The following message was given at Grace Community Church in Mendon, Nevada. Good evening. You can hear me, can't you? Well, I'm really happy to be here tonight. I'm thankful that you've included me in this prayer meeting, and I have to say my heart was particularly warmed when I came in and I saw all these, not just Spanish, but Catalan food offerings there on the table. That was wonderful. I don't know if you realize that some of the things that were there are typical specifically of the region that we're in in Barcelona, not just in the rest of Spain, but that pan con tomate, so the bread with tomato, that's a really typical Catalan thing where the Catalans will take a fresh baguette and they'll cut open a small soft tomato and they'll smear the tomato on it and they'll put olive oil and salt and they serve that by itself or as part of a sandwich. But if you order that in another part of Spain, they give you a piece of bread and a tomato. And here it was done right. So you can chop up the tomato and smear it on little pieces of toasted bread. That was wonderful. So that was really sweet. I have to apologize. I left the fun and interesting part of my family in our Airbnb in Carson City. So my wife is back with our two youngest kids who are traveling with us this summer. Our youngest, our 12-year-old, is kinda sick. So we were in San Francisco visiting two churches this last weekend and it was cold. It was Monday, the high temperature was 60 degrees with the fog and the wind and he's got a runny nose and a sore throat and his ears are plugged and we were driving over all these passes on the way to get here and he's, my ears, my ears. So he stayed back with our 14-year-old, who isn't feeling so hot either, and my wife stayed with him. So hopefully everybody will be fine later in the week. You'll get a chance to meet and to see all of them. But on their behalf, thank you so much. We came in 2018 for a really brief visit. So we showed up on a Sunday morning, and it was our last stop on our long road trip that we made throughout the Southwest, California, Southern California, Northern California. We came back through Nevada, and we came to see you, and you graciously allowed me to give a presentation like I'm going to now in the adult Sunday school hour. And not long after that, your church decided to support us. So you've been supporting us for six years. We're grateful, we're encouraged, and I hope that tonight, the little bit that I'm gonna share about our ministry in Spain is encouraging to you as well, just to give you a taste of what the Lord is doing in Spain. But also I hope it's encouraging to you because you should know that you're having a part in what the Lord is doing in and through our ministry there. So let me begin by telling you a little bit about our family. I should point it this way, there we go, okay. That picture was taken last fall, and for those of you who I haven't talked to or haven't really met, which is most of you, I grew up in Georgetown, Colorado. Now, just a little bit of Western United States history, Georgetown owes its existence partly to Nevada. Isn't the Comstock Lode close to here? Okay, so Comstock Lode, 1859, the second gold rush. In 1859, a man called George found some gold in a little valley about an hour west of Denver in the mountains of Colorado, and he named the town where he found the gold after himself, Georgetown. That's where I grew up. So thank you, all of you from Nevada, for giving me my hometown. I was talking to somebody earlier, Georgetown's like close to Eisenhower, the Eisenhower Tunnel, you're driving on I-70 west out of Denver, you go for about an hour and Georgetown's there, if you blink, you miss it, it's a small place. Who would have thought that I would grow up and marry a Spaniard? Although I actually just misspoke. It's a good thing she's not here, because I'd be in trouble. I married a Catalan. Una Catalana. So my wife is from Barcelona. Her name is Nuria. You can call her Nu for short. That's easier. And I first went to Spain in 1995 on a short-term mission strip. I was working with Campus Crusade for Christ. And now it's called CRU, which is a cooler name. But back then it was Campus Crusade for Christ. And at the time they were encouraging, almost obligating, all of the single young staffers to do a short-term mission strip. They called it a stint, overseas. Three months, six months, maybe longer, to try to bolster the Campus Crusade ministries in other countries. So I went to Spain. in 1995. I got off the airplane on December 5th, and on December 15th of 1995, I found myself in a Christmas party. A Christmas party in a church outside of Barcelona, and all the songs, and the message, and the games, and the mixer, and the whole thing was all in Catalan. So, I don't know how many of you know this, but in Spain, there are four different languages that are spoken. Everybody in Spain can speak Spanish, but in Barcelona, where we are, in the northeast region of Spain, most people's first language is Catalan, and it's not a dialect. So when you meet my wife on Friday or Sunday, you can say, your language is beautiful, don't call it a dialect, because she'll get upset. It's as different from Spanish as Portuguese. So it's another language. So I'm in this Christmas party and it's all in Catalan and I'm completely lost and somebody had mercy on me and introduced me to this beautiful girl named Nuria who spoke English. And it was love at first sight. That was on December 15th of 1995. We'd been married for almost 27 years. There we are. Okay, so this picture's fun. I just realized, I've been using this as we've visited churches throughout the year. We've been in the United States for a year on home assignment, and I just realized two weeks ago at our sending church in Escondido, California, Grace Bible Church. If any of you know Jim Neuheiser, he was the pastor there for many, many years. Somebody said, you guys jumped that fence? Does it look like we're jumping a fence? I mean, back a long time ago, I might have had some hops, but that was like two years ago. If I tried to jump that fence now, I'd probably, I'd be in trouble. We're on a trampoline, jumping up and down with a fence behind it. So we will celebrate 27 years of marriage, Lord willing, on August 30th. And I blew it, because I planned our trip back to Spain on August 30th. August 30th, we're gonna leave Denver on the 29th and we'll be flying on the 30th, it's not gonna be romantic. So my wife's not here, pray for me. I'm already in trouble. We were supposed to go to Greece or something and we're flying, anyway, internationally. So let me show you a picture here of our kids. Now this picture was taken, let me back up just a bit. So why are we in the United States? Typically, we live in Spain. I've lived there for about 25 years. My wife is from there, of course. Every five years or so, we come back to the United States for a year of what we call home assignment. And it's a time for us to visit supporting churches, friends, family, do networking, research, writing, and that's what we've been doing for this last school year. This picture was taken on the first day of school last fall. Now, on the right is my oldest, Dan. He's 22, almost 23 years old. He is out of college. Well, he kind of just quit college, and he's working. Yeah, he didn't kind of, he quit college, straight up, yeah. He's working. He has a little business. He sells home security systems, alarms. He goes door to door. He's in Jackson, Mississippi this summer working. Number two there in the picture, John, he's 20, and he's studying at Arapaho Community College, which is in Denver. So when we go back to Spain on August 30th on our anniversary, we're gonna leave John in Denver with some really good friends of ours, a dear Christian family. He's gonna live there and Lord willing, finish his associates in economics. That's his goal, and then from there we'll see what he does. Number three, Tanya, she's 18 and she graduated from high school in Colorado this year, which was a real special privilege for her. She doesn't know what she wants to do. She's going to come back to Spain with us and take some online courses from the same community college that her brother is going to until she figures out. So that's a more serious prayer request for direction for our children. We were talking about that, a group of us, out in the foyer earlier. Kids this age and you pray that the Lord would lead them. Number four, Alex, he's 14 and he just did eighth grade in a charter school back in Denver. And 12 year old, number five, Mark. Fun little story about them, they play soccer in Spain and they're decent in Spain. Well, here they were superstars. So in the fall season for the middle school, this charter school that they went to, they had a league and they played games and it was a lot of fun. And the championship game, I can tell this about Alex because he's not here, he scored two of the three goals. and was the MVP, so that was just a boost for him, because in Spain, I mean, he plays, he gets minutes, but he doesn't score a lot of goals. It's a different deal. Oh, and one more thing. In May, I had the privilege of baptizing John and Tanya in one of our supporting churches back in Denver. That was a real joy. This is a picture of the town where we live. It's called Cabrils. And it's about a half hour north of Barcelona, right along the coast. So we tell people that we're suffering for Jesus on the Mediterranean. It's rough. Beautiful little town, 7,000 people or so, and you see the houses with the white walls and the red roofs, and it looks like Mamma Mia, Greece. It's really, it's a nice place, and it's a pleasant place to raise a family. But it's challenging to raise a family in Spain and to do ministry. I'll tell you a little bit more about Spain. Spain is a very diverse country. So I compare Spain to California because they're similar in size and in population. There's a little bit, there's more population in California, but Spain is about 45, 46 million people, something like that. And it's really diverse. So in Spain you've got coastline, you've got beaches. We live on the Mediterranean coast. The northern part of Spain, the beaches there are from the Atlantic Ocean and there's some waves and good surfing up there. Spain also has mountains. So I grew up in the mountains, my hometown Georgetown's at 8,600 feet of elevation, and so every now and then I need a mountain fix. So we can hop in the car and we can drive an hour and a half and we get up to the Pyrenees, which are right on the border between Spain and France, they're beautiful. Spain has two big cosmopolitan modern European cities, Barcelona, which is where we live, and the other one is Madrid. There's other cities that are also big, modern, like Bilbao in the north, Valencia, Malaga, Sevilla, Granada, you've probably heard of some of these cities. Beautiful cities, modern, all the amenities, they're wonderful. But again, Spain is very diverse. You can go an hour out of one of these cities and get into what the Spaniards called pockets of poverty. Small little rural towns that have been abandoned. This happens in the United States too. But you could feel driving an hour or an hour and a half out of Barcelona feel like you've just gone to another country. Very diverse demographically. A little bit about cultures and languages. I've said something about this already. You can travel from the north of Spain to the south of Spain, and again, to use the same expression, you feel like you've gone to another country. It's different. The way people dress is different. The architecture is different. the things that people like, the food is different, and the languages. So like I mentioned, there's four different languages that are spoken in Spain. It's hard to contemplate when we think of the United States and how homogenous it's been, at least until recently. I know now things are changing rather drastically. We live in Catalunya, which is in the northeast corner of Spain, so let me see if I can get this with a pointer. We live up here, so you can see Barcelona, this area, that's Catalunya, and it's kind of like the New England of Spain. So it is the most prosperous, industrious, wealthy part of the country. It's also the most progressive, liberal, hippie, if I can use the word, part of the country. A lot of the Catalans are, and if you go there, you'll see. There's plenty of hippies. You may have heard that in the last six or seven years, Catalonia has tried to become independent. Anybody ever hear anything about that? Just to tell you real briefly about the political tensions within Spain. There's two regions in Spain that would really like to be independent. The Basque country up north and Catalonia where we live. They'd like to be independent to the point of actually having a referendum. They had a referendum six years ago. And the majority of the population voted yes, we'd like to be independent. But that referendum was not recognized by the rest of the country. Somebody said earlier as we were talking over the Spanish finger food out there that Madrid, which is the central governing part of Spain, doesn't want to let the most prosperous part of the country go because that would be a loss in tax revenue. But there's serious rivalry and tension between the different parts of Spain. Sometimes it can even be a problem in the church. We'd like to see, ideally, the church transcend those political rivalries, but sometimes those rivalries show up even in that context. Spiritually. So Spain, of course, is a Roman Catholic country, and I've had a number of people say to me, why would you be a missionary in Spain? Isn't it a Christian country? And I'd say, no, it's not. So it's traditionally Roman Catholic, but there's a picture here you can see in this slide. There's these massive, beautiful cathedrals. Some of them are centuries old that are spread out throughout the country. There's a lot of little small towns as you're driving through the countryside of Spain that'll have little tiny apartments and houses in this big church right in the middle of it that's maybe two, three, four hundred years old. And those churches are almost entirely empty. So on any given Sunday morning, only about 3% of the Spanish population goes to Mass. I've got a graphic here that isn't the best, but it'll help us. I'll explain it to you like this. If you were to walk down the street in Barcelona, Madrid, Malaga, and stop Spaniards and ask them, what religious persuasion are you? Half of them would say that they're Catholic. But what they mean by that is that they're culturally Catholic, that their families are Catholic, that grandma is a Catholic, maybe she goes to mass. But the large majority of those people are agnostic. So what does it mean to be agnostic? It's like adult Sunday school on Wednesday night. So if you're agnostic, you would say we can't know if God exists or not. So the typical Spaniard, if you ask a Spaniard, so what do you believe about God? Well, I'm agnostic. We can't know if he exists or not. So I'm hedging my bets. I'm a good person. I haven't robbed any banks, I haven't killed anybody. I've heard four or five people say that. I know people say that in the United States as well. So I haven't done any of these really rotten things. So if God exists, I'm going to heaven, I'm okay. But since we can't be sure, I live a secular lifestyle. I live for the here and now. And most Spaniards, to live for the here and now doesn't mean to just go wild and crazy. Spaniards are very big on family, they're very big on their cultural events, they really love soccer, they love football, but they're very concerned just about really what they can get out of this life as opposed to thinking about the life to come, transcendent questions, am I right with God or not? 20% of the population, is atheist, so different from the agnostic persuasion. An atheist would say, I know for sure that God does not exist. That's a strong claim. 20% of the Spanish population is atheist. So just to give you an idea, in the United States, I think 2% of the population is atheist. Typical of Western Europe, Western Europe is even more secular than the United States. Now we've seen the United States become more and more secular. We go away for five years, we come back, and we can't believe the progress, negative progress that's been made in our country. But Western Europe was there even before we were in the United States. So again, back to that initial question when people ask me, why would you be a missionary in an already Christian country? I say, well, it's not Christian, it's post-Christian. Christian, really Spain is, it's secular or even pagan, and maybe I'll talk more about that a little bit later. So there's really not much space in public discourse for talk of supernatural, to talk about God, to talk about Jesus. I mean, people look at me cross-eyed when I tell them what I do. I know that can happen here too, although my experience here is quite different. So just to give you an example, soccer dad, I'm the soccer dad. So I go to, both our little guys changed clubs a couple years ago. So I met all these new soccer dads in a different club. Like, what do you do for a living? And I say, well, I teach in an evangelical seminary. And they're like, evangelist, what? So, evangelical, you don't even know what that is. Well, I teach in a seminary, we're Christians. Oh, you get paid to do that? One time, when we were meeting some new neighbors and we moved into the house that we're in now, my wife was introducing herself to some neighbors that lived a door or two up. And the wife of the neighbors, my wife says to her, well, my husband's a pastor. And the neighbor wife says, well, where does he have his sheep? And on the other hand, here in the United States, I met a soccer mom just this last fall. She said, what do you do? And I said, well, I teach in a Bible college in Spain. She's like, oh, that's great. I don't believe in God, but I respect what you do. So it's just, it's different. We come to the United States and we feel like it's much easier to do evangelism. And I'm not saying that we've seen more conversions necessarily here, but yet people here are a little more open to talk about God. A lot of people know at least one thoughtful Christian or have met one thoughtful Christian in their lives. In Spain, that's not the case. You can't assume really any prior knowledge when you start to talk to people about your faith. So there aren't many evangelicals. I don't know if you can see that on the graphic up there. Evangelicals, Protestants, a half of a percent of the population is evangelical. So I've looked at different statistics and I think that's the most accurate. Although sometimes I think that's optimistic. So a half of a percent means one out of every 200 Spaniards is an evangelical Christian. I think it's even less than that, because I think of our town of 7,000 people, and there's only a couple of Christian families in the whole town. So just to give you some context, that percentage is similar to the percentage of evangelicals in other countries that we consider un-evangelized, like Saudi Arabia. So that's just how dry Spain is. We prayed for Greece earlier. Greece would be very similar in that regard. Southern Western European countries. There are many, many, many more Muslims. in Spain than evangelical Christians. So the official government statistics, if you look it up online, percentage of the Spanish population that's Muslim, the government says 5%. I think it's not double that, but it's probably at least seven or eight. So it's immigration mainly from Morocco, from Northern Africa. And the Muslims come, and then they get established, and then the brothers come, and the cousins come, and they have a lot of kids, and they have mosques and houses of prayer that are much larger than evangelical churches or meeting spaces. And I don't say that to complain. I actually think that's a really interesting evangelistic opportunity for the Spanish Evangelical Church, because these Muslims come, and in Spain, we can preach the gospel openly. On the other hand, I have a friend who's a missionary in Morocco, and he has to be careful for his life. He has to watch what he's doing. He's got people that follow him around. He's supposed to be an electrical contractor. and the government's trying to see if that's exactly what he's doing or not. So I think it's actually an interesting opportunity for evangelism and for reaching, because those Muslims, if some of them were to come to faith in Spain, they go down to Morocco almost annually, and they take things down, they go see grandma and grandpa, they make this trip back and forth, and wouldn't that be a great way for the gospel to penetrate into the country? So not to feel sorry for ourselves or anything, but this is our church meeting space. We have a storefront, and this is really typical of a Spanish evangelical church. We have, I'll tell you more about the church in just a minute, but 50-something members, maybe 80 people on a Sunday morning, which is a mid-sized evangelical church in Spain, but small. Small, there's very few believers, few resources, and that's one of the main reasons why we're in Spain doing what we're doing. So I'll tell you a little bit about our church. We have two main ministries. One of them is the local church, and the other one is the seminary where I teach. So first I'll tell you about the local church. What language is that? It's not Spanish, is it? Because it would be iglesia, right? Julio Iglesias. Iglesia, a little Spanish, a little Spanish and a little Catalan going, Asglésia, Asglésia. La Asglésia Evangelica de Vilasar de Mar. So this is the name of our church and it's in my wife's hometown. It's about a mile and a half from where we live in Cabriles, the picture of the town that I showed you earlier. So this is a picture from a church retreat that we had a couple years ago. We try to get away. Once a year we go a little farther up the coast and there's this touristic hotel where we typically get rooms and rent like kind of a conference area where we can invite a speaker and have times of prayer, worship, and special messages. And so this is a picture from like two, I think that was two years ago. So the church was founded, it was planted by a larger church in Barcelona, starting in 2002. So when I graduated from Westminster Seminary in 2002, this is where we went back to this church and worked together with another missionary named Steve Phillips. And Brian's not here tonight, but I know Brian knows Steve. I think at some point they were roommates somewhere. I don't know, we'll have to ask Brian about that. I don't remember. But anyway, Steve and I worked together. for a number of years, and Steve's tall, and I'm not. So we were Sancho Pan, no, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. And if you knew Steve, and you've read any of Don Quixote, you'll see that there's more truth to it than just sort of, because Steve was always dreaming, and I was always pulling him back down. Steve's optimistic. My wife says I'm pessimistic. I think I'm realistic, but anyway. So our church has been actually independent for almost 20 years. Really thankful for that. We have, well, we'll just stay here for just a second. Oh, am I gonna be able to go back? There, yep, okay. 50-something members, like I said. 80 or so on a Sunday morning, and that's great. That doesn't sound like a very big church, but in Spain, like I say, that's a mid-sized church, and it gives us enough critical mass to be able to pay a pastor. And I'm really proud of our church, because we've paid off our building, that little storefront that we have, and we pay a pastor full-time. That's unusual in Spain. A lot of churches either don't have the funds to be able to pay a pastor or they don't value the ministry of the word enough to pay somebody to dedicate themselves to it. So I'm really proud of how our church is doing and I'll tell you this, so this year that I've been in the United States, that we've been as a family in the United States, I went back twice because I had to teach classes in our seminary. So we're understaffed. If I'm gone for a year, they can't cover all my classes. So I went back for most of November and a good part of February. When I went back in November, I went to our church, the first Sunday I was there, and it was packed. I mean, I got there a little late, true confessions. Well, I'm on leave as a pastor. I'm not active, so if I show up five minutes late, it's not a big deal, right? Five minutes late, and I couldn't find a seat. And there's all these little kids running around. A few new families had come since we left. And so I stood up at the end of the service to greet the church, and I said, I see that the key to church growth is for the latents to leave. And then the church explodes. Well I am, really I am thankful for our church because our prayer when I was there with Steve, the other American, the Don Quixote, our prayer was that our church would become self-sustaining financially and not depend on Steve's missionary salary and my missionary salary to have pastors. And they don't. So they pay a pastor from the offerings. A church that would be self-governing, and I'll talk more about that in just a second. A church that would be self-propagating, that's gonna be a prayer request, that we would be more effective in evangelism. But I think our little church, if my wife and I didn't go back, they would just keep right on sailing. So it's taken 20 years, but we're really grateful for the work that the Lord has done there to see that church become independent. My wife is very, well, so I've been an elder in the church since 2006, and I am in the preaching rotation. I don't preach super often, because I'm really busy at the seminary, but once every couple months. I've taught adult Sunday school, I oversee all the teaching ministries, and my wife, She oversees the children's ministries, so she finds and prepares all the curriculum and organizes all the teachers, and she's a part of the music ministry as well. So here she is singing with our daughter. That was a couple years ago. You can't really see it in the pictures. COVID time, so we got the screens up and all that. You guys didn't have to have screens here, did you? Or did you? Well, anyway, that's a whole nother story. Now my wife has a really interesting little ministry. She translates songs. There's a lot of songs from the Trinity Hymnal, for example, like we sung tonight. Some of those songs are in Spanish. A lot of them aren't. My wife translates those songs into Catalan. So there are some in Spanish but even fewer in Catalan because it's a minority language. And kind of a little dream that we have for her is that someday she could publish these translations and maybe have them open access on a website or something like that. But she's really gifted. It's really hard to translate. I mean, I don't know if any of you know a second language or have tried. I mean, it's really hard to fit into pretty much the same space. of words, you know, like a sentence or whatever, the translation into another language and be faithful to the original language and it's even harder when there's rhythm and there's meter and there's symbolism because the songs are poetic and my wife's just got a knack for that, it's great. So I'm telling you, she's the fun, creative part of the family. Okay, so what I said about the church being self-governing. Now, for the longest time, the church was led by gringos. Steve, me, I was there by myself for a while. I was together with another Spaniard, so it was 50-50 for seven or eight years, but now I'm outnumbered. Thanks be to God. So we have two national elders. I'm on the elder board, I'm number three. I've been able to kinda step into the background. I don't usually preside. I mean, the thing is, if a thoughtful Spaniard or Catalan walks into our church on a Sunday morning, non-believer, may be interested in just finding what we're about, whatever, if their first thing they see is a gringo, And I can be up there and I'll be presiding in Catalan. I'll do it in Catalan, but I've got an accent and you can tell that's not where I'm from. It's real easy to put up the excuse, oh, that's an American thing. Or that's an Anglo thing, you know, Protestants, whatever. But we're traditionally Catholic and we're secular and we're sophisticated. So it's so much better for people to hear the message from nationals. Our paid pastor, his name is Isaac, that's Isaac, and his wife, Anna. And they have another child, so this picture's older, but I couldn't find a better one, so I included them. Isaac is in his mid-30s, and he's a graduate from the school where I teach. So when he does things well, I say, I taught him everything he knows. He's great, he's gifted, he's a wonderful speaker, he's got a heart for evangelism, for discipleship, his wife is great with youth, we're super grateful for them. And at the same time that we recognized him, this was three years ago, that we called him as a church and brought him in as an elder, we also recognized another man who had already been in our church for 10 years, and his name is Jose. Jose, this is his wife Laura, they have three kids, two boys and a girl. And Jose designs furniture for hotels and he goes to furniture fairs in Italy and France and he's all artistic and he is such a good communicator. He is my mother-in-law's favorite preacher in the church. He took that title from me, it used to be me. And he's amazing, bi-vocational, he's taken some seminary classes here and there. We're trying to help him round out his training, but he's just sweet, he's got a heart that's just popping out of his chest. So I'm super thankful. to be able to tell you that the Lord over all these years has been answering prayers. And the last time I was here, so six years ago, there were two of us, two, it was me and a national. And even then I'm sure I was asking you to pray that the Lord would raise up another national. I probably even told you about Jose. And at the time he said he was too young, he wasn't ready, but finally God consolidated that and there he is. So we're really grateful for where the church is at. Now, second. main ministry is the seminary where I teach. So here's the name of the seminary, this is Spanish, we're the Facultad de Teología, what does that mean? It's not that hard, is it? Teología, theology, Facultad, Faculty of Theology, so this is a very European, you gotta be a faculty, not a university, you're a faculty. Faculty of Theology, IPSTE, I-B-S-T-E, which is Instituto Biblico, Biblical Institute, Is Seminario Teologico, it's a theological seminary, de España, Spain. It's really long names. The Spaniards love really long names and a bunch of acronyms, and if you really wanna know how our name got so long, I'll tell you later, but there it is. So just Evangelical Seminary in Barcelona, you could just call us that. It's been around for 50 years. It was founded by Greater European Mission. It was 50 years ago. I've been teaching there for 18 years. This was at graduation, not this last June, but the year before. And I teach hermeneutics, Greek, New Testament, and lots of other things that aren't in my wheelhouse because we're shorthanded. My wife told me to tell you that you need to pray for more professors because she's afraid that her hubby's gonna keel over. So they asked me, I have to teach Hebrew. next year, because we had a guy who was teaching, he was doing a great job, and he took a call to pastor a church on the other side of the country. But I can admit this amongst you, right? My Hebrew's a little rusty. It's a little rusty, I'm gonna have to blow off the dust. And I console myself by saying that my students know absolutely nothing, so the Hebrew that I can remember is ahead of where they're at. But anyway, I'll show you a picture here of our campus. So in 2011, this has got to hit you, this is a miracle. We received full accreditation from the Spanish government. It was amazing, it was amazing. Why is that amazing? Because when Franco was dictator until like the early 70s when he died, Protestants were considered a cult on the same level as the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses. Protestant churches could not own land, Protestant pastors could not be paid in the social security system, they couldn't have retirement or pension or anything like that. Then there was some religious liberty and more missionaries came and we're not a cult anymore, but people still, the government looks at it, doesn't know what to do with us. And all of a sudden in 2011, There was an election. And I think the socialists who were in power thought that there were more evangelicals than there really are. And so they threw us a bone. Here, have your accreditation. And maybe they thought they were gonna get, you know, how many hundreds of thousands of votes. So that probably didn't go so well for them, but they didn't win either. But we'll take the accreditation. It's amazing. So what that means is that our students can get grants. They can get enough to pay their full tuition to study evangelical theology, to study to be pastors. It's funded by the government, by a secular government. Isn't that incredible? They can go on and do other things, and maybe I'll say something else about that in a minute, but fantastic blessing, and the government doesn't care what we teach. That's the most amazing part. So we had to tell them what we were gonna do, and when they come to inspect us, they're like, did you do what you said you were gonna do? We say, yeah, we did it, you're all good. They don't ask us what we teach. Absolutely amazing. So fantastic, we're grateful for that. So this is our building. It's an old beach hotel. So I used two adjectives there. Noun, substantive, hotel. Adjectives, old and beach. So if we're recruiting students, we emphasize beach. If we're raising funds, we talk about the old. It's actually, it's close to the airport. It is a seven or eight minute walk from the beach. We're extremely thankful. There's no way we could buy something like this now. I mean, just the property is worth so much money, but it was purchased in 1974. We're there, but the building needs a lot of work. And I'll tell you about that at the end. That's another prayer request I wanna share with you. So we had, during COVID, we had to go online. big time, like in a week, overnight. We put our whole program online. We all learned how to use Zoom and all that stuff, just like everybody else did. And thanks be to God, we didn't lose a single student. So we're really grateful for that. And this is, you can't probably see it very well, but that's me teaching. I'm wearing my Denver Broncos hat. Is that all right? So it was just down in San Diego, they weren't real happy about that. They were throwing like John Elway at me and all that. And I said, well, you throw John Elway at John Elway, the charger stunk. I mean, anyway. So that's me teaching in my Broncos hat. And here's some of our, this guy's like reclining a little bit, isn't he? But this is some of our students you could see. So we learned how to use all these tools. This is on my iPad. I've got my outline here. And you know, we're working through one of Paul's letters. Yeah, so not by faith, not by sight, Richard Gaffin, anybody familiar with that? But anyhow, so working through this and I realized that I can draw on my iPad and the students can see it via Zoom, whatever, and we realized that it wouldn't be that difficult to open an online program to supplement our on-campus program. So that's a new project that we're working on. Right now we have 45 students, Full or part-time, so not all those students are, it's like 25 or 27 probably are full-time and then the others are part-time. And does that sound like a lot of students? Well, I mean, it depends. Like, if you're in Western Europe and you're teaching in a conservative, a theologically conservative Bible college, that's great. Hallelujah. In the United States, that's not much. You're probably gonna close your doors. But the thing is, the students that we have now have to uproot, unless they live in Barcelona and they can commute, and a lot of our students do, they have to uproot from whatever part of Spain they're from, and they have to come move to Barcelona and study with us. And that's not easy in the United States, but it's even harder in Spain. Per capita income is half there of what it is here. And the cost of living is a little lower, but not that much. So we get requests every year from people, when are you going to start an online program? Especially like bi-vocational elders who can't leave their churches, they can't leave their jobs, they've got a family, they want to get some training. So our goal is this year to have our whole first year online. This is what we're working on and we're using all the tools and the learning curve is really steep. We're still learning how to use all this stuff. But our goal is to offer at least some of the basics so that somebody who can't uproot their family and move to Barcelona to study with us for four years can start to fill their theological toolbox right from where they're at. And we're also hoping that God will use the online program to convince guys who are maybe on the fence, should I go to seminary, should I not go to seminary? Try it for a year and see how the Lord leads you. We're hoping that that'll be, and that works here in the United States, by the way. There's a lot of seminaries now that have invested millions of dollars in their online programs. And a lot of times the students don't finish online, they come on campus. So we're hoping that that's gonna happen. Student body, I already said, 45 full or part-time students. Most of them studying for pastoral ministry, but some of them go on to work as campus ministers. We had a married couple that graduated, and they're full-time with Young Life, if you've heard of Young Life now. And this is, get this, this is also, it's just a paradox. I'm gonna talk way too long. Just tell me to shut it off. My wife's not here to control it, and I'm getting excited, so. Okay, so get this, you can get a four-year, you get a Bachelor of Arts with us, that's what you get, Bachelor of Arts in Theology. So you get that and you do one more year at the University of Barcelona, you get a Master's Degree in Pedagogy, they call it, and you can teach evangelical religion in the public schools and they'll pay you. So in a public school, if there's eight or more evangelical families and they request that evangelical religion be taught instead of Roman Catholic religion, because that's what's offered, automatically that's what's there. Eight or more families, the school is obligated to hire somebody to teach it. So we have students, I don't know how many of our graduates have gone on to do that, and we have students who get a full-time teacher salary just that way. They're evangelizing little kids in public schools. It's so paradoxical, that doesn't happen here. It's such a secular country, and they're paying our students to study, and then they're paying some of them to do evangelism in the public schools. It's absolutely amazing, but they have to come study with us first, because they have to have a theology degree first. Now, you can't probably see this super well either, but okay, so this is me, that's a long time ago. I was looking a little different. Well, anyway, so this is what my wife wants you all to pray for. We need more teachers, but specifically nationals. So if you look at this, here's our principal, Manuel. He's from Spain. Here's one of our deans who's retiring. His name is Bernard. He's not Spanish. He's Dutch. He's like 6'6". I'm sorry, I'm only short Spaniards. I fit in pretty well in Spain, by the way, because everything's a little shorter. Bernard, he's been teaching for many years, but he's retiring, he's leaving. Carlos is a Spaniard, and Arturo is Mexican. So Arturo went to Reform Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, and then he got his PhD from the University of Barcelona, and he teaches with us now. So here's the thing, Manuel and Carlos are our only two full-time nationals. Arturo is as if he were a national, but he's not, he's from Mexico. I'm there, and right now, full-time, that's it. So we need, first of all, more professors, and it's a tall order, because we need professors who have degrees, love the Lord, that's not a given, love the local church, theologically conservative, and they have to be fluent in Spanish, they have to be able to teach in Spanish. So pray for more teachers just in general, but pray that the Lord would provide for us so that we could pay another national. It's not as much of a disadvantage to be a gringo teaching in a seminary. It's maybe a little bit more so in the local church, but in a seminary, not so much, because like, oh, you studied at Westminster in California, wow, you know, like Michael Horton, wow, you know, they think that that's, all of a sudden I've got all this prestige because I've associated with the name of this school or whatever. So it's not so much of a handicap, but it's still not the same. So you get in and maybe you're teaching a hard doctrine. And you got a student who's disagreeing. And again, it's like, oh, well that's because you're Puritans and the British. Oh, they call me a Puritan when they're not happy with me. Oh gee, I'll take that as a compliment, thank you. National professors, but in professors in general. So if you could pray for that. Let's see, a little more. Okay, I'm not gonna tell you stories about everybody here, but just to give you an idea what some of our graduates do, we'll just hit on a couple of these. So this fellow down here is Pablo, and this is his wife Anais. Pablo graduated eight years ago from our school. And he went and worked with a more seasoned pastor in the Barcelona area. And then he took a call to a little church in the south of Spain that was dying. They're down to like seven or eight members. And he's revitalizing it. So they're up to 30 something members. They've had baptisms. They're seeing success in evangelism, discipleship. Super thankful for his ministry. This is Alejandro and his wife Ruth. And Alejandro is Presbyterian. So we're, I didn't mention this, we're interdenominational seminary. So theologically conservative all the way across the board, full inerrancy, penal substitutionary atonement, bodily resurrection, all those things. But Baptists, there's Presbyterians, there's others. So he's akin to like PCA, roughly, if you're familiar with that denomination here in the States. He's pastoring a church down in Sevilla and he does two things. He pastors that church and he teaches evangelical religion in two public schools. And he gets paid, like I said earlier. So, fantastic. And we've got graduates around the country doing other things. Couple other ministries to mention. So I get the opportunity, and really it's a privilege, to speak in other contexts besides our church and besides the seminary. I get invited to speak in conferences and so forth. And when I went back to Spain in November, I took an invitation to speak in a conference and I spoke about textual criticism. Does that sound interesting? Does that sound bad? I'm gonna criticize the text. No. What is textual criticism? It's a study of what? The manuscripts, yeah, so, we don't have the originals of the New Testament, y'all know that, right? Here you're gonna know that, I'm sure you've been taught well. Don't have the originals, so we have 5,000 something copies of the New Testament, and textual criticism is simply the study of those copies to discern what would have been the original reading of whatever text it is. So I gave a two-part conference to talk about that, which was just a blast, I had a wonderful time. And I also get to do some writing, Published a number of different things in Spanish, articles, chapters in books, and books. Let's see, what would be, anybody here know Jim Adams? Okay, so Jim's son, David Adams, is in Columbia and he runs an evangelical publishing house. And David and I do a lot of work together. So what's neat is when I get to write things, sometimes what I write is stuff that I've already developed in the context of the classroom or even in maybe an adult Sunday school in our church. And I'll write it, like the less technical stuff especially. And it gets published in Columbia and it gets distributed in Latin America. So for me that's a real blessing because it's a way to take stuff that I've worked on and I've taught in Barcelona and throw it out there and hopefully it's beneficial for people that I'll never meet, people in countries that I'll never visit. So I consider it a real privilege to be able to write and to publish. So a few prayer requests real quick. Oh yeah, this is, yeah, this is a joke. So this is, there's an evangelical bookstore in Barcelona and this is my book on the bestseller rack. Yeah. That's Seminary Survival Kit. That's, and I'll tell you who buys that book, the students at our school, and that's, so they better buy it. Actually, it's required reading, so yeah. I made sure that it would be required reading. I get paid a Euro for every copy. I haven't seen a paycheck yet, but. A few prayer requests. Just for our family, just pray that our children would all grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord. They're in different places in terms of their faith, so just pray for them as you pray for your children and your church here. And pray for This is our last month here in the United States. So it's been really busy. We've had a lot of wonderful visits. We trust that the next five days that we're gonna be here with you. We're also gonna be visiting up in day spring. We're expecting nothing but blessing. We go back to Colorado after that, and we're gonna be living out of suitcases for a couple weeks. But we're hoping to get a couple days off and to rest a little bit before we go back. So if you could pray that that would happen, that would be great. Pray for our local church, here's another picture of the group. Yeah, I feel like we're not as effective evangelistically as we could be. Somebody prayed earlier for opportunities to preach the gospel to the people around us, and we pray those same sorts of things too. I don't know if any church is ever satisfied with their evangelistic efforts, maybe not. But I'd really like it if Jesus would be just non-ignorable in our town. So where the church is, is a town of about 25,000 people. And it's compact. Most everybody knows that there's an evangelical church in town because you can see our sign. It's right along one of the main streets that goes right up through town. But do people, have they heard the gospel? Very few. We've tried different things. We've tried inviting people to the church. We've tried doing things outside the church. Really difficult, and we're trying to just learn, all of us, pastors, members, everybody, how to speak more naturally about our faith in context, just when it comes up. Tell people, I'm praying about something. You're praying? Why are you praying? Well, just say it. Just start a conversation. Just pray that we would be more assertive, I guess is a good word. I don't want to say aggressive, you know, smash people, that's not, I mean, Jesus is, you know, he's gentle. But we do want to be assertive, and we want to speak about our faith more often. For the school, pray for, here's a picture of our student body, that was two years ago as well. Pray for more students. And I say that not just for more revenue for us. More students because we wanna train up more young men for pastoral ministry and men and women for all kinds of ministries so that they'll be useful in Spain, for ministry in Spain. It's really hard for a young man thinking about going into pastoral ministry. In the United States, you gotta take a loan, you go to seminary, it's expensive, but there's prospects of getting a paid position And getting paid enough to where maybe you can pay off that loan, or you can support your family in a dignified way. In Spain, it's really difficult. So I tell my young students, I tell them, it's your generation's job to teach all your people that they need to pay you. Which is hard, which is hard, but pray for that. It's a dynamic of the churches valuing pastoral ministry to the point where they're willing to pay for it. And then young men, I think, will be even more willing to get the training that they need and pursue the ministry. as the Lord calls them. And then one other thing I wanted to mention about our seminary. Oops, we'll stay on this slide for just a minute, if I can. Oh, when you click it too much, it just gets confused. There we go, all right. We're in the middle of a building project. So last thing I wanna tell you, here's what happened. Right before COVID, the local town hall building inspector showed up and she walked around and she said, this, this, this, this, you can't have public activities here, your building is way out of code. And she's right, I mean, it's an old, Beach hotel, old. So what do we have to do? We have to widen access, we have to put in non-slip floors, we have to put in new bathrooms, we have to put in forced air ventilation, we have to build a metal fire escape on the side of the building like Spider-Man goes up and down, you know, like New York City kind of thing, we gotta do that. And it's 600,000 euros. Now, That's a drop in the bucket compared to Westminster, my alma mater, that just spent $22 million to build a student residency. So I don't feel so bad. But we need to raise 600,000 euros. And thankfully, they've given us time. COVID helped, there's been other delays. We've got a couple more years, I think, to finish. We've raised about 40% of that already. And we've done a good bit of the work. And you know what? Actually, when the inspector came, I wasn't there, but the principal was there, and he told us about it in the next faculty meeting. We're all like, oh, no, like, oh, why? We see God's hand in it, because even the work we've done has made the building better. It's a better learning environment than it was before. So I'm convinced that we're gonna be more effective when the building is finished. So if you could pray for that as well. I should leave some time. Oh, I already went over. It's already 8.04. I'm sorry. I don't know if we could have a question or two. Somebody told me I could go as long as I wanted. I'm not looking at anybody. Somebody told me that. So, I don't know, maybe just a couple questions and if that's okay. Yeah. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, so how is our support now? So we had a goal of raising $2,000 a month for us as a family, which we reached, thanks be to God, some months ago. Really thankful for that. But then sometimes people fall off and it's always a cycle. So I think typically for a missionary, it's always, well, do you need support? Yeah, because, oh yeah, hit the goal and then boom, down. But the Lord's been really good to us. We're very grateful. Yeah, and thanks for asking. Are there opportunities for young people from here for short-term mission? Yes, so one of our supporting churches back in Denver, Southside, another fire church, Ken Murphy is, well, Ken, I know he travels, maybe he's never been here to preach, but they're sending a group of high schoolers next summer to work at a summer camp where my wife and I worked, where one of our seminary graduates works full time, and they're gonna go for 10 days. And what they're gonna do is, the kids are gonna be campers along with Spaniards in a week of English camp. Get it? So the Spaniards are desperate for their kids to learn English. They need to learn English because that's in the job market and Spain's economy isn't great and maybe they need to leave the country, whatever. They want their kids to learn English. So they'll send them to a Christian camp to learn English even if they're not Christians. So this group of kids is gonna go, and there's gonna be like 15 teenagers together with another, I don't know, 40 or 50 Spanish kids. And there are gonna be campers together, but there's one of the things that attracts the kids, the Spanish families who send their kids, is that there's native USA English speakers there in the camp. And then a couple of the older people who are going, like there's I think a college and career person or two, and they're gonna be counselors. So that's an opportunity. And there's even maybe a couple of others that we could talk about. Thanks for asking. Does that make sense, what I just said? Isn't that neat? I think that's really neat. Wow, that's a good question. Do our children prefer living over in Spain or they prefer living here? So it depends. For soccer, they'd rather be there. So my kids complain. They're like, dad, they're talking to me in Catalan when running up and down the field. Dad, these kids don't know how to pass. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I don't know if there's anything. That's really, that's just soccer snobbery, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have even said that. And they have friends, they miss their family, so my wife's parents are young and energetic and super helpful for us as a family, really involved in my kids' lives, they're cousins, they miss all that. My older children miss the food. Being able to walk out of the house and meet up with friends and go eat tapas all on foot without having to get in the car. Yeah, so there's some really nice things about living there. They prefer to live here for school. So our kids went to a charter school back in Denver this year that was, for us, it felt like a Christian school. It wasn't, but there were so many Christian families. And it was just safe and it was rigorous academically, but it was just so organized and the teachers were excited. I'm sorry, I'm going on and on. Just real quick. So the teachers in Spain are all civil servants. And they can't get fired unless they kill somebody. Is this being live streamed? I'm gonna get myself in trouble. Oh my goodness, my wife's not here and I'm just shooting from the hip. But you can tell, some of the teachers just aren't excited about, whereas this year, my kids, they enjoyed almost every single one of their teachers, because they were excited about what they were doing. And the teachers want to teach them not just what they're teaching them, but to teach them to love to learn. And the kids pick up on it, and in that sense, they'd rather be here. My wife would rather live here, because here she has Christian friends, and back there she really doesn't, her age. Anyway. I'm looking at the pastor, you just pull the plug whenever. Oh, okay, all right. We'll shut it down here maybe, unless there's... Yeah, thanks for asking. So the question is, are there any concerns politically? And maybe that'd be applied specifically to the church or to the seminary. Similar to here, so there's all the gender issues and all those sorts of things. We have a number of clauses written into our constitution and bylaws both at the church and at the seminary to protect us, to make sure that we can continue to teach and say and preach the things that we believe are biblical. We don't feel right now like any sort of imminent threat. It's no worse now than it was 10 or 20 years ago, I'll say it that way. Maybe here we might answer that question differently, but there it's just kind of the same. Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you for listening to me and letting me talk and talk and talk and we'll look forward to seeing you again Sunday afternoon. We hope that you were edified by this message. For additional sermons as well as information on giving to the ministry of Grace Community Church, please visit us online at gracenevada.com. That's gracenevada.com.