Building Communities : Father Nicholas Wheeler in Brazil
To the rest of the world Project B04 is a worthy cause but to us it’s our own Father Nicholas, a neighbour in St Michael’s, Camden Town for many years And now Priest Missioner to Cidade de Deus in Rio de Janeiro.
Cidade de Deus (City of God) is one of the most disadvantaged communities in Rio de Janeiro. Built in the 1960s to provide a new start for the city’s poor, it became a notorious haven for drug trafficking and gun crime. Fernando Meirelles’ award-winning film in 2003 brought the neighbourhood to world attention, highlighting the battles between the dealers and the police or rival drugs gangs which left many dead. Father Nicholas has been asked to support the work of the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil as it seeks to make a difference to the people of the City of God. He is attached to the Parish of Christ the King in the heart of the community. The congregation is small but growing and shares its space with a number of social projects which provide local people with job skills, English classes and counselling. In a city where a huge statue of Christ the Redeemer looks down from a mountain top with outstretched arms of unconditional love, this project is attempting to translate this vision of God into a practical expression of his love for the world in one of its most broken and abandoned places.
Cidade de Deus has now become famous for two vibrant new murals painted on the boundary walls of the church of Christ the King. It’s not possible to do justice to the murals in this magazine but you can see them in Transmission, the magazine of USPG: Anglicans in World Mission [there are 2 copies at the back o the church ] and on a poster on the noticeboard, or on their website www.uspg.org People come to pose in front of the mural and have their pictures taken in the outstretched arms of Jesus.
“I believe that God has called me to a new beginning in a place to which he has lent his own name” – Nicholas Wheeler, USPG Mission Companion
Of course Cidade de Deus isn’t USPG’s only project in Brazil and worldwide they have projects in over 50 countries ranging from breadmaking to herbal remedies, HIV to Malaria, care of babies and of the elderly. In Zimbabwe struggling rural congregations paid their diocesan quota in maize and candles rather than fail to pay at all. In Myanmar the daughter of the Archbishop of Myanmar gave a donation for fans for the parish church where the congregation was struggling with the heat and with paying the clergy enough to live on – 50p a day, enough to buy a bag of rice that would last their family a month. In Tanzania a tamasha was held to raise money to support young people’s choirs, a huge part of the local scene. What sets a tamasha apart from other fund-raising events is that everyone there, from the visiting speaker and invited guests to the ordinary people in the audience, has to announce out loud how much they are donating. Now there’s a thought!
You can find out more about all these on their website or in Transmission, their quarterly newsletter.
USPG: Anglicans in World Mission
Judy East