Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one. I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking. This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.
Our lodger looked at the placemat we had put underneath her glass.
"That's where I come from!", she said.
And so it was. A quite worn down picture of a castle on top of a coastal hill overlooking the town of Denia.
Our lodger came from a Baptist Church in Denia. But we had heard of Denia many years before when visiting Christian friends in that area of Spain. While it would be surprising for any smallish Spanish town in a Catholic country long ruled by autocratic government to have a Baptist-type church, it would be a 'given' that it would be likely to be a group in a house, or 95% expats in a hotel ballroom or the like.
That's what made - still makes - the Baptist Church in Denia so amazing.
In the oppressive General Franco years (specifically in 1957), Gerald and June McNeely arrived in Spain as Southern Baptist missionaries from Kentucky. They served in many ways in an environment that, to put it mildly, was not conducive to evangelical Christianity.
However in the Denia area Spanish Baptists owned a patch of land - in those days almost worthless - with a view to holding Christian camps by the seaside.
Its a long story that can be read elsewhere, but the end result was an evangelical Baptist church with hundreds of people. A patch of Spain that had an evangelical witness that would have been hard to find in some English seaside towns of those days (and most of them today).
It is a Church that defies sociological trends and cultural explanations and which testifies to faithful ministry and the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit.
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