News, March 2011

News from the Churches

This is Spain Prayer week. Actualidad Evangelica web news service launched. Protestante Digital renewed - English service temporarily unavailable! MariLuz murder trial took place. Hospital chaplains finally at work in Madrid. Protestant university titles to be recognised and some pastors to get pensions in government recognition of the evangelical community. This and more... Read on!

Now on or coming soon!

On 2nd April the 3rd Spain we are praying for you national prayer day will take place in locations across the country. In Mallorca prayer is taking place at meetings throughout the preceding week. The main events will unite churches at rallies in most provincial capitals on Saturday evening, with a 10 minute national video link bringing all the main centres together. Join us in praying for Spain this week.

Easter is a key date for numerous special conferences and church or group retreats. This year the main event is Mission Possible, a national youth missions event which will take place in Madrid.

[Image 104???]On 9th March the new news service of the Evangelical Federation was launched with the name Actualidad Evangélica. This is part of a larger project, called Red de Servicios Informativos Evangélicos (Evangelical News Services Network). It takes the place of the previous FEREDE news service. We wish this new news channel well as it attempts to communicate the reality of the Spanish Evangelical world. AE thus complements the news service of the Evangelical Alliance, Protestante Digital, which was itself relaunched earlier this year, sadly to date without its English language news service. One of the novelties of AE is its sections for rather more regions than PD currently offers.

From 11th March Madrid's hospitals have recognised chaplains to attend the evangelical patients. Although it has long been recognised as a fundamental right of protestant pastors to visit their church members in hospital, this is the first case of a specific role being permitted within the public health system. It is to be desired that there will soon be similar recognition across Spain. Health services are now directed by regional governments, requiring separate agreements in each one.
The government is to include the recognition of certain protestant academic (theological) titles in a new adaptation of its way of relating to the evangelical community. A number of seminaries have been campaigning for this for years. Also a number of pastors, who were not permitted to contribute to the Social Security under Franco (and later) are now finally to get a pension. In addition, evangelicals will be granted the right to request 0.7% of their tax bill to be granted to the Federation of Evangelical Churches (FEREDE) in future years (hopefully as from the 2012 tax year), as has for many years been the right of Catholics. Finally, the status of church buildings will be defined. Over the past few years many buildings have been closed by municipal authorities, often on spurious grounds.
Mi Esperanza (My Hope), a TV campaign, will take place at Christmas 2011. It was launched in mid-November 2010. The campaign aims to unite the best of mass and personal evangelism, by training church members to invite neighbours, family and other contacts to their home to watch the 30 minute TV show together. They will then give a 3 minute testimony and invite people to turn to Christ. In this simple way, local churches can take advantage of a nationwide broadcast on a main stream channel to reach out at a time of year when people are most open to the gospel. This outreach is being supported by most of the largest denominations and many local churches, as well as backed with a major contribution from the Billy Graham Association. See the Spanish website!

Recent news and events

The trial of Santiago del Valle, accused of the murder of MariLuz Cortés, daughter of an evangelical pastor, took place between 16 February and 22 March. The little girl (3 years old) went missing from her home in Huelva, Andalusia in January, 2008. Her body was discovered several weeks later thrown into the harbour close by. More information is the separate article.
An evangelical master chocolatier has become Spain's chocolate champion and will now represent Spain in the world championship in Paris. He is famous in the Madrid area for having built a 20 metre long Crib scene in his church, the Boadilla del Monte Evangelical Church, as well as having made Prince Felipe's commemorative wedding cake.
Protestante Digital, the Spanish evangelical news service, led by the Spanish Evangelical Alliance, has updated itself. It has taken some 18 months to reach the definitive launch date on 31st January, 2011. The English language service remains to be reconnected at the time of writing, but we look forward to the positive effects of the transformation. We congratulate them on the amazing growth and effectiveness of the service, approximately over the same period as PrayforSpain has been in existence.
An evangelical foundation has been awarded a grant of 8,000 square metres of ground to build a school in Dos Hermanas, near Seville. It will become the first evangelical school in Andalusia since the Civil War and will offer infant, primary and secondary education. The competition for the new school was won due to the proposal to make this a centre for educational research. More from Protestante Digital (Spanish).
The city council of Lleida (Catalonia) has closed 5 churches and opened studies on 3 more in the weeks before the regional elections. Meanwhile, a Catholic church which has been denounced repeatedly for excessive bell tolling has no such study. The reason given is that the churches appear to have no opening licence, as though they were discotheques or pubs. The need for a licence is arbitrary, depending on each town hall, but recently the Catalonian Parlament published regulations for the entire region. With elections at regional level, it is doubtful if the churches can obtain even a start to justice until well after Christmas. The church buildings all belong to pentecostal groups, including Assemblies of God, the Gypsy Filadelfia church and two Nigerian churches. They are all located, as is customary in Spain, in premises on the ground floor of blocks of flats, it being virtually impossible to buy land suitable for the building of a church, even if one had the money. In theory, the city councils should provide land for the churches to build on.

Earlier news in bullets:

Once again an Evangelical service was televised over Christmas.
The Disney version of C.S. Lewis's The Journey of the Dawn Treader was released in Spain on Friday 3rd December.
On 9th December the former directors of Barcelona's Evangelical Hospital and Madrid's City Mission, Armand Urrutia and Juan Simarro, were awarded the second Diakonia prize for evangelical social work.

For earlier news from the churches, click here!

Finally, more news from the churches is (usually) always available at the Protestante Digital site.

As of 1st February, the transformation of the PD web means there has been some interruption to the service. You can also listen to some reports and comment.