DAWN LATIN EUROPE REGION, A GREAT CHALLENGE!

INTRODUCTION
According to the vision God gave us to “mobilize and train the body of Christ in Portugal, Spain and Italy for a dynamic transformational church planting movement, committed to the transformation of each Latin Europe nation”, we have looked at serving with allegiance in the countries that constitute the Dawn Latin Europe region. In these first six months of 2007 we tried to honor the expectations written in our Global Action Plan jointly with all the coordination responsibilities. In terms of practical and visible outcomes in each one of the countries of the Latin Europe region, we point out the following:

PORTUGAL – GLOBAL MISSION 2015 PROJECT

It is with joy that we registered the trend among the Portuguese leadership for a greater awareness of the relevance and the value of the Global Mission 2015 (GM2015) project in the definition of a church planting strategy for the independent churches, denominations and mission organizations in the country. We can affirm that the church planting movement in progress in Portugal can be characterized today as never before as autochthon and rapid.

It is autochthon because it was the leadership of the Portuguese Evangelical Alliance that in May of 2004 decided by unanimous vote to adopt the Dawn vision as its vision for the transformation of the country through a transformational church planting movement. At that time, the Portuguese leadership was aware that in 2003 it still had 72 of the 308 counties of Portugal with no evangelical church and, based on this fact, reacted to this sad reality by planting some new churches in strategic places through denominational initiatives, joint efforts between different denominations and shared efforts between mission organizations. Today, after 4 years of a common vision adopted by the whole body, we have only 42 counties with no church. This represents a notable growth in this young church planting movement in Portugal and the results of the information harvested for the research team of our project is gradually updated and shared to all the evangelical community.

This movement is rapid because if it is true that between 1960 and 2000 the Evangelicals had planted 1340 new churches, the fact is that it between 2000 and 2007, a period of only 7 years, we believe that there have been planted about 370 new churches Some of these are ethnic churches, planted as a result of the immigration movement, but also “simple churches”, “traditional churches”, “house churches”, over all in the main urban areas. With this rhythm, we believe that we will reach the goal to see 1200 new churches planted up by 2015, that is, 1 church for each 3500 Portuguese.

The numbers cannot be very rigorous for the moment, but today we are working hard in terms of good database research and we truly believe that Portugal will have, no later than the end of 2007, a good and reliable database on the evangelical movement in Portugal and the rigorous classification of the most urgent areas of need in terms of church planting.

Another important area of the GM2015 project is the increasing number of opportunities promoted or sponsored by us in terms of regional training and practical service through evangelistic efforts done by students in some cities with no church, National Conferences (IV), Distance Learning Program (Teófilos), Church Planting Workshops and Consultations, Leaders Meetings, etc. In these initiatives, some emergent leaders have been identified and recruited as regional coordinators for research, vision and strategy, and prayer. We are confident, as we mention in our plan for 2007, that we will have at least 10 committed district teams working on the regional level by December 2007. Some of these emergent leaders have been added to our national team of leadership and we are trying to train them in some specific areas (e.g. organic church). Today we have a very committed executive team with some new leaders who will be in condition to continue the SCP movement after the exit of the pioneers, which should happen in 2008.

The GM2015 project has also been a unifying element between the different Christian families of the country and has been used as a promoter of unity among the people of God while it recognizes different forms of “doing church planting”.

SPAIN - PIEES PROJECT INSPIRED BY DAWN VISION

When we finished the III Training Conference of Global Mission 2015 last March in Lisbon, a group of Spanish leaders made the decision to meet again in order to start a similar movement in Spain and to establish a National Task Force of an SCP movement in the country.

After the first meeting in Madrid in May 2007, 13 leaders from different backgrounds and denominations identified Manuel Cerezo, who shared his vision based on Jim Montgomery’s book "DAWN 2000: 7 Million Churches to Go”, as leader of PIEES (http://www.piees.es/). PIEES is a very representative network started in 2002, mainly among the Pentecostals and charismatic’s leaders with a vision to start a church planting movement. Their goal is to plant 7000 new churches in the next 15 years. The group decided to pray about the possibility of adopting PIEES as a platform for an SCP movement to serve all the evangelicals. They see Manuel Cerezo as a key leader but he will need the support of others for research, prayer and executive ministries. They planned another meeting and they will make a proposal of a larger team, including some conservative leaders, to all the existing participants of PIEES by October 2007.

One of the researchers of emRG network has been supporting this initiative with mapping tools, advice and assistance as needed to bring awareness to the Spanish leadership. The Evangelical Alliance of Spain also requested our support in the same area.

ITALY – FIRST INITIATIVES

Italy has a culture of influence. The fingerprints of Italian culture permeate the Western world. Yet for the most part, Italians have remained untouched by the gospel of Jesus Christ. They live in a "Christian" culture; but in name only. A historically Christian nation, today less than 10 percent of Italians attend Catholic mass monthly.

Approximately 100,000 people are believed to be practicing magicians (psychics, witches, and fortune tellers). This is more than the number of Catholic Priests, and 324 times the number of Protestant missionaries and evangelists. Satanism is very strong in the north and is rapidly moving toward the south. Satanic practice includes praying for the removal of all Christian evangelical missionaries from the country. Approximately 80% of the Italian population have consulted or will consult a witch, psychic, or fortune-teller at least once in their lifetime. Many politicians consult witches and psychics before every election, and some big corporations consult them before investing in major projects. The magicians, fortune-tellers, and psychics have daily programs on local and national television.

During the first semester of 2007 we had the chance to establish the first contacts with some key leaders in Italy. These contacts had been enabled through the Evangelical Alliance of Italy, with its General-Secretary Gian Piero Marussich, and with a veteran church planter in the country. It was really helpful to enlarge our understanding of the needs in terms of church planting. The Italian evangelical community faces serious challenges in terms of religious freedom and unity among the Church and it does not possess any strategy for church planting.

The Evangelical Alliance of Italy is open to hear of the experiences of others and, over all, to invest in research efforts to evaluate the dimension of the needs in church planting. Having better conditions, we believe that we will be able to help this nation to achieve their goals in terms of church planting.

LUXEMBOURG – A country to Adopt

Whereas the number of inhabitants in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was less than 340 000 in the 1970 population census, the 450 000 mark will be exceeded during the first half of the present decade. So in 30 years, the residential population has grown by some 100 000.The accelerating demographic growth during the first half of the 1990s led STATEC to propose, in its population forecasts, a variant resulting in more than 700 000 inhabitants by the year 2050.

We had the wonderful opportunity of visiting Luxembourg during the first semester of 2007 and spending some time with Paulo Pereira, a Portuguese Pastor with a typical “John Knox” heart. We truly believe God is opening doors through the Portuguese leaders and churches to start something new in Luxembourg in terms of unity and prayer, towards a Church Planting movement.

We felt that we, as Portuguese, or we, as the Latin European region, should “adopt” this little nation as part of our strategy and combine efforts to help them to adopt a saturation church planting strategy in the country. We really believe we should encourage an organic church planting movement but not forget the existing churches in their efforts to reach the natives.

NEED

Latin Europe (Portugal, Spain and Italy) is a wonderful region of the European continent with almost 110 million inhabitants. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish, Portuguese and Italian speakers is approximately 791 million. Spanish is the fourth most spoken language by total number of speakers and Portuguese is one of the world's major languages, ranked sixth according to the number of native speakers (over 250 million).

It is generally agreed that Spain, Portugal, and Italy are Catholic countries, and according to Pope Benedict XVI, other Christian denominations were not true churches. For all of these reasons, the Latin European region needs to continue to be challenged and mobilized to initiate or to strengthen the efforts for the transformation of these nations through church planting movements.

In some ways the situation in Portugal remains very needy but now we are beginning to see good progress. If in Portugal the number of evangelicals is below 1.6% of the population, and of 308 municipalities 42 are still without the presence of a evangelical church, in Spain the situation is even worse. There the number of evangelicals is less than 0.79% and out of a total of 1235 municipalities, 714 do not have any evangelical church. There are 411 towns with more than 5000 inhabitants who don’t have any evangelical church. In those 411 towns live 3,652,339 inhabitants or 8% of the country’s population.

Italian evangelical/protestant numbers are approximately 285,000 in a country of 57 million. With more than 33,000 cities, towns, and villages in Italy, less than 1,500 have an evangelical church. Just in the capital city, Rome, exists 4 million inhabitants and only 30 evangelical churches. The majority of the leadership has been focused on the maintenance of their ministries. Very few evangelicals can be found in politics, journalism or the media in all three of these countries.

Luxembourg is a very conservative Catholic country, like Portugal, besides having some big differences in terms of economics, population, size, Germanic mindset, etc. It’s a multi-ethnic country with 37% of it’s population being immigrants. The biggest immigrant community is Latin (1st Portuguese, 2nd Italians, and 3rd Spanish). The Portuguese alone are 16% of the population. In fact Portuguese and Italian are the languages spoken by a large part of the population. In terms of Evangelical churches, Luxembourg has 4 Portuguese churches in a country with just 15 traditional churches that are members of a very ineffective Evangelical Alliance.

The Portuguese Evangelical Alliance has set a target of 1200 new churches by the year 2015. Its goal is to reach all the municipalities without a church. Sadly, Italy has not as yet set any goals in terms of church planting, but in Spain the objective is an evangelical church in every municipality of more than 5,000 persons by the year 2012 and for that they need to plant 7000 new churches in the next 15 years.

VISION
Our Vision is to mobilize and train the body of Christ in Portugal, Spain and Italy for a dynamic transformational church planting movement, committed to the transformation of each Latin European nation.