Home-based groups are growing in Spain.

By November 2, 2005

Spain (MNN) — How do you reach a country that has had the Gospel for two thousand years? That’s the question Greater Europe Mission is asking as they minister to the Catalan people group in Spain, where just one-fourth of one percent of the people are evangelical Christians.

Lauren Wells is with GEM, and he says they’re rethinking church in new ways:
“So what we’re really hoping to see, and actually starting to see quite a bit of movement in, is really more of kind of a home-based church, much more of what I like to call, simple church.”

Wells says home-based church has the potential for high impact and doesn’t use a lot of the “professionalism” that many people are wary of across post-Christian Europe, where Catholicism and religious traditions have left many people skeptical of the church.

Through GEM’s work in the province of Catalonia, Wells says they’ve learned that the believers there don’t need more people to come to them and explain the Gospel; “They’ll tell you face to face that they’ve had the Gospel in their country for 2000 years. But if we come as servants, actually demonstrating to them, working out for them in our lives a Christian walk, they find that very, very attractive. And I believe that is what the Catalan Christian today is looking for, is someone to come alongside and really live their faith and maybe give them – the Catalan Christians – the strength and the courage to actually live their faith.”

So that is what GEM is hoping to do: provide much-needed support for those Catalan Christians who will step out in faith to reach Spain in new ways.

It’s a crucial need, especially as home-based churches are rethinking the traditional methods of church. Wells says there are great challenges that face the believers: “Those people who choose to worship in a different way, first of all are cast out of the Roman Catholic Church, second of all are cast out of the Evangelical Church, by both as really being heretical. So there are certain implications of that, and it’s a very challenging area; it’s very challenging for people to actually grasp that idea and be willing to take that step.”

Pray for God to awaken His people to be a inviting display of Christ to the Catalan people and all of Spain, and that He will bless the faith of those who are attempting new things to impact a new generation.

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