From the October-December 2008 Issue
Population growth and gospel growth
Andrew and Vivienne Birch
Palma, MallorcaAren’t statistics fascinating? – Well, some, anyway. I found the following very recent facts and figures about Spain interesting, to say the least: Spain now has a population of over forty-six million, which means that in the space of one year the population has grown by almost exactly one million people; of the over forty-six million ‘souls’ living (and registered) here, more than 11% are officially classified as ‘immigrants’ (including, presumably, Vivienne and myself); heading the immigration ‘league-table’ are: Romanians (728,967), Moroccans (644,688), Ecuadoreans (420,110), British citizens (351,919) and Colombians (280,705); and of Spain’s seventeen autonomous regions the one with the highest percentage of non-Spaniards is our very own Balearic Islands, with over twenty percent.
It occurs to me that these official (Spanish) government figures lend themselves to what we might refer to as ‘a spiritual analysis’: (1) God, in his providence, is bringing more and more people to Spain from all over the world, with, presumably, some purpose (or purposes) in mind; (2) the most obvious (and surely the most eternally significant) purposes would seem to be: (a) to bring people to a relatively free country, where they may hear the gospel – for example, think of all those Moroccans; and: (b) to bring Christians here (especially from Latin America and Eastern Europe) to help to evangelize the rest of the population; (3) all over Spain, albeit to a greater or lesser extent, many Evangelical churches are growing, and new churches are ‘springing up’ (especially in the big cities), mainly as a result of the arrival of Christians from elsewhere.
What is happening at the national level is certainly reflected here on the island of Mallorca, in the city of Palma and in our church. More and more people from all over the world are continuing to arrive here, the majority of them (though not all) coming from fairly desperate economic conditions back home, and prepared to take the very real risk of having a hard time here; especially now that Spain is feeling the effects of the general economic crisis, there are ever fewer jobs available for an ever-growing number of people looking for work, and joblessness, debt, depression and deportation, among other trials, are increasingly the order of the day.
Hardly a Sunday goes by without a few more new faces being seen at our morning service. Although we get ‘all sorts’ of people crossing the church’s threshold, including non-Christians (for whose presence among us we are, of course, grateful), and some folk whose main aim is clearly to get practical help of various kinds, quite a high percentage of these visitors end up attending regularly and some of them join our church. At our AGM earlier this year, for example, we were happy to welcome seventeen new members, from twelve different countries; and we already have new waiting-lists, both for baptism and for church-membership, which include folk from some seven different countries.
Chiefly as a consequence of this growth, we have been able, over the last twelve months or so, to start up six home-groups, in six different locations which, between them, cover quite a wide area of the island, from the west coast to the north-east and the south-east. These groups, which usually meet once a fortnight for Bible-study, prayer and singing, are attended by anything between seven or eight and twenty-five to thirty people. Some folk who live in Palma go to meetings outside the city, mainly to support smaller, more isolated groups of believers. There has also been an evangelistic dimension to these meetings, with some non-Christians attending regularly and showing interest in the gospel. And we are now in the process of planning what we hope will become a church-plant in an area with little, if any, Spanish-speaking gospel testimony, where we have a large number both of church-members and of non-Christian contacts.
All of this, which is very encouraging, brings with it a number of fairly obvious needs for which we would appreciate ongoing prayer: (1) more elders; (2) more capable group-leaders; (3) someone to work (either full-time or part-time) alongside us; (4) wisdom for dealing with the many complex pastoral situations that inevitably arise; (5) unity among us now that there is greater diversity than there used to be; (6) a renewed vision for and commitment to outreach on the part of the congregation as a whole; and (7) that we would be enabled to make the most of the day of opportunity, without in any way ceasing to be faithful to the Lord and his Word.