It is also home to a different kind of church, located in a beachfront suburb along the Atlantic coast, near a fishing village known for having some of the world’s biggest waves. Parishioners attend in shorts, T-shirts, flip-flops and even barefoot.
They surf before they worship.
Surf Church was founded by a Brazilian-born Portuguese surfer and an ordained Baptist pastor to spread the Gospel in a once devoutly Catholic country (and a major surfing destination), where about half of young people today say they have no religion.
In less than a decade, it has grown from a few families to dozens of parishioners representing more than a dozen nationalities from around the world. Its motto: “We love the waves. We love Jesus.”
“When you’re waiting for the right wave, it’s the calm before the swell, and that’s a moment of peace that sometimes lasts seconds, sometimes minutes,” said the Rev. Samuel Cianelli, pastor of Surf Church. “This moment of peace is, for me, my deepest connection to God.”
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On a recent Sunday, he wore a bright orange wetsuit — rather than traditional priestly vestments — and lay face down on a surfboard in the fine sand of Matosinhos Beach to show the young parishioners gathered around him how to paddle, “jump” and catch a wave.
“I’ve always loved the waves and when I see people learning to surf, it fills my heart with joy,” said Uliana Yarova, 17, after emerging from the same waters where, a week later, Cianelli baptized her and her brother in a joyous ceremony. They wore matching white T-shirts that read: “I chose Jesus.”
The Ukrainian teenager fled her war-torn country with her family after the Russian invasion and found refuge in Porto and the Surf Church.
“When you’re paddling out on the surfboard waiting for the wave and you’re standing up, you can start to doubt yourself and feel like you’re going to fall,” he said. “And then when everything goes right, you feel confidence and peace; you feel nature and how God is holding you on that wave.”
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Church members, mostly Gen Zers and millennials, waded in and out of the water smiling, carrying red and turquoise surfboards with Surf Church stickers. Some sported tattoos of the cross, the only other visible sign that set them apart from other surfers sharing the waves.
In preparation for worship, they rinsed off their surfboards and loaded them into a white van that was driven by missionaries in bathing suits to the nearby Surf Church.
The churches of Porto, Portugal’s second-largest city, include the majestic cathedral with its silver altar, the so-called “Chapel of Souls,” with its facade of thousands of illustrated blue and white tiles, and São Francisco, with its intricate wood carvings covered in gold dust.
The Surf Church garage is painted with a mural of a gold Volkswagen van with a blue surfboard strapped to the roof.
After surfing, church members, wearing sandals, hung their wetsuits next to a rack full 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 waves.
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Church member Hannah Kruckels said she never felt so welcome attending a much larger, traditional church in her native Switzerland. That changed when she arrived as an intern in 2020 at Surf Church, 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 ocean,” she said after a Sunday service she attended with her Portuguese boyfriend, who is also a surfer. “That’s what makes surfing a spiritual experience.”
Surfing had religious significance in Hawaii, where it originated 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 devotees could pray for waves,” writes William Finnegan in “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.”
Men and women of all ages and from all social levels, from royalty to commoners, surfed. But when 19th-century Calvinist missionaries arrived on the islands, they were horrified by what they considered a barbaric spectacle and banned surfing.
It only resurfaced decades later thanks to Hawaiians like Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic gold medalist swimmer considered the father of modern surfing.
Surfers were still “pigeonholed as vagabonds and vandals,” Finnegan wrote. Even in the modern era, some coastal towns banned surfing.
For a long time, surfing was viewed negatively as a countercultural movement or a mere pastime, and for decades it remained little known outside of California and Hawaii.
But things have changed. Surfing has spread across the world as a professional sport and, more recently, as an Olympic sport, and has become a multi-billion-dollar industry.
Portugal has become one of the world’s top surfing destinations: home to some of the biggest waves for pros in the fishing village of Nazaré and uncrowded waves for beginners on the beaches near Porto.
“People come from all over to Portugal because they want to experience what the beaches of Portugal have to offer,” said Cianelli, wearing a loose shirt covered with palm tree designs. “We found in this a good strategy to start a church that combines Jesus and surfing.”
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Cianelli grew up swimming competitively in the Brazilian port city of Santos, where soccer legend Pelé played most of his career. After an injury prevented him from competing at age 15, he took up 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 2013 conference in Brazil, he met Troy Pitney, an American missionary and surfer. They began dreaming of planting churches in Portugal.
They wanted to use Portugal’s growing surf culture to attract members to a once fiercely Catholic country where religious practice is declining, especially among young people, while a rising wave of immigrants from Brazil and other South American countries continue to plant evangelical churches.
After moving with their families to Porto, they launched Surf Church in April 2015. Their strategy was simple: catch 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 worshipped at a gym near the beach from 2016 to 2020, “just to break the concept of what church means,” Cianelli said.
“The building is for the people. You can be at the ocean, on the beach, in a gym, or in someone’s living room. Or right now, where we are, in the space that belongs to us. It doesn’t matter where, what matters is the people: that is the true meaning of the church.”
They were also intentional in their words: They still don’t use the word “igreja” — church in Portuguese — to avoid connotations of cavernous spaces with empty wooden pews.
There are many “beautiful and historic” religious buildings in Porto, says Cianelli. He respects their historic role, but says what his congregation is looking for is a “living, modern church made by people.”
The pillars of their church remain the same: surfing, community and the Bible. It took them nine years to go through the New Testament, word by word, and they have recently started with the Old Testament.
His dream, he said, is to plant surf churches, or churches linked to mountain biking, soccer or any passion that unites people in sport and prayer, all over the world.
“We’re not just surfers anymore,” he said.
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