Strobe lights scanned a crowd of outstretched arms as a rock band took the stage, smoke billowing out and applause echoing through the coliseum. The pastor bounced out to the beat of a drum roll, a microphone curved around his face.
This Sunday’s sermon, Pastor Sergio Hornung announced, would be about “the territory still to conquer.”
“There are many places where they talk to you about God,” said Scarlet Reyes, 21, a former Catholic who started coming to this Pentecostal church, Agua Viva, two years ago. “But here, they teach you how to know God.”
Pope Leo arrives on Wednesday in Peru, where he served as a priest for two decades, rose to bishop and became a Peruvian citizen. He returns at a time when the church faces two major challenges in Latin America: growing secularization and competition from other Christian denominations.
While Catholicism remains the dominant religious force in the country and the region, evangelical churches have made enormous gains, with congregants saying these churches offer more direct relationships with God and a more expressive, modern style of worship.
The trend dates back to the 1970s, when missionaries helping sow the seeds of the movement. But data released this year by the Pew Research Center shows just how pronounced it has become, with other Christian denominations rising up to loosen Catholicism’s hold on Latin America.
In Peru, Catholics now make up 67 percent of the population, down nearly 10 points from a decade ago, while Protestants, including evangelicals, account for 18 percent. In Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico — the five other nations studied by the Pew Center — the Catholic Church has lost an even larger parts of the population.
In Brazil, which has emerged as the region’s evangelical stronghold, Catholics make up just 46 percent of the country.
In Peru, evangelical churches have gained not just followers but also political power, with several members in Congress and influence over legislation. They also play a leading role in a highly visible social movement called Don’t Mess With My Children, which advocates against the teaching of so-called gender ideology in schools.
New presidents now meet with both Catholic and evangelical leaders.
José Luis Pérez Guadalupe, a theologian and former interior minister in Peru who has written extensively about this trend, said the region had experienced a rise since the 1980s in what scholars call neo-Pentecostalism. It is more conservative and more involved in politics than the evangelical movements that came before it.
The shift, he said, has been from a social agenda based on alleviating poverty to a moral one centered on issues like opposition to abortion and defense of the traditional family. (One of the more prominent religiously tinged political fights in Peru recently has been an effort by an evangelical senator, Milagros Jáuregui de Aguayo, to ban statues inspired by pre-Columbian erotic artwork from public spaces.)
For years, Mr. Pérez Guadalupe said, Peru and neighboring countries were divided between Catholics and evangelicals. But today, the division has shifted to one between conservatives and progressives — with conservative evangelicals and conservative Catholics teaming up on hot-button political issues.
This sets up the pope, who has cut a path more focused on the social and economic challenges facing migrants, the poor and the marginalized, for a tenser visit than may be apparent.
Both Catholics and evangelicals face a challenge of rising secularization.
The Pew report shows that while evangelical churches have made enormous gains over generations, their growth has become more modest. Over the past decade, the number of people in Latin America’s six biggest countries who describe themselves as “religiously unaffiliated” has risen by a range of seven to 17 percentage points, depending on the country.
Interestingly, a very high number of respondents in those countries — from 89 to 98 percent — say they still believe in God.
In interviews, Peruvian evangelicals — nearly all of them former Catholics — described many reasons for changing churches: a desire for a connection with God that didn’t involve a priest as an intermediary; disgust over the abuse scandals involving Catholic priests; and an inability to connect with the formality of the Catholic Mass.
Agua Viva, a megachurch that operates out of a former bullfighting ring that seats 20,000, was founded 40 years ago and now has 14 locations in Lima alone. The Movimiento Misionero Mundial in Peru claims 1,800 churches across the country and has a sophisticated communication strategy that includes its own television network.
Evangelical churches have extensive geographic reach and strength in Peru, including in the highland and Amazon regions the pope will be visiting on his six-day trip.
At a Saturday service at the Alianza Cristiana y Misionera Church in the upper-middle-class Lima neighborhood of Miraflores, a visiting pastor focused on the topic of “the family trapped between screens.” The pastor, Miguel Luna, 61, warned of “likes that lie” and the “perfect bodies” on the internet that hide hurt souls.
“Algorithms remember your preferences,” he said, “but God remembers you as a person.”
Afterward, Martín Gallo, 57, said he had joined Alianza at age 19, after being raised in what he called a “somewhat impoverished” Catholic family. A turning point for him was a papal visit by John Paul II in the 1980s, when he was struck by the “exaggerated pomp.”
“He arrived at the airport with the helicopters, the Popemobile and his rings,” said Mr. Gallo, “I compared all of that to Christ. I thought to myself: But Christ was humble.”
Pastor Luna said that while members of his church certainly leaned conservative, it would be a mistake to paint Alianza with one political brush.
Speaking of Ms. Jáuregui de Aguayo, the evangelical senator, who is considered a right-wing hard-liner, he said, “I didn’t vote for her.”
At the Agua Viva coliseum on Sunday, congregants began lining up nearly an hour before the first service. (There were two at the church headquarters that day.) A security staff in black polos and a welcome staff in red directed people down an escalator. Branded hoodies were on sale at a merchandise shop. Inside, giant screens framed the stage, and the band got the crowd going.
During a pause, the audiovisual team played a promotional clip from Pastor Hornung’s latest podcast. Then the pastor began his sermon about lands yet to be conquered.
The message was both metaphorical and literal. He urged people to be grateful with their lot in life but not to remain complacent, and to always reach for bigger dreams. But also, he explained, the church has declared 2026 the “year of expansion.”
“I have come to announce to you that we are not going to stop,” he said. “We will continue opening fields, we will continue opening centers, we will continue holding meetings. We will continue going to other cities, we will go to other countries. We will reach the ends of the earth.”
As the service closed, orientation guides led dozens of newcomers to a welcome hall, as a dance team closed out the event.
“We go from glory to glory and from victory to victory,” the pastor declared. “The best is yet to come!”
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