The Redeemed mission to the United States represents perhaps the greatest test to date of these immense ambitions. The church is still in its infancy here, with only around 15,000 active members, most of them Nigerians, but its goal is to make gradual inroads into the wider culture, at first aiming at members of immigrant groups — other Africans, Caribbeans, Latin Americans, Asians — and then moving on to African-Americans and whites. They are filled with the confidence of miraculous faith, though they realize they are contending with cultural impediments. “Initially, it may be rough,” says Pastor James Fadele, head of the church’s operations in North America. “But some of our children grew up in America, and they are affiliated with the church, and they have white friends, they have African-American friends, they have Asian friends. They will come to the church. It’s a matter of time.”

Fadele has entrusted the task of increasing the number of Redeemed churches to Daniel Ajayi-Adeniran. Reed-thin at 44, the minister carries himself with the earnest conviction of someone who has already surmounted many obstacles. He came to this country in 1995, without a job or a place to live. At first he slept in homeless shelters and subways until he landed a job at a Brooklyn car wash, where the owner let him bed down in a hallway. He now presides over a parish with around 400 members and branches in other cities. “I believe that when there is raw power, when the lame come to church and can walk, when the blind can come and see . . . when things begin to happen like that, people will come,” the pastor told me. “It’s going to be very, very explosive.”

THE BEST EVIDENCE OF THE REDEEMED CHURCH’S outsize aspirations, at least in this country, lies in the prairie lands of Hunt County, Tex., about an hour northeast of Dallas. Down a gravel road, past barns, a white clapboard Methodist church and flat fields of dark, freshly turned soil, a large brick-and-glass auditorium appears from behind grain silos. A sign points the way to Redemption Camp, the church’s North American headquarters. From this unlikely base, in the course of less than a decade, the Redeemed have spawned nearly four hundred parishes. Over the long term, church officials plan to develop the site as a mixed-use community, with homes, stores, a university, a commercial fish farm and perhaps even a water park.

In January, Ajayi-Adeniran traveled to Redemption Camp with other church leaders to celebrate the end of a month of fasting. Several hundred people, most of them Nigerian, gathered in the auditorium for a service that began in the morning and went well past midnight. It was televised live on the Internet for a global audience. A succession of evangelists asked God to heal sickness, to keep the faithful from harm, to cancel debts “supernaturally” and, most of all, to multiply the ranks of the Redeemed. Wearing a white linen jacket and clutching a crinkled Bible, Ajayi-Adeniran stood in the front row, hands raised and eyes closed, his head bobbing, his face fixed in an ecstatic grimace.

Even by the passionate standards of Africa, the Redeemed are renowned for the intensity of their prayer. In Nigeria, it has been called “the weeping church.” During services, members of the congregation will clap, whoop and break into glossolalia — speaking in tongues — which Pentecostals believe to be the verbal expression of the Holy Spirit. They will collapse to the floor, burying their faces in the carpet, and writhe in the throes of divine communion. “I don’t know how to explain it,” Ajayi-Adeniran once told me when I asked him what he felt when he prayed. “There’s a kind of aura that comes from above that envelops you.”

It is this spiritual zeal that the Redeemed Church hopes to bring to Americans. Though its successes so far are tentative and anecdotal, they appear to be real. In my visits to many Redeemed churches in different parts of the country, I encountered non-Nigerians at every turn. That night in January at Redemption Camp, I met an African-American woman named Della Faye Sowunmi. A native of Indiana, Sowunmi is married to a Nigerian and was first exposed to the Redeemed by her sister-in-law. “I just wasn’t getting what I was after spiritually in the Baptist Church,” she said, explaining her conversion. “To watch people praise and worship like that, it touched my heart.”