Posts Tagged ‘People Movement’

The Steering Group for Together in Mission met a few days ago and amongst many discussion points, we heard from the leader of DAWN Europe – Reinhold Scharnowski. He was able to share with us information about an upsurge in church planting activity in many nations in western Europe. One of the most fascinating stories comes from Portugal, traditionally a very strong and conservative Catholic nation.

Although evangelical churches have been present in Portugal for decades, they have usually been seen as small, lacking in growth and vitality, irrelevant and, almost like cults, outside of the mainstream of society. In recent years there has come a huge growth. Since 1990, the total number of evangelicals has grown to something just under 200,000, up from around 35,000 in 1960. The number of churches has gone from 291 in 1960 to nearly 2000 today with 370 of those being planted in the last 7 years.

Evangelicals now represent close to 2% of the 10.5 million population of Portugal and because their growth is somewhat exponential, could easily be more than 10% within the next two decades. This kind of growth is close to being described as a people movement. There are now more evangelicals in Portugal than in Switzerland – a nation of some 7.5 million people.

The Portuguese story reminds us that God can bring the unexpected and that in relatively short periods of time, situations of apparent hopelessness can become dynamic illustrations of the power of God – even in a western European nation!