Spain Needs Jesus

Up at 7:00am then off to our first meeting by 9:00am. What a day, got to go by a High School and it was as big as one you would see in Austin or Houston. The students get out of High School at the age of 16, then, if they go on in school, at the age of 17 they will be in Jr. Collage. The students of Barcelona have less than a 10 minute walk to school. At the age of 10 they are getting to be on their own more and more. The funny thing is that they cannot drive a car until 18, it cost $3000.00 to get their license and they do not move out of the house until about 30. If a teen is from a nonchristian home they have more freedom to do what they like. One of the Churches we were at today has 15 teens in their youth group and they meet on Sunday night in a real life group setting. Every year the teens from all over Spain meet together and around 1500 teen attend to get motivated for local and global missions. After two more meetings we made it back to our hotel room around 10:00pm and what a day it was. - Charlie Matlock


Today was a great day! We met with a Pastor who is a church planner for the Evangelical Churches in Spain. We created much excitement when we discussed the possibilities of starting a business based in Spain that would be created for the purpose of assisting our mutual missions’ endeavors financially. His eyes were opened when he realized that a church based business would benefit not only our activities but would benefit the churches in Spain as well. We fully have his support. He and I will continue our communications after we leave the country. There was truly a sense of desire to work together for our common vision of reaching every man woman and child with the life changing reality of Jesus Christ. We also met a Pastor who is the Secretary General of the Evangelical Alliance for Spain which has approximately 150 voting churches in their alliance which covers all of Spain. He too was very excited with the idea of starting a business in Spain. In his congregation of 70, which is considered a large church in Spain, there are some businessmen who may be interested in networking with us to create our new venture. He and I will also continue to communicate. With God’s help, anything is possible, Mark 10:27. --- Rene Dela Garza

Wow, what a day today. We got the opportunity to meet with several Pastors in the area that have a big heart for Christ and a heavy burden for their city and country. Do you know that the average church in Spain is 30-60 members and that less than one percent in Spain out of 45 million go to an evangelical church and only 20% go to Catholic Church, 5% in Barcelona? For every conversion that you have here you have 3 Muslim converts. Barcelona has been identified by the Pope as the most strategic city to impact to reach the Europeans. We met mostly with conservative Pastors that have a heart to reach unreached cities for Christ, for example one of the cities has 45 thousand people and not one church to bear witness, if that doesn’t give you a knot in your stomach, I don’t know what will. A city of 80 thousand where we met another Pastor only has 3 churches. Church members are not used to give because over here you give taxes to the government and out of the national treasury they give to the Catholic Church so people are not used to give to the church, so funding new church plants is difficult, and yet necessary. The church here gets little to no outside funding for church planting but yet the Muslims are heavily funded from the outside to be aggressive and property is bought for them from foreign countries to expand the mosques. Don’t get me wrong there are positive things going on, mainly Jesus Christ is working, it is evident in the hearts of these Pastors and in the current awareness of the gospel within the immigrant community that the Lord is going to unlock the gospel to this unreached people group, Latinos and Muslim Moroccans. Once a year these conservative churches gather together to help start or support new church initiatives and we have been invited to participate, what an honor if we do. Well off to more meetings, keep praying for us as we discern what our role could be here. - Jesse Elizondo