Presbyterian believer in 1863.”31

 The Camp Calvin decision did not come as a surprise to those who had followed closely the PCB top leadership’s increasing unhappiness with the policies of the UPCUSA, from whom they had severed relationships only ten years earlier. While the UPCUSA was the earliest advocate of complete autonomy for all its daughter national churches, that denomination had increasingly likened the PCB leadership to the dictatorial practices of the Brazilian military government which had seized political power in the coup of 1964. In addition, the conservative PCB leadership did not appreciate the openness of the UPCUSA toward the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil.

     No particular problems surfaced during the withdrawal of the PC(USA) forces. A final meeting of the PCPC was held on August 10, 1984, when the PCPC executive committee, represented on that occasion only by the moderator of the General Assembly of the PCB and the Field Secretary of the PC(USA), met to deal with a few final details and to pray together. September 30, 1984 was set as the date by which the transfer of all former PCUS work to the PCB was to be completed.

     Although events immediately following the 1983 reunion of the two American Presbyterian churches brought partnership with the PCB to an abrupt end, it was not the end of partnership in Brazil. At the time conversations were already being held with the smaller Independent Presbyterian Church of Brazil and these soon resulted in a fullblown church-to-church relationship with the PC(USA) which continues to this day. All of the lessons learned from the PCB transition were effectively applied to this new partnership. As it turned out the Presbyterian Mission in Brazil had, from the September 1984 date, only fifteen more months of life. The Mission was dissolved on December 31, 1985 by the successor denomination to the one that had initiated it. The reader should not conclude that the demise of the Brazil Mission was a direct consequence of the break between the Brazilian and American churches after union in 1983. That is not the case. The closing of the Mission was the natural result of the intentional turning over of all its responsibilities to the national church. The PC(USA) General Assembly approved the dissolution of the Brazil Mission without knowing that the PCB would choose not to continue in cooperation. The end of the Mission in Brazil came quite independently of the result at Camp Calvin.

     The Brazil Mission was the last of the foreign Missions which were part and parcel of how the Presbyterian family had done mission since the middle of the nineteenth century. 34 In that century Missions were established as the means for the planting of churches in countries like China, Zaire, Japan, Korea, Mexico, and also Brazil. The Brazil Presbyterian Mission did not die young. It reached a ripe old age, and it can be said that its passing was entirely due to “natural causes”—the demands of a “younger church” come of age and the policy changes of a “sending church” adjusting to new realities. The Mission expired in an age and in a country radically different from that in which it was born. Times had changed, there was a strong, vibrant national church in the land, and the time had come to seek new ways to participate as partners in the unchanging task given to the church to announce the Kingdom of God among the peoples of the world.

6 Report of Ashmun C. Salley, Executive Secretary of the Central Brazil Mission, dated August 20, 1942. Copy in author’s possession.

7 Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (hereafter Minutes of the GA, PCUSA), 1947, Part 2, Report of the Board of Foreign Missions (Philadelphia, Office of the General
Assembly), 9.

10 Unpublished report of the Presbyterian Conference of 1954. Copy in author’s possession.

11 Minutes of the GA, PCUS, 1954, Part 1, Appendix, 161.

12 Minutes of the GA, PCUS, 1960, Part 2, Report of the Board of World Missions, 5.

13 James E. Bear, Mission to Brazil (Nashville: Board of World Missions, PCUS, 1961), 206.

14 Ibid.

15 T. Watson Street, On the Growing Edge of the Church (Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1965), 59.

16 Ibid., 19.
17 Ibid., 62.
18 Minutes of the IPC, May 4, 1967, 2. Copy in author’s possession.

19 Brazil Notes (published by the former Central Brazil Mission of the UPCUSA), No. 4 (March 30, 1974): 2.

20 Brazil Notes, No. 6 (April 27, 1973).

21 Minutes of the Inter-Presbyterian Council, September 7, 1971, 2. Copy in author’s possession.

22 Brasil Presbiteriano, March 1973.
23 Bylaws of the PCPC, 1973. Article 2, first paragraph, 2. Copy in author’s possession.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid. Article 7, paragraphs 1 and 2.
26 Ibid. Article 8, a and b.

27 Letter from Jule C. Spach, General Secretary of the Brazil Mission, to PCUS missionaries, undated. Copy in author’s possession.

28 The Strategy Guidelines, Executive Committee of the Brazil Presbyterian Mission, June 1975. Copy in author’s possession.

29 Preliminary report of the Office of Review and
Evaluation, May 1977. Copy in author’s possession.

30 Minutes of the PCPC, March 17, 1979, 2. Copy in author’s possession.

31 Annual Report of Frank L. Arnold, Field Secretary of the Brazil Mission, 1981, 1. Copy in author’s possession.

32 Letter from Clifton Kirkpatrick, Director of the
Division of International Mission, dated July 12, 1983. Copy in author’s possession.

33 Recommendations of the General Assembly Mission Board (GAMB), PCUS, October 27, 1983. Copy in author’s possession.

34 The Brazil experience was unique in Latin American Presbyterianism. There were only two other Mission structures established in the entire area. These were in Mexico and Venezuela and were dissolved before the one in Brazil.