From the July-September 2007 Issue
First Heralds of the Gospel
Matt and Judith Hill
Market bookstallThe package arrived this morning. Quite a large package, considering I had gone to the Post Office on foot. I knew where it had come from because it said so on the front – EDITORIAL PEREGRINO. And I guessed what might be inside, hoping there might also be some new books to enjoy. Five minutes later, and slightly out of breath, I got back into the refuge of my study in the church building and put the kettle on. Then it was time to open the package. Inside was our two-monthly supply of evangelistic literature, the People’s Herald (it sounds much better in Spanish – El Heraldo del Pueblo). ‘Three hundred platoons of little lead soldiers’, to borrow a phrase from a different context.
Unreached villages
Recently the four of us who go out ‘on the doors’ met to plan tactics for the coming summer. For many years the church here in Cuenca have combined their tracting efforts here in the city with a burden to reach out into the towns and villages of the province. One of the batons that Luis Cano passed on to me was a large map showing the whole province and a circle drawn whose circumference is at about 25 miles distance from Cuenca. Many of the places within the circle are marked as visited, with some still to be done. Many places fall outside the circle, and although we are the nearest evangelical church for many of them, we will not be able to visit them just yet.
We pored over Luis’ map for half an hour or so and settled on a plan – we would attempt to finish the more populated half of the circle before the end of the summer (thankfully, the summers here can last well into October). So every Thursday we plan to be visiting a different town or village – some are no more than hamlets – with our literature. We knock on the doors and seek to leave a copy of El Heraldo with whoever opens the door – if possible trying to engage them in conversation at the same time. If there is no reply then we carry out a careful examination of the doorstep. If a house is occupied then the doorstep will be spotlessly clean, since it is washed every day. So it is easy to see the houses that are inhabited and know whether to push a tract under the door or not. Because of migration to the large cities, up to half of the houses in any one village can be empty. One of the reasons for visiting in the summer months is that many of the families who have migrated will return to the family home for the summer, which in turn means we have more chance of finding people who will open their door to us.
It never ceases to amaze and move me to think that in the places we visit we may well be the first Gospel heralds ever to set foot in that place. But Spain is like that. Once you leave the cities and large towns behind it is very hard to find an Evangelical church. When you do, it may well be a Gypsy church for Gypsies, or a Romanian church with all the services in Romanian. We are grateful to God for all those places of worship where the true Gospel is preached, but they are so few and far between. With nearly three hundred towns and villages in the province of Cuenca, the total number of churches would be under 30, with six of those being in the city of Cuenca itself. On average in Spain only 1 town in 20 has an evangelical church.
So, we’ll continue going to the towns and villages of Cuenca Province, trusting that the God of all grace will pour out His grace on one and another for salvation. And we’ll continue to use Biblical literature like El Heraldo produced by Demetrio Cánovas at EDITORIAL PEREGRINO and tracts from the Gospel Printing Mission. Come to think of it, there could be a parcel of tracts from GPM waiting at the Post Office…