Edir Macedo and the Universal Church

Who Edir Macedo Is

Edir Macedo is a Brazilian bishop, broadcaster and author, born on 18 February 1945 in Rio das Flores in the state of Rio de Janeiro. He founded the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in 1977 and remains its head. Outside the church he is known chiefly as the owner of Record, the television group he purchased in 1989, and as the author of an autobiography that was later filmed as a Brazilian feature.

Three facts about him are uncontested and explain most of what follows. He built a religious institution from nothing in under a decade. He understood before almost anyone else in Brazilian religion that broadcast media, owned outright rather than rented, changes what a church can do. And he kept control: the Universal Church has had one leader since its founding, and its structure runs from him downward.

Assessment of him divides sharply. Members and sympathisers describe a preacher who took the Gospel into neighbourhoods the established churches had abandoned, who gave the poor a place where their material trouble was treated as a spiritual matter worth praying over, and who was persecuted by a hostile press and a hostile state. Critics, including Brazilian journalists, prosecutors who brought and lost cases against him, and former members, describe an organisation that extracts money from people who have very little of it under the promise of divine return. Both descriptions are held by serious people. This page separates what is documented from what is disputed, and says which is which.

From a Lottery Desk to a Former Funeral Home

Macedo grew up in a Catholic family of modest means and came to Pentecostalism as a young man through Igreja Nova Vida, a Rio de Janeiro Pentecostal church that drew a middle-class and upwardly mobile congregation in the 1960s. Before entering full-time ministry he worked as a civil servant for the Rio de Janeiro state lottery. He has spoken publicly about a sister's illness and healing as a decisive event in his turn toward faith.

Nova Vida matters to the story because of what Macedo took from it and what he left behind. He took the Pentecostal grammar: the Holy Spirit acting now, healing expected rather than hoped for, prayer as something you do out loud and with authority. He left behind its social register. Nova Vida was a church for people who already had something. Macedo's project from the beginning was aimed at people who had nothing, in the Rio suburbs, and it borrowed the physical spaces those neighbourhoods had going spare: shopfronts, cinemas, warehouses.

By the mid-1970s he was preaching in the open air in Rio, in squares and parks, with a small group of associates that included Romildo Ribeiro Soares, known in Brazil as R. R. Soares, who was married to Macedo's sister. Their partnership produced the first congregation. It did not survive the decade.

The Founding of the Universal Church in 1977

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God was founded on 9 July 1977 in the Abolição neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro, in a building that had previously been a funeral home. The date and the setting are part of the church's own account of itself, and it retells them often: a church begun in the place where the city dealt with its dead, by men with no institutional backing.

Growth was rapid, and the method was consistent. The church rented or bought large, plain, centrally located buildings, frequently old cinemas, and opened them for long hours with services running through the day rather than once on Sunday. Each day of the week carried a theme: health on one day, finances on another, family on another, deliverance on another. A person with a specific trouble was told which night to come. That structure is still recognisable in Universal Church buildings today, and it is a genuine innovation in how a congregation handles a city.

R. R. Soares left at the start of the 1980s after a dispute over control and founded the Igreja Internacional da Graça de Deus, the International Church of the Grace of God, which became a substantial body in its own right with its own broadcasting. The split left Macedo in sole charge of the Universal Church, and no comparable rival to his authority has emerged inside it since.

Expansion abroad began in the 1980s and accelerated through the 1990s. The church established congregations across Latin America, in Portugal, in Portuguese-speaking Africa, particularly Angola and Mozambique, in South Africa, and in the United Kingdom and the United States, often beginning among Brazilian and Lusophone migrant communities and then reaching beyond them. In Britain it operates under the name UCKG HelpCentre.

On size: figures for the church's membership vary widely depending on who is counting and what counts as membership. Brazil's national statistics agency, the IBGE, is the only source with a defensible method, and its census counts of Brazilians identifying with the Universal Church fell between the 2000 and 2010 censuses even as Brazilian Pentecostalism overall grew. This page gives no global membership number, because no verifiable one exists.

What the Universal Church Teaches

The Universal Church teaches that God wills health, freedom and material provision for his people now, that the obstacle to receiving them is usually demonic, and that the way through is a determined, demanding faith expressed in prayer and in sacrificial giving. That is the core, stated as the church states it. What follows sets out the main elements in the church's own terms before any Catholic response, which comes later on this page.

Prosperity, the tithe and the sacrifice

The church teaches the tithe as a binding obligation, ten per cent of income, grounded in Malachi 3:10 and the promise that God will open the windows of heaven. Beyond the tithe it calls for offerings, and beyond ordinary offerings it runs organised campaigns in which members are asked to give something that costs them significantly, sometimes over a set period of weeks. The best known of these campaigns is the Fogueira Santa de Israel, the Holy Fire of Israel, in which envelopes of intentions and offerings are taken to Israel. The theology behind it is explicit: a sacrifice made in faith is the act by which a believer moves God to act in return.

Members are taught to give with expectation. The language is of seed and harvest, of investment, of a covenant in which God has bound himself to respond. Testimonies of debts cleared, businesses recovered and jobs found are a standing feature of services and broadcasts.

Deliverance and spiritual warfare

The Universal Church treats a great deal of ordinary human trouble as demonic in origin. Illness, addiction, unemployment, marital breakdown and depression are addressed in services as afflictions with a spiritual cause, and the response is deliverance: prayer of command, the naming and expulsion of spirits, sessions known in Brazil as descarrego. Manifestations during these services, in which a person speaks or convulses and is confronted by the pastor, are normal and expected, and were for years broadcast on television.

This is the church's most distinctive practice, and the church itself puts it at the front of its advertising and its broadcasts. Someone arrives with a problem that no one else has taken seriously as a spiritual matter, and the church takes it seriously immediately and dramatically.

Faith as determination

Macedo's own writing and preaching stress a strong, active, almost forceful faith. Passivity is treated as the failure. The believer is taught to demand, to insist, to refuse the situation as it stands, and to act as though the answer has already been given. The frequently quoted text is Matthew 11:12 on the kingdom suffering violence and the violent taking it by force.

Anointed objects and points of contact

Services distribute physical items as points of contact for faith: anointing oil, salt, water, roses, keys, small objects associated with pilgrimages to Israel. The objects are presented as aids to faith rather than as possessing power in themselves, though in practice members frequently treat them as carrying it.

Worship, government and the sacraments

Worship is Pentecostal in feel and plain in furnishing. The church rejects the veneration of images and of the saints, practises believer's baptism by immersion, and observes the Lord's Supper as a memorial rather than as a sacrifice. Government is episcopal in title, with bishops and pastors appointed from the centre, though the office of bishop here carries no claim to apostolic succession and its holders are appointed and reassigned administratively.

The Conflict with Afro-Brazilian Religion

The Universal Church identifies the entities of Umbanda and Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religions with deep roots in Brazilian popular culture, as demons. This is not incidental to its message. Deliverance services frequently name those entities directly, and Macedo published a book in the 1980s arguing the case at length under a title asking whether the orixás and spirit guides are gods or demons.

Practitioners of Umbanda and Candomblé have responded with sustained public objection, arguing that the church's teaching and broadcasting fuel discrimination and, in some Brazilian cities, physical attacks on terreiros, their houses of worship. Legal complaints alleging religious intolerance have been filed in Brazil in connection with the book and with broadcast content. This page does not state the outcome of those proceedings, because the record is complex and it cannot be verified here.

Two things should be held together honestly. Christian teaching does hold that the spirits invoked in non-Christian cult are not gods, and the Catholic Church does not treat spiritism as harmless. And the persons who practise those religions are owed the same respect and the same protection under law as anyone else, and a Christian body that helps produce a climate in which their buildings are attacked has done real damage regardless of what it believes about the spirits. The Catholic position is capable of holding both, and the Second Vatican Council's declaration on non-Christian religions, Nostra Aetate, insists that the Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in other traditions while proclaiming Christ as the way, the truth and the life.

How the Church Is Governed

The Universal Church is governed centrally, from the top, with Macedo at the head and a body of bishops under him. Pastors are appointed by the centre, assigned to congregations, and moved between congregations and between countries at the centre's discretion, frequently and without a fixed term. A pastor does not build a local power base, does not own his building, and does not control his own budget.

Congregations report financial results upward. Reporting of offerings and attendance to regional and national leadership is a standing feature of how the church runs, and Brazilian reporting over three decades has consistently described a culture of targets for pastors. The church has publicly rejected that characterisation. Its own account of its government is centralised, with pastors appointed and directed from above.

Understand what this structure buys and what it costs. It buys speed. A body organised this way can plant a hundred congregations in a year, standardise everything from the liturgy to the signage, redeploy staff overnight and take a coordinated public position without consultation. It costs accountability. There is no synod, no independent review, no external audit that members can appeal to, and no mechanism by which the leadership can be corrected from below. Catholic church government is often criticised for being slow and hierarchical, and rightly so at times. It is worth noticing that Catholic bishops answer to canon law, to Rome, to their own councils and to civil authority, and that a Catholic parish's finances are subject to diocesan oversight. Accountability structures are boring until the moment they are the only thing standing between an institution and its worst instincts.

The description of central financial reporting rests on three decades of Brazilian mainstream reporting on the church's internal operations and on accounts given by former pastors in that reporting, together with the church's own public description of its centralised government. Specific internal figures and targets are not reproduced here because they cannot be verified from this desk.

The Media Holdings: Record, Radio and Print

Macedo bought the São Paulo broadcaster Rede Record in 1989, and that purchase is the single most consequential decision in the church's history. Record was then a minor network. Under his ownership it became one of Brazil's largest, competing for national audience share with entertainment programming, telenovelas, news and sport that has nothing to do with the church, while also carrying church programming in bought time slots.

The wider group includes the Aleluia radio network, a rolling news channel, a free newspaper distributed at church services, and production companies. The church also buys airtime on other broadcasters, in Brazil and abroad.

The strategic point is ownership. A church that rents airtime can be dropped. A church that owns the transmitter cannot. Owning a general-audience network also does something subtler: it puts the church's name on programming that most viewers do not associate with religion at all, which normalises the institution in a way that religious broadcasting alone never could. Brazilian journalists have argued for years that the media group, rather than the congregations, is where the church's public power actually sits.

Macedo's autobiography, published in Portuguese as Nada a Perder, was adapted into a feature film released in 2018 with a sequel the following year. The films were commercially successful in Brazil and were promoted heavily across the group's own channels, which drew criticism from Brazilian media commentators about the use of a national broadcaster to promote its owner's life story.

The Temple of Solomon in São Paulo

The Templo de Salomão, the Temple of Solomon, is the Universal Church's headquarters, opened in 2014 in the Brás district of São Paulo. It is a very large building, seating thousands, designed with deliberate reference to the temple of the Old Testament: stone imported from Israel, a replica of the ark, courts and named spaces that recall the Solomonic plan described in 1 Kings 6. Its inauguration was attended by senior Brazilian political figures, including the country's president at the time.

The building is the clearest statement the church has made about how it understands itself. A Pentecostal movement founded in a converted funeral home in 1977 built itself a temple in the largest city in Brazil and named it after Solomon's.

Cost figures for the Temple of Solomon circulate widely in Brazilian and international coverage, and they vary. No figure is given here because none can be verified from this desk.

The theological question the building raises is worth putting plainly, because Catholics and Universal Church members can both feel its force. The New Testament is emphatic that the temple has been fulfilled. Jesus says the temple of his body will be raised in three days (John 2:19-21), Stephen tells the Sanhedrin that the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands (Acts 7:48), and Paul tells the Corinthians that they themselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in them (1 Corinthians 3:16). Catholic churches are consecrated buildings and Catholics believe Christ is truly present in the tabernacle, so no Catholic can object to sacred architecture as such. The specific question is what it means to rebuild Solomon's temple in São Paulo after the one Christ has already fulfilled it in himself.

The Church and Brazilian Politics

The Universal Church has been an organised presence in Brazilian electoral politics since the 1980s, and it has never pretended otherwise. It has backed candidates, supplied them, and delivered a bloc of votes with a discipline that Brazilian parties study. Members of the church have served in the Chamber of Deputies, in the Senate, in state legislatures and in city halls. The party now called Republicanos, previously the Partido Republicano Brasileiro, has been widely described in Brazilian reporting as the church's political vehicle.

The best known figure is Marcelo Crivella, Macedo's nephew, a bishop of the church and a gospel singer, who was elected to the Brazilian Senate and then served as mayor of Rio de Janeiro from 2017 to 2020. This page does not assess his time in office, which is a separate matter with its own record.

Catholic teaching does not forbid Christians from political engagement. The opposite: the Catechism treats participation in public life as a duty of citizenship, and the Church's social teaching insists that the faithful bring the moral law into public argument. What Catholic teaching does resist is the fusing of a church's institutional interests with a party's, and the treatment of a vote as an act of religious obedience. A church that can tell its members how to vote, and a church that owns the network on which the campaign is covered, holds a kind of power that is very difficult to check.

The 1995 Kick at Our Lady of Aparecida

On 12 October 1995, a Universal Church bishop named Sérgio von Helder kicked and struck a statue of Our Lady of Aparecida during a programme broadcast on Record. The date was the feast of Our Lady of Aparecida, patroness of Brazil, and a national holiday. The broadcast was seen across the country and produced an immediate and furious national reaction, including from Brazilians with no particular religious practice, because the image is a national symbol as much as a devotional one.

The church publicly apologised, and von Helder was removed from his post in Brazil. The episode sits at the centre of the Universal Church's relationship with Brazilian Catholicism, and it is still recalled in Brazilian Catholic commentary decades later.

The theological disagreement underneath it is real and worth stating accurately in both directions. The Universal Church, in common with much of Protestantism, holds that venerating images is forbidden by the second commandment and that Marian devotion displaces Christ. Catholic teaching answers that the honour given to an image passes to the person it represents, a principle settled at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, and that Marian devotion is directed to Christ through his mother rather than away from him. The Catechism is explicit that the veneration of sacred images rests on the mystery of the Incarnation, in paragraph 1159, and that veneration of the saints differs in kind from the worship owed to God alone.

Notice that the disagreement did not require the kick. Protestant and Catholic Christians have argued about images for five centuries in print, and that argument is legitimate. Destroying a national devotional image on television on the patroness's feast day is a different act with a different purpose. If you want the Catholic account of the shrine and the devotion the image belongs to, see the guide to the Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida.

The Legal Record, and How It Ended

Edir Macedo has faced criminal proceedings in Brazil and has not been convicted. That sentence is the whole of the settled record, and it should be read before anything else in this section.

Both matters are frequently cited online without their outcomes, which is a form of dishonesty even when the underlying facts of the charges are correctly stated. An allegation that was annulled or dropped is not a finding. Brazilian criminal procedure has its own rules on jurisdiction and on the admissibility of evidence, and cases fall for reasons that range from the substantive to the procedural. What can be said is that no Brazilian court has convicted Edir Macedo of these offences, and this page will not imply otherwise.

The Universal Church has also faced regulatory scrutiny, tax questions and civil complaints in various countries over the decades, as any institution of its size and financial scale does. Where the outcomes of those matters are not established, this page does not describe them.

What This Page Does Not Claim

Several things belong in the open, so that a reader can weigh what is here.

• No claim of criminal guilt. Edir Macedo has not been convicted of any of the offences alleged against him in Brazil, and this page states that wherever the allegations appear.
• No membership or wealth figures. Global membership numbers and personal wealth estimates for Macedo circulate widely and cannot be verified from published, methodologically sound sources. None are given here.
• No cost figure for the Temple of Solomon, for the same reason.
• No outcome stated for the religious-intolerance complaints brought in Brazil in connection with the church's teaching on Afro-Brazilian religion. The complaints are documented. The dispositions are not established here.
• No verdict on anyone's salvation. Judgment belongs to God, and the Church has never taught otherwise. This page assesses public teaching and public conduct, which is a different thing.
• No coverage of events after mid-2026. Anything more recent than that is not tracked here.
• No claim that members are foolish. Most people in Universal Church buildings on a Wednesday night are there because something in their life has broken and they were told God cares about it. That instinct is right.

The Catholic Response, Point by Point

Catholic teaching answers the Universal Church's central claims specifically rather than in general, and the answer is not a blanket dismissal. Several of the instincts the church appeals to are sound instincts that Catholic practice sometimes serves badly.

On giving

Giving is a Christian duty and Scripture praises it warmly. Paul tells the Corinthians that God loves a cheerful giver (2 Corinthians 9:7), and Jesus names almsgiving alongside prayer and fasting in Matthew 6 as one of the three works of the disciple. What Scripture does not do is present giving as a lever that obliges God. Peter's answer to Simon the magician, who offered money for the power of the Spirit, is blunt: your silver perish with you, because you thought God's gift could be bought (Acts 8:20). A campaign that ties a specific sacrifice to a specific promised financial result has moved from generosity into exchange, and the exchange falls hardest on the people with the least margin. The full Catholic treatment of the doctrine is on the page about the prosperity gospel and what Scripture says about wealth.

On deliverance and evil

The Catholic Church believes in the devil, believes demonic oppression is real, and maintains the office of exorcist. Every Catholic diocese is expected to have a priest appointed for it, and the Rite of Exorcism is a formal liturgical act performed under a bishop's authority after a serious process of discernment that includes medical and psychological assessment. The Church's caution here is deliberate and pastoral: attributing a treatable illness to a demon leaves a sick person untreated. The ordinary Christian means of resisting evil are the sacraments, confession, prayer, Scripture and the intercession of the saints, and they are available to everyone every week. See the page on spiritual warfare and how the Church actually fights it.

On the sacraments and assurance

A theology of demanding faith puts the weight of every outcome on the believer's own intensity. When the healing does not come or the money does not arrive, the only available explanation inside that system is that the person did not believe hard enough or did not give enough. Catholic sacramental theology places the weight elsewhere. Baptism, absolution and the Eucharist work by Christ's action, not by the strength of the recipient's feeling, and the grace they give does not depend on how well the person performed. That is the deepest structural difference between the two accounts, and it is what makes the Catholic account survivable on a bad week. On the relationship of faith and action, see the page on faith and works.

On suffering

Prosperity teaching has no place for the suffering of the faithful, and the New Testament is full of it. Paul asked three times for his thorn to be removed and was told that grace was sufficient and that power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). The Church's teaching on redemptive suffering takes that seriously, and it is set out on the page on why God permits suffering. A gospel that cannot account for a Christian dying poor cannot account for most of the saints.

On what the church got right

Honesty requires this paragraph. The Universal Church grew because it went to places the established churches had left, opened its doors at hours when working people could come, treated material desperation as a spiritual concern rather than an embarrassment, and gave ordinary members something to do. Catholic parishes that lost people to Pentecostal churches in Latin America and Africa mostly lost them for reasons that had nothing to do with doctrine. Anyone who wants to answer the Universal Church seriously has to answer that first. The wider picture of Pentecostal growth is on the pages about Pentecostalism and its history and why people leave the Church.

If You Attend, or Have Left

Practical advice, offered without contempt for anyone in either position.

• Nothing you give buys anything from God. If you have given until it hurt and the promised result did not come, the failure is in the promise. It is not in your faith and it is not in the amount.
• Ask what happens if it does not work. A teaching that has no answer for the faithful person whose situation does not improve has a hole in it exactly where most human lives are lived.
• Get medical trouble treated medically. Prayer and medicine are not rivals. The Church has run hospitals for sixteen centuries.
• Read the Gospels straight through, without a preacher's frame, and notice how Jesus talks about money and to whom.
• Talk to a person, not a website. A parish priest, a chaplain, a trustworthy pastor. Say plainly what happened and what you are weighing.
• Take the time you need. Leaving a congregation can mean losing friendships and a whole weekly structure. Nobody has the right to hurry you, and God is not running a clock on you.
• Report any crime to the civil authorities. That comes before any church process anywhere.

For the general tests of whether a religious body is healthy, the framework is on the page comparing cults and Christianity, and the scriptural tests for teachers are on the page on false prophets.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Edir Macedo?

Edir Macedo Bezerra is the Brazilian religious leader who founded the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, in Rio de Janeiro in 1977. He is the church's principal bishop and the owner of the Record broadcasting group, one of the largest television networks in Brazil. He was born in 1945 in the state of Rio de Janeiro, worked as a civil servant before entering ministry, and has led the church he founded for its entire history.

What does the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God teach?

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God teaches a form of prosperity theology combined with intense deliverance ministry. Its services centre on freeing people from demonic affliction, on healing, and on financial and family breakthrough, and it calls members to give sacrificially in organised campaigns, with the sacrifice presented as the act of faith that God answers. It is Pentecostal in worship and government, it rejects the veneration of images, and it treats Afro-Brazilian religion as demonic.

Has Edir Macedo been convicted of a crime?

No. Edir Macedo was arrested in Sao Paulo in 1992 in connection with allegations arising from church fundraising and was released within days without conviction. In 2009 prosecutors in Sao Paulo brought charges alleging money laundering and criminal association against him and other church leaders. Those charges were annulled by the Brazilian courts and the case did not go to trial. Macedo denied the allegations throughout and the church described the case as persecution.

Does Edir Macedo own Record TV?

Yes. Edir Macedo acquired the Sao Paulo broadcaster Rede Record in 1989 and built it into one of Brazil's largest television networks, alongside the Aleluia radio network, a news channel, a free newspaper and a production company. The church buys airtime for its own programming across the group and elsewhere, and the media holdings give the movement a reach across Brazilian broadcasting that its congregations alone would not provide.

What was the kick at Our Lady of Aparecida in 1995?

On 12 October 1995, the feast of Our Lady of Aparecida and a national holiday in Brazil, a Universal Church bishop named Sergio von Helder kicked and struck a statue of the patroness of Brazil during a programme broadcast on Record. The broadcast caused a national reaction. The church publicly apologised and von Helder was removed from his post in Brazil. The episode is remembered as the sharpest public rupture between the Universal Church and Brazilian Catholics.

How should a Catholic answer the Universal Church's teaching on giving?

A Catholic should answer that giving is real Christian duty and that God is never placed under obligation by it. Scripture commends the cheerful giver and condemns treating God's gift as purchasable, as Peter tells Simon in Acts 8:20. Almsgiving is one of the three works Jesus names in Matthew 6, and it is offered without a promised return. A campaign that presents a specific sacrifice as the trigger for a specific financial result has crossed from generosity into exchange.

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