World Cup Churches 29: Portugal

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.

Portugal is such an interesting country that, despite its small size has influenced all corners of the maritime world.  It is also a country with deep Catholic history, but here for my blog is a Protestant Church - Igreja Evangelica Prebyteriana de Lisboa.  It was the first in Portugal and, predictably, the result of a Scottish missionary's initiative. 

There are not hoards of Evangelical Presbyterian churches in Portugal, and they have been through a lot over their history.  Although this one has ended up with a strong number in a modern building, many are in minuscule chapels in isolated locations, as typical of Protestantism in very Catholic cultures.  What drew me to these churches was something as simple as their default picture on their listings page.

What do you do when you don't have an actual picture of a church?  I've seen many techniques - badges, letters, blank spaces, Bibles, praying hands . . .

Like the photograph above, the default picture for the Evangelical Presbyterians of Portugal's unpictured churches is a picture of people:

Whether a typical Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Portugal is as friendly as this appears, I have no idea.   But I do like the idea that if you only envisage one thing about one of their churches you envisage warmth and fellowship.

World Cup Churches 8. Wales

It's World Cup year - taking place in November/December in Qatar instead of the Northern Hemisphere summer as it has always previously done.  Heading round the 32 qualifying countries I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is a exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

In my look at the USA (Previous blog click here) I referenced a Presbyterian Church that had closed.  As it turns out the next World Cup nation - Wales - also features a Presbyterian Church that has closed.  Let me take you deep into North West Wales beyond Snowdonia, and to Edern, a village that, together with its surrounding farms and hamlets, has had a population of 300-400 for the last 150 years.

It has a small parish (Anglican) church as befits an isolated rural community.  

It also has - or perhaps we must say had - Edern Chapel.

Look, it's not that there are no alive and interesting churches in Wales, but Edern Chapel, which closed in May this year, represents something profound about Christianity in Wales.  You may think that this is the sadness that all the chapels are closing down (many are).  But my reason for choosing Edern is not mainly that - it is the amazing testimony that it gives to what God has done in Wales.

Think about it for a moment.  From the moment it was built to the day it closed this chapel (in a village, remember, that also has a small parish church) could fit in the population of the village and surrounding area more than twice.  For the small London suburb where my current church is that would be the equivalent of a Stadium Church seating 55000.

If we had such a church it would certainly raise the question, 'Why?'.  The answer is Revival.  A community and area so saturated with the Gospel and desire for prayer and preaching that people would seek out opportunities to do it in vast numbers in their own and neighbouring areas on any or every free moment of a day or week (of which there wouldn't have been many).  

Just by being there this Chapel has continued to tell the story of great works, not of architects and builders (though it is stunningly beautiful inside), but great works of God.

Wales may not be encouraging now, but its monumental moments with God are still told in a thousand communities in impossible buildings like this.

World Cup Churches 7. United States of America

It's World Cup year - taking place in November/December in Qatar instead of the Northern Hemisphere summer as it has always previously done.  Heading round the 32 qualifying countries I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is a exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Well, this is the biggie.  A vast country, a huge population and hundreds of thousands of churches.  Can we possibly find one that epitomises something American?  As with England I found selecting one church surprisingly easy.

Christ Cathedral is the Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange in California.  As such it is a reminder of the hugeness of the Catholic Church in America (including of course the current President), not least in California (reference Sister Act) and its burgeoning Hispanic population.

For all that it is very glitzy in Californian-American style - and that is for a reason. Until not so long ago it was called the Crystal Cathedral and the home of Reverend Robert Schuller's Positive Thinking TV empire.  Technically a Presbyterian Church it was more accurately a Television Church and its Hour of Power, birthed out of a 1960s Drive-Thru church, was vastly popular across the English-speaking world and beyond.  You can't get much more American than all that.  I thought that one day as I walked through the glass building alongside the fountains gently spurting out water in the middle of the aisles as the sun beamed in.

'If you can dream it, you can do it.'

'Let your imagination release your imprisoned possibilities.'

'Problems are never real problems unless they cause you to take your eye off your goals.'

It's not necessarily straightforward to derive these maxims from the carpenter of Nazareth and his disciples, followers, martyrs, prisoners, missionaries and attendant Holy Spirit- inspired operatives.  But in sunny California they made a whole lot of sense.

Until they didn't.

Because for all the positivity stamped on the side of free pens, glasses, eagle ornaments and handkerchiefs - and written in an endless stream of best selling books - some of the problems WERE real problems, whether you thought about your goals beyond them or not.

This whole caboodle cost an awful lot of dollars - orchestras, high-level staffing and prime-time level programming don't come cheap.  And in a long story played out in court and public the ministry filed for bankruptcy.

Unfortunately there was a marked lack of positive thinking in the family.  Firings and hirings, Schuller himself suing the ministry he had founded and energetic divisiveness from an angry, diminishing, and now online congregation.  In many ways among the most negative decades in any church's story in America from a church that had steadfastly refused to countenance sin in the interests of thinking positively. That is one great irony.

Another irony is that a building christened a cathedral simply to make itself sound important (a Presbyterian Church remember) has now actually become a Cathedral - the seat of a Bishop - in the Roman Catholic Church.

It happened in America.