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One man who has expertise of crime and religion – although in his case, not on the similar time – is Pastor Diego Nascimento, who grew to become a Christian after listening to the gospel from a gangster holding a gun.
Taking a look at him, it is arduous to imagine that this boyish trying 42-year-old Wesleyan Methodist minister with a prepared smile and dimples, was as soon as a member of Rio’s infamous Pink Command crime gang and managed its actions within the metropolis’s Vila Kennedy favela.
4 years in jail for drug dealing weren’t sufficient to make him surrender crime. However when he grew to become addicted to crack cocaine his standing within the gang plummeted.
“I misplaced my household. I virtually lived on the road for nearly a yr. I went as far as to promote issues from my home to purchase crack,” he says.
It was at that time, when he was at all-time low, {that a} well-known drug vendor within the favela summoned him.
“He began preaching to me, saying there was a manner out, that there was an answer for me, which was to settle for Jesus,” he recollects.
The younger addict took this recommendation and started his journey to the pulpit.
Pastor Nascimento nonetheless spends time with criminals, however now it’s by way of his work in prisons, the place he helps folks flip their lives round, as he did himself.
Regardless of having been transformed by a gangster, he regards the thought of non secular criminals as a contradiction in phrases.
“I do not see them as evangelical believers,” he says.
“I see them as people who find themselves taking place the flawed path and have a concern of God as a result of they know that God is the one who guards their lives.
“There isn’t a such factor as combining the 2, being an evangelical and a thug. If an individual accepts Jesus and follows the Biblical commandments, that particular person can’t be a drug vendor.”
