Jeff Adams

I love to visit Spain. It’s a beautiful country and rich with history. When I lived in Latin America years ago, I was always curious as to what Spain was really like. Under General Franco it was a very closed country, and those of us in Latin America had a the impression that Spaniards looked down on us as speaking inferior Spanish and being still a little crude and savage here in the Americas.

My first visit to Spain was in the mid 80’s, not long after Franco died in 1975 and Spain became a constitutional monarchy under Juan Carlos de Borbón. Change was already in the air. I even found that I got along famously with the Spaniards! What a country!

One thing had not changed. Spain remained highly resistant to any form of evangelical Christianity. Franco conserved Spain’s Roman Catholic traditions with a fervor that seemed at times not far removed from the days of the Inquisition.

In the post-Franco years, Spain has become increasingly secular and the youth increasingly apathetic or even skeptical of the church. The Spanish worldview has become more like that of Spain’s neighbors in Western Europe. Yet, Spain remains the Western European country without a Reformation, and Spanish hearts are still resistant to evangelical Christianity. One of my favorite statistics to express the situation in Spain is that there is more caffeine in most decaffeinated coffee than there are evangelical believers in Spain. In the country of 40 million there are approximately 150,000 evangelicals and many of them are gypsies.

Now, Spain is awakening to a new reality, one from a most unlikely source. Over the past couple of decades a trickle of Latin American immigrants has become a raging flood. Over a million Latin Americans have arrived, matching the arrival of about the same number of Muslim immigrants. The Latin American group, though, is somewhat like an evangelical Trojan horse, because an amazing 300,000 of them profess to be evangelicals! That’s twice the number of Spanish evangelicals. Among them are over 1,000 evangelical pastors, many working in construction, hotels, restaurants, etc.

My friend Tony Vazquez recently wrote about meeting an Ecuadorian pastor sent to minister to the thousands of Ecuadorians in Madrid. In a recent soccer match in Madrid between the Ecuadorian National squad and the famous Real Madrid, there were more Ecuadorians in the stands than Spaniards! Tony attends a church near the large Atocha rail station with 900,000 passengers each day. Tony’s church now has more than 20 nationalities, unheard of not that many years ago. Latin American evangelicals are already having an impact on Spanish society, and Spanish churches are recognizing the need for a new strategy to take advantage of this amazing opportunity that God is giving to them, not only to reach other Spaniards with the Gospel, but connecting with ministry in Africa and the rest of Europe. What a great opportunity for all of us to work and pray together!

Atocha Station