Amazon River is the largest river in the world by volume of water and depending who you talk to it the longest or second longest river in the world behind the Nile.

The river stretches through Peru, Columbia and the vast jungles of Brazil.

According to historians, the river was named Amazon by Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana who encountered a tribe along its banks whose warriors were led by women. This reminded him of the female Amazon warriors who were part of Greek mythology.

In an article for CBN, George Thomas wrote about his visit to the Amazon in 2024. He reported on a revival taking place in the Northwestern region of the Amazon River located in Brazil. This is home to about 30 million people with many of them living along the Amazon River.

Though the region has been long dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, Charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity has been making significant inroads in recent years.

In the first six months of 2024, the Foursquare Church water baptized approximately 14,500 people after they declared their faith in Christ.

Foursquare has over 3,200 churches in the area that still use the river as their main way of travelling through the region.

“Back when we started evangelizing in this region, we had just a few workers and, in some municipalities, pastors had to walk 10 to 15 km to open a congregation,” said Josué Bengtson who started one of the first Foursquare churches in the region. “Today, almost all medium-sized churches in the Amazon have a small boat.”

The pastors typically use motorized boats to hold services along the Amazon river, but that wasn’t always the case.

Esequiel Santo has been a missionary in this region of the world for over 3o years, told how they initially travelled in the early years.

“I’m from Rio de Janeiro, and back then since I couldn’t afford a plane ticket, I had to take a 6-day bus journey to Belem,” Santo said. “From there I went by boat for another six days to the outskirts of the Amazon basin. Once I got there, it took at least 15 days by canoe, not a motorized boat, to paddle up the Solimões River and the Purus River, until we reached the remote communities where we worked,” 

The Holy Spirit seems to be moving in this region of the world. Throughout the Bible, we see instances when the Holy Spirit moved on specific cultural groups.

The city of Nineveh came to the Lord when the prophet Jonah brought a message of repentance.

The Holy Spirit fell in Samaria because of the work of Philip the Evangelist, and the Apostles John and Peter. The Samaritans were an ethnic religious group created when the king of Assyria sent gentiles from several nations to live in Samaria. They mixed with the Jewish population that still remained and this resulted in the formation of a religion that included both Jewish and pagan practices (2 Kings 17:24; Ezra 4:2-11).

Throughout history we see times of the Holy Spirit moving on particular cultural groups, while nothing seems to be happening in neighbouring, but different, ethnicities.