Daniel Berg

Daniel Berg was born on April 19, 1884, in Vargön, Sweden. He grew up in a poor family in a country with strong Lutheran traditions. As a young man he worked in a foundry, doing hard physical labor in the heat and noise of the furnace. He was drawn to the Baptist church, and he came to a living faith in Christ in his youth. In 1902, at the age of eighteen, he emigrated to the United States in search of work and a better life. He settled in the Swedish community in Chicago and found a job in a steel mill.

In the United States he met the Pentecostal revival that was spreading through the immigrant churches. He attended a Swedish Baptist church in South Bend, Indiana, and was drawn into the Pentecostal movement. He received what he called the baptism in the Holy Spirit. In 1909 he met Gunnar Vingren, another Swedish immigrant who was a Baptist pastor and who had also become a Pentecostal. The two men became close friends. They shared a vision of taking the gospel to a land that had not yet heard the Pentecostal message.

In one of their prayer meetings, they received a prophecy that told them to go to a place called Para. They did not know where it was. They looked it up in an atlas and found that it was a state in northern Brazil. In 1910 the two men sailed from New York with little money, no mission board and no knowledge of the Portuguese language. They arrived in Belém, the capital of Pará, in November 1910. They had only a few dollars between them.

They began by attending a Baptist church and studying Portuguese, and they supported themselves with whatever work they could find. Berg worked for a time as a laborer. When they began to share their Pentecostal faith, a division arose in the Baptist church, and they were put out. They formed a small group of believers who met in a house. In 1911 this group was formally organized as a church and was named the Assembly of God. It was the beginning of the Assemblies of God in Brazil, which is now one of the largest Pentecostal churches in the world.

Berg was a practical man, who helped to build the church by selling Bibles and literature and traveling to new towns. He did colporteur work, going door to door with tracts and Scriptures, and he was a faithful witness to many. He worked closely with Vingren, who served as the pastor and teacher. He went through many hardships, including illness, poverty and the loneliness of living in a foreign land.

He returned to Sweden in the 1950s and spent his last years there. He wrote a memoir of his life and of the early years in Brazil. He died on December 16, 1963, at the age of seventy-nine. By the time of his death, the church he helped to found had grown to hundreds of thousands of members. His life shows the fruit of a plain man's obedience, and it reminds us that great movements often begin with two friends who pray and go.