PORTO, Portugal (AP) — Porto prides itself on its beaches, its ancient churches covered in blue and white tiles and its famous port wine, named after the city in northern Portugal.
It is also home to a different kind of church – located in the beach suburbs along the Atlantic coast near a fishing village known for some of the the biggest waves in the world. Congregants come in board shorts, T-shirts, flip-flops – even barefoot.
They surf before they pray.
The Surf Church was founded by a Brazilian-born Portuguese surfer and ordained Baptist minister to spread the gospel in a once strictly Catholic country – and top surfing destination – where about half of the young people today they say they have no religion.
In less than a decade, the congregation has grown from a few families to dozens of congregants representing more than a dozen nationalities from around the world. Their motto: ” We love waves. We love Jesus.”
“When you wait for the right wave, it’s the calm before the swell, and that’s a peaceful moment that sometimes lasts seconds, sometimes minutes,” said Rev. Samuel Cianelli, pastor of Surf Church. “That peaceful moment for me is my deepest connection with God.”
On a recent Sunday, he donned a bright orange wetsuit instead of the traditional priestly garb and lay face down on a surfboard in the fine sand of Matosinhos beach to show the young parishioners who had gathered around him how to paddle, “surface” and catch a wave.
“I’ve always loved waves, and when I see people learning to surf, it makes me so happy,” said Uliana Yarova, 17, after emerging from the same water where Cianelli baptized her and her brother in a joyful ceremony a week later. They wore matching white T-shirts that read, “I chose Jesus.”
The Ukrainian teenager fled her war-torn country with her family after Russia’s invasion and found refuge in Porto and the Surf Church.
“When you’re paddling on the surfboard and waiting for the wave, and then you stand, you might have doubts and feel like you’re going to fall,” she said. “And then, when everything goes well, you feel confidence and peace – you feel nature and God holding you on that wave.”
Church members, mostly Gen Z and millennials, went in and out of the water smiling, carrying red and turquoise surfboards with Surf Church decals. Some wore a cross tattoo, the only visible mark that distinguished them from the other surfers swimming in the waves with them.
In preparation for the service, they rinsed the surfboards and carried them to a white van, in which some missionaries in bathing suits drove to the nearby Surf Church.
Churches in Porto, Portugal’s second-largest city, include the majestic Cathedral with its silver altar, the so-called “Chapel of Souls” with its façade made of thousands of illustrated white and blue tiles, and São Francisco with its intricate wood carvings covered in gold dust.
Instead, the Surf Church’s garage is painted with a mural of a gold-colored VW camper van with a blue surfboard strapped to the roof.
After surfing, the sandal-wearing church members hung their wetsuits next to a rack of boards. Some rinsed their feet with a garden hose or took a quick shower before gathering to pray and sing in a cozy living room decorated with surfboards hanging from the ceiling and a mural of surfers riding the waves.
Church member Hannah Kruckels said she never felt so welcome in a much larger traditional church in her native Switzerland. That changed when she came to Surf Church as an intern in 2020, where she feels at home and where she learned to surf.
“It’s an important part of spirituality to be connected to something bigger. In this case, for us, it’s God, but it can also be the sea,” she said after a Sunday service she attended with her Portuguese boyfriend, who is also a surfer. “That makes surfing a spiritual experience.”
Surfing had a religious significance in Hawaii; it originated there long before the arrival of Europeans.
“After prayers and offerings, master craftsmen made boards from sacred koa or wililili trees, and some had heiaus (temples) on the beach where believers could pray for waves,” writes William Finnegan in “Barbarian Days: A Surfer’s Life.”
Men and women of all ages and social classes, from the nobility to the common people, surfed. But when Calvinist missionaries arrived on the islands in the 19th century, they were horrified by what they considered a barbaric spectacle and banned surfing.
It was only decades later that it was revived thanks to Hawaiians like Duke Kahanamoku, an Olympic gold-winning swimmer who is considered the father of modern surfing.
Surfers were still “branded as truants and vandals,” Finnegan wrote. Even in modern times, surfing is banned in some beach towns.
For a long time, surfing was frowned upon and considered a counter-culture movement or mere pastime – and for decades it was hardly known outside of California and Hawaii.
But the tides have changed. Surfing has spread across the globe as a professional and recently Olympic sport and as a multi-billion dollar industry.
Portugal has become one of the most popular surfing destinations in the world, with some of the biggest waves for pros in the fishing village of Nazaré and less crowded waves for beginners on the beaches near Porto.
“People from all over the world come to Portugal because they want to experience what the beaches of Portugal have to offer,” said Cianelli, wearing a loose shirt with palm tree motifs. “We thought this was a good strategy to start a church that combines Jesus and surfing.”
He grew up in the Brazilian port city of Santos and was an active swimmer there, where football legend Pelé also played most of his career. After an injury prevented Cianelli from competing at the age of 15, he started surfing.
At the same time, he grew closer to his Christian faith. He attended seminary, was ordained and served as a youth pastor.
During a conference in Brazil in 2013, he met Troy Pitney, an American missionary and surfer. They began to dream of planting churches in Portugal.
They wanted to use Portugal’s growing surf culture to recruit members in the once staunchly Catholic country, where religious practice is declining, especially among young people, while a growing wave of migrants from Brazil and other South American countries continue to establish evangelical churches.
After moving to Porto with their families, they founded Surf Church in April 2015. Their strategy was simple: ride waves and invite other surfers and beach lovers to read the Bible, sing and pray.
“We didn’t know what we were doing,” Cianelli said. “We just loved Jesus. We were all surfers.”
They began meeting in an apartment, and from 2016 to 2020 they attended a gym near the beach for worship, “just to break down the concept of what church means,” Cianelli said.
“The building is about the people. You could be in the ocean, you could be on the beach, you could be in a gym or in someone’s living room. Or now that we are in the space that is ours. The place doesn’t matter, what matters is the people – that is the true meaning of the church.”
Their choice of words was also deliberate: they still avoided the word “igreja” (Portuguese for church) to avoid associations with cave-like rooms with emptying wooden pews.
There are many “beautiful, historic” church buildings in Porto, says Cianelli. He respects their historical role, but his congregation strives for a modern “living church, created by people.”
The pillars of his church remain the same: surfing, community and the Bible. It took them nine years to go through the New Testament word for word and they recently started the Old Testament.
Their dream, he said, is to start surf churches all over the world – or churches related to mountain biking, soccer or any other passion that brings people together in sport and prayer.
“We are not just surfers anymore,” he said.
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