A Reclamation of Liturgy: Ananda’s Story
Ananda Cintra, Communications Student, Class of 2026
Senior Communications major Ananda Cintra loves liturgy—so much so that her capstone project is a catechism on the Anglican eucharistic rite. She also plans to include an introduction on a theology of the body and the incarnation of Christ.
This love of liturgy, however, has developed in her more recently. Growing up, in her hometown of Rondonópolis in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, she found the liturgy of her Catholic Church perplexing. “I never went through catechism,” she says, “so I couldn’t understand the liturgy and the meanings and the theology behind it. Mass for me was so boring.”
Her attitude toward church didn’t change much when she and her mother—a clinical psychologist—moved to the capital city of Cuiabá and started attending an Assembly of God church at the behest of one of her mother’s students. Though Ananda began to hear and understand the gospel for the first time at this new church, she was quite rebellious.
“My mom would literally, literally drag me to church,” Ananda says. “I'd have my headphones in and be on my phone the whole time, and when my phone was dead, I would be so angry.”
Though leaders of the church wanted to confront Ananda for her attitude, the pastor’s wife stopped them, saying that confrontation was the Holy Spirit’s job, not theirs. This, it turns out, was the correct approach. Ananda says the worship songs and prayers at the church began to soften her heart, and she began to hear the whispers of the Holy Spirit, which she obeyed and was baptized.
“After that, I was literally regenerated, and I became a new person,” she says.
While she was still in high school, Ananda began serving as the youth communications director at the church, handling social media posts and taking photos at services, conferences, and mission trips. At the same time, she became the “right-hand woman” for the youth leader, teaching and leading teams and handling groups on missions trips.
“I was literally leading a whole communications team for a big youth and young adults conference,” she recalls. “I was leading worship. I was in school. I was also responsible for the communications team. So, I barely slept.”
Ananda’s passion for communications was tempered by the knowledge that there were few job opportunities in Brazil for communications professionals at the time. So, after high school she planned to study criminal psychology with an eye on law enforcement, inspired by her grandfather, the only father she’d ever known. But his death during her senior year of high school was a pain that set her longing to flee the country.
“Praise God for my youth leader, because he looked at me and said, ‘You know, God is not going to let you go if you’re just trying to run away from your stuff,’” she recalls. After this conversation, God used that season of grief to strengthen Ananda’s faith.
After studying psychology for two and a half years at a college in Brazil, Ananda got the opportunity to travel to Chicago to work as an au pair for a pastor and his wife. She arrived ten days before the COVID lockdown and spent the next two years helping to homeschool the family’s youngest child. During this time, she heard about Moody Bible Institute, but she didn’t see the need to go to “a ministry school” when she’d been doing ministry since she was 15.
Then a free e-book popped up in her iBooks How to Study the Bible.
Ananda devoured it. “It was really, really good,” she remembers. “And I wondered while I was reading, ‘Who wrote this book again?’ It was D.L. Moody.” And based on that classic book by Moody’s founder, Ananda decided she needed to check out the school. She admitted, “I thought if they teach this at that place, I want to go there.”
Creative Agency, 2024 - 2025
On a very cold winter day in February 2022, Ananda sat in a New Testament Greek exegesis class during a Day One (now Experience Moody), and she knew Moody was where she needed to be. By March, her au pair assignment had ended, so she returned to Brazil, applied to Moody, and was accepted. She thought she might need to work for a while to save up for school. But when her host family offered to pay for her first semester, she was able to start in the fall of 2022.
Her Introduction to Communications class brought her back to her passion.
“That class changed my life,” she says. “I always had this longing for beauty and order and theologically-grounded choices. Then Professor Kammerzelt introduced us to liturgy.” Liturgy brought those two loves together. For Ananda, this connection fulfilled a deep longing to ground her communications practices in the person of Jesus Christ.
It also led Ananda to begin attending Cornerstone Anglican Church, which she approached with some hesitation because of her history with the Catholic Church. “I went to the service, and I saw the liturgy. I started reading, and I started learning. I knew, ‘I can’t run away from this,’” she says.
Introduction to Communications transformed her approach to communication. “I don’t practice communications in the same way that I did before. For example, I used to be part of the live stream team in my church. [But] if God became incarnate, what should we do? Do we go virtual more and more? Or do we embody the hands and feet of God in this place?”
Ananda currently serves as the Director of the Creative Agency team in the Communications Program. After her graduation in May 2026, Ananda plans to continue her studies in Communications in a graduate program that will allow her to deepen her theology and theory. After that, she’s open to go wherever God leads. Regardless of where God takes her, her time at Moody has changed her approach to communication.
“It’s not just about getting ‘likes’,” she explains. She wants to encourage church communication leaders to thoughtfully examine their approach. What communication practices does your church utilize? And what theology grounds and motivates those practices? Once you understand the importance of asking both questions, Ananda says, “There’s no going back.”
