From the January-March 2007 Issue
God made it grow!
Andrew and Vivienne Birch
Spain SquareThe good news is that the church here in Palma is growing! I don’t know how many members the church has – probably something between a hundred and a hundred and twenty – but there are new people arriving all the time, quite a few of whom end up applying for membership – at the present time there are about fifteen people interested in becoming church members.
So, who are all these new people, and where are they coming from? There are three basic answers: (1) the vast majority are Christians from other countries (mainly, but by no means only, from South America), who have come to Spain (a) because of serious economic problems in their countries of origin, and (b) because of the common language; (2) we are also getting Spanish Christians coming to us, either because they have moved here from other parts of Spain, or because (for all sorts of reasons) they have left the churches they used to attend; and (3) we are seeing some conversions – more about that later.
Obviously, these three factors are quite different from each other. With so many Christians coming here from other countries, it takes us all our time to get to know each other, and we all have to get over cultural, doctrinal and other differences. In the case of Christians simply changing churches, we are concerned to go about things in the right way, trying to find out the real reasons for such changes, getting in touch with the churches these friends are coming from and listening to ‘their side of the story’, and encouraging people to take seriously their commitment to their local church. As for people coming to faith, well, that’s the kind of growth we’re most interested in, of course, but even that can bring its own set of complex circumstances!
I have to say that, in spite of the inevitable tensions at times, by far the majority of the Christians who have come here from other places have been a real blessing to our church; many of them are mature believers who have been serving the Lord faithfully for many years, some of them as pastors or elders, deacons, Sunday school teachers, etc. It’s true that few of them have had any real contact with ‘the doctrines of grace’ that we love, but we find that most of them respond very positively to any preaching or teaching that they can see is coming straight from the Bible.
Some individuals
Well, let me tell you about some of the people who have come to faith during the last two years or so.
We’d been here in Palma only a few weeks when an Argentinian lady was saved after one of our Sunday services. She came from a Catholic background in Argentina, but had married a backslidden Christian, who had then introduced her to the gospel.
Then there’s a man from Ecuador. After having had no real interest in the gospel at any time in his life, he heard something about the gospel from a backslidden Christian woman from his own country. To cut a long (and wonderful!) story short, this man quite unexpectedly felt his need of God, cried out to God to make himself known to him, and was clearly led by the Lord to our church, where, the very first time he came, he stayed behind to ask me to explain the gospel to him. He was converted almost immediately after that, and since then he has been baptized, joined our church, witnessed to quite a few other people, and married the woman he’d been living with for about twenty years!
There is another Ecuadorean man. He had had contact with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but not with the true gospel, until, when he was already living here, his parents-in-law, back in Ecuador, were converted. Then, on a trip back home, he went to church with his ‘in-laws’, was spoken to, and was encouraged by the pastor to look for an Evangelical church in Mallorca. He found our church, and has been coming ever since, along with his wife (not yet converted) and children and other family members. He is currently waiting to be baptized.
In addition to these friends, we have also seen a number of other people professing saving faith; these include a Mallorcan girl, a local man who had been both a drug-addict and a committed Jehovah’s Witness, and two Romanian teenagers.
We long to see more such conversions, and are continuing to evangelize in different ways – among others, doing regular open-air meetings in one of the main squares, holding outdoor children’s meetings, giving out tracts, holding home-meetings in other towns, and special evangelistic meetings both at church and in other places, as well as the annual camps, etc. In order to be able to keep up the work, and develop it further, we need more workers, and are currently praying for more elders and also a couple to come and work here, either part-time or full-time. Please join us in praying for this, as well as for the work here and throughout Spain.