Tenrikyo's Nankai Grand Church Sends Missionary Families To Brazil

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Tenrikyo's mission to Brazil followed the same Japanese emigration that had been carrying workers to the country's coffee growing interior since the ship Kasato Maru first arrived in 1908. Kita Grand Church planted the movement's first Brazilian congregation, Noroeste Church, in 1927, giving Tenrikyo a foothold among the Japanese immigrant communities already settled in inland Brazil nearly two decades after that first migrant ship had landed.

In 1929 Nankai Grand Church organized ten missionary families and sent them to settle in Brazil and propagate the faith there, a deliberate missionary effort rather than the informal spread that individual migrants carrying their own private faith might have produced on their own. Those ten families built directly on the single congregation Kita Grand Church had already planted two years earlier.

What the Nankai families changed for Tenrikyo's spread was scale: by 1936, marked in the movement's own calendar as Nakayama Miki's fiftieth memorial anniversary year, the effort had grown from a single congregation to five churches spread across inland Brazil's Japanese immigrant communities, a fivefold expansion in under a decade built on the ten families Nankai Grand Church had deliberately sent to settle and propagate the faith there.