Yes, thank you. Good morning. Can you all hear me okay? Well, let me begin with some preliminary comments about pulpit dress code here at Dayspring. Apparently there's some ambiguity. I asked around yesterday and some people said sport coat, looking sharp. Others told me that Craig Marshall wore a ratty polo shirt untucked a few weeks ago. And so I thought I'd be all things to all men. And in this first session, I'm gonna go untucked. And then in the service, I'll put a sport coat on. Would that be okay? We've got to try to please everybody here. Well, we are really thankful to be here with you this morning. I'm here with my wife, Nurdia, and two of our five children, our two youngest, are here today, Alex and Mark. We have three others, and I'll tell you a little bit about them maybe in just a minute. So we normally live in Spain, but we've been back in the United States for a year on what some people call furlough, others might call home assignment. Typically missionaries will go to their field where they're assigned for a term of say four or five years and then come back to the United States for a year. And during that year they visit supporting churches, they network, they recruit, and they have some time to rest and recharge their batteries before they go back. to their field. We've been here for a year. We're almost done with our home assignment. We lived in Colorado throughout most of that time. I'm from Colorado. In fact, my hometown is called Georgetown. If I had a piece of candy, I would offer it as a prize to anybody who could tell me where Georgetown is. up in the mountains, it's an hour west of Denver, right off I-70, right before you get to the Eisenhower Tunnel. And I will say, I learned something this week, Georgetown owes its existence to Nevada. So isn't the Comstock Lode pretty close to where we are right now? So the Comstock Lode was discovered in 1859, which sparked the second gold rush. And Georgetown was founded precisely in 1859 by somebody who was on his way to Nevada, stopped in Colorado, discovered gold in a little valley an hour west of Denver. The guy's name was George and he founded a town and he named it after himself. That's where I grew up, and we spent a good amount of time at my mom's house, at grandma's house up in Georgetown. We were down in Denver. That's where we lived, visiting supporting churches. I had lots of meetings. I spent a lot of time in Denver Seminary Library working on writing projects, which Thomas has been reading in Spanish, right? It's been extremely edifying, I'm sure. Amen, amen, fantastic. But we're really happy to be here with you at Dayspring, and I should go back and look at your giving records. but I'm pretty sure that as a church, you began to support us in our ministry in Spain almost as soon as you started. If not the first month, it was shortly after, and we are so grateful for your generosity, for your faithfulness to us, and we've enjoyed, on Friday night, and then again on Saturday yesterday at the picnic, the intelligent questions that you've asked us about our ministry and about us, Specifically, I can tell that many of you read our prayer letters. And that's not a given. One of my best friends back in Colorado, I remember coming back on home assignment, this was like the last time we were back, five or six years ago. So one of my best friends, he's been supporting us for over 25 years. And we got together and he asked me, he said, so Matt, tell me again what you're doing in Spain. Somebody's not reading our prayer letters. But we've had intelligent questions from you guys asking for specifics about our ministry in Spain, about different things that have been going on for us here in the United States, and we are so encouraged that you're paying attention to our ministry. that you're praying for us, that you're supporting us financially. And my goal this morning is to encourage you just a little bit about what the Lord's doing through our ministry in Spain, and I want you all to know that you have an important part in that. You're participating with us in Spain in our ministry there. So thank you for standing with us, and I hope that this time is encouraging. So is there, yeah, nice. Okay, so there's a family picture. We have five children. My wife and I, Nurdia, we've been married for 27 years. We have five kids. Our oldest is 22. Then we have a 20-year-old, two boys. We have a daughter who's right in the middle. She's 18. And our two youngest are here, 14 and 12. Maybe go to the next slide. So this picture, I realize I've been giving this presentation throughout the year in different supporting churches and just a couple weeks ago when we were in the Bay Area, somebody saw this slide and they said, wow, you guys jumped over a fence. Look at how athletic you are. Does it look like we're just hopping that fence behind us? I think if we did that, I would blow out both my knees simultaneously. We're jumping on a little trampoline and it looks like we're way up in the air and we're super athletic. There we are. So we've been married for coming up on 27 years. We're gonna celebrate our 27th anniversary on August 30th and I am such a I'm just so not romantic. I'm such a reject. It's By God's grace that my wife is still married to me because on the day of our anniversary, we're going to be flying back to Spain. I mean, is there anything less romantic than the second leg of that transatlantic journey? We're going to be all dizzy. And I planned that and then realized later, that's our anniversary. Oh, so yeah, pray for us. We will have been married 27 years on August 30th. And then the next slide is a picture of our five children. And this was taken in August of last year, the first day of school. So our children, we got them all together. Our oldest, Dan, he has lived in different parts of the country, but he works in sales and marketing. Right now, he's in Mississippi. He was just back visiting us for a short time, and it coincided with the first day of school, which was really fun. So Dan's our oldest. John is the second one in the picture there. Like I said, he's 20. He's studying at Arapaho Community College in Denver. He's going to finish, Lord willing, his Associate's Degree in Economics this year. When we go back to Spain, we're going to leave him with some friends of ours, and he'll hopefully finish that up. Tanya, our 18-year-old, graduated from high school this last year, we're really proud of her, in the United States, and she's also gonna study at Arapaho Community College. And our two little guys did eighth grade and sixth grade and were the most valuable players on their middle school soccer team. So they're good soccer players in Spain, but here they were the stars. So that was fun, we had a good time with that. Next slide. This is a picture of our town. So back in Spain, we live in a small town called Cabriles, and the population is about 7,000. And you can see from the picture that we live on the coast, and it's a little bit like Mamma Mia. It's the white houses with the red tile roof and the view of the Mediterranean. If you get up on, our house is this narrow townhome, and it's like 1,500 or 1,600 square feet, and we have six bedrooms. So this is the European thing, where you take advantage of every square meter. And if you climb up to, it's tall and narrow, it's like a dollhouse, and you climb up to the top floor and you get on the terrace and you can lean out and you can see a little slice of the Mediterranean. So that's where we live. It's really close to Bilasar de Mar, which is where our local church is, and I'll tell you about that in a minute. And quite frankly, it's a really nice place. It's been a nice place to have a family and raise our children. Next slide. So Spain is a really diverse country. How many of you have been to Spain? A few of you, okay. Spain is, I compare it often to California because it's about the same size and roughly the same population. And like California, it's very diverse. So there's coastline, a lot of coastline, both on the east side, which is where the Mediterranean coast is, and then in the north, there's the Atlantic coast. And this picture is taken, in Vilasar, where our church is, just maybe a five minute walk from our church. Next slide. And then also in Spain, there's mountains. So I grew up in the mountains in Colorado, and thanks be to God, in an hour and a half, we can be in the Pyrenees Mountains, which are the mountains that, where Spain borders France, and I can get my mountain fix every now and then, I need that. We get up there as often as we can. Next slide. There's also a diversity of cities and towns. So you have in Spain large cosmopolitan modern cities, especially Barcelona and Madrid. Those are the two biggest cities. But there's other cities that you may have heard of like Valencia, Bilbao, Malaga, prosperous cities with all the modern conveniences that we would have here in a big city in the United States. But, and it's like this in some places in the United States as well, you can drive for an hour out of the city and find yourself in a small town that's run down, and in Spain they sometimes call these areas pockets of poverty. You feel like maybe you haven't gone into a third world country necessarily, but a lot of people have fled the more rural parts of Spain to go live in cities in search of work. And so again, the demographics are very diverse in Spain. Next slide. Cultures and languages. So you can travel from the north of Spain to the south and really feel like you're in a different country. You could be, you could travel from Barcelona to Sevilla, to Seville, and Sevilla is another big cosmopolitan city. There's a million people there. It's really nice. But you feel like you're in another country because the cultural differences are just so noticeable. And one example of that is the fact that there are four different languages spoken in Spain. So in Spain, of course, everybody knows how to speak Spanish. That's taught in all the schools all around the country, but there are three other languages, and they're not dialects. Three different languages. So you can see in the picture there, in the northwest side of Spain, there's a region that's called Galicia, and they speak a language that's called Gallego. And it sounds like a mix between Spanish and Portuguese. Can you guess why? Look where it is geographically. So Galicia shares a border with Portugal, and historically there was intermixing. And so Gallego sounds like this mix. It sounds sometimes like Portuguese, sometimes like Spanish. In the north, in the middle, the Basque country, they speak another language, the Basque or the Euskera. Nobody knows where that language came from. It's very difficult, it's complex, it's difficult to learn. And where we are, Most people's first language in Barcelona is Catalan, not Spanish. So Catalan, I've had people say, you have to be really careful around my wife. Ask her about your language, not about your dialect, unless you want to have an argument, because she'll tell you that Catalan is not a dialect of Spanish. It's as different from Spanish as Portuguese or Italian. So it's an interesting. languages. My wife and I met, in fact, because I arrived in Spain in 1995. I was working at the time with Campus Crusade for Christ, and I arrived in Spain on December 5th of 1995. I knew a little bit of Spanish, but I didn't even know that Catalan existed, and I'm ashamed to admit that now. And I went to a Christmas party on December 15th in a church outside of Barcelona, and the entire thing was in Catalan. So the songs were in Catalan and the message was in Catalan and the games and the mixtures and all that was all in Catalan and I was completely lost. And somebody had mercy on me and introduced me to this beautiful young lady who spoke English. So that's how my wife and I first met is because I couldn't speak Catalan and it was love at first sight. And I married into Catalan, so I can speak Catalan now as well as Spanish. Some of you maybe know as well, if you follow any European news, that six or seven years ago, although this was brewing a long time before, but there was a push in Catalonia for independence, Catalan independence. They had a referendum vote, which passed, actually, and the vote was, should Catalonia secede from the rest of Spain? So the vote passed, but the central government in Madrid didn't recognize it. Some of the political leaders ended up in jail, but just to give you an idea, some of the Catalan leaders, because they were accused of treason. Just to give you an idea of some of the political issues sometimes that you're faced with in Spain, and sometimes those issues and those divisions seep into the local church, which is a challenge that we have to face. Next slide. So I tell people that I'm a missionary in Spain, and they're like, why would you be a missionary in a Christian country? Isn't Spain historically Roman Catholic, sort of generally Christian? And my answer is yes, historically, Spain was Roman Catholic. And today, traditionally, culturally, it still is to some extent. But Spain really should be described as secular. as post-Christian, in some ways pagan, really. So as you travel around Spain, you'll find these really big cathedrals that were built two, three, 400 years ago, and some of them are just spectacular. On Sunday morning, they're almost entirely empty. Only about 3% of the population goes to mass on Sunday morning. That may vary. It may be a little more in the south, a little less in the north, but that's it. There's these large cathedrals and also churches, smaller parish churches in local towns, that are almost entirely empty on Sunday morning. So, most Catholics, if you stop a Spaniard on the street, one out of every two Spaniards, if you ask them, what is your religious persuasion, they'll say, well, culturally I'm Catholic, But really, I'm agnostic. So I noticed that Pastor Thomas was asking questions. It's kind of the Sunday school hour, right? We can ask questions. What does it mean to be agnostic? You can answer in Spanish if you really want to. Yeah, okay. A fence sitter. So an agnostic is somebody who says, we can't know for sure if God exists. He may or he may not. And that is actually the typical Spanish positions. Fifty percent of Spaniards are agnostic. I've had conversations with Spaniards, and I'm trying to talk to them about the gospel, and they say, well, we can't really be sure if God exists. If He does, I've been a good person, I haven't killed anybody, I haven't robbed any banks, so if God exists, I'll be going to heaven. But since we can't know for sure, quite frankly, I'm focused on the here and now. And that's what it means to be secular. So a lot of Spaniards, for them, their values are based on their families, the culture, soccer. Soccer's a really big deal in Spain, as you can imagine. But very little spiritual interest. 20% of Spaniards are atheists. What's the difference between an atheist and an agnostic? Exactly. So the atheist goes a step farther and says, I'm sure that there's no God. 20% of Spaniards would say that they're atheists. Does that sound like a lot? In the United States, the statistics that I saw, yeah, it was like in the spring I saw this, about 2% of Americans are atheists. But in Western Europe, and in Spain in particular, this historically, this traditionally, Now, as for the evangelicals, 0.5% of the population, one half of 1% of the population is evangelical Christian. And even that, I think, is a little bit optimistic. So that would be one in every 200 people. In our hometown, I don't think one out of every 200 persons is an evangelical Christian. And even this is just, yeah, but that half of a percent, about half of those are gypsies. Any of you ever heard of the gypsies? Yeah, so not the Gypsy Kings, not, it's this group of people that nobody knows exactly where they came from. They're spread around all over Western Europe, and they tend to build like these kind of little ghettos that they live in on semi-public property, and they live and they dwell, they're in Spain, they're in France, they're in Germany, and they don't, here's my point, they don't integrate with the culture more broadly. So half of that half a percent of evangelicals are gypsies who really don't have a meaningful testimony or witness in the context of the country. So there's lots of need for church planting, evangelism, church revitalization in some cases, and that's why we're there. The next slide. So this is kind of just a symbolic picture. This is our meeting place in our local church, and it's a small storefront. It's a tube, a narrow tube that goes back and doesn't have any windows. And not complaining, we're thankful for our meeting place, but this is really typical. So in Spain, a lot of evangelical churches own or rent little storefronts. That's where they meet. And this is a symbolic picture of just kind of how small and how little space the Evangelical Church occupies in the Spanish context. So, that's why we're in Spain. It's not like we're missionaries in a Christian country. We're missionaries in a country where there's a lot of need. So, next slide. We have two main ministry focuses. One of them is our local church, and the other one is the seminary where I teach. So, I'll tell you about them both. I'll tell you first about our local church. What language is that? Yeah, that's not Spanish. So in Spanish, what would be the name of our church? Iglesia, Julio Iglesias, right? That's just to help it stick, eh? A little Spanish lesson this morning. Was that effective didactically? Maybe not. Do I need to dance more? Sing? No. Okay, drop it, Dad. That's why I got my kids here in the front, and they're just, oh, the dad jokes. Església Evangelica. So here the Catalan sounds similar, to the Spanish, but the name of our church is In Catalan because we're in Catalonia, we're in a town that is especially Catalan, where again, most people's first language is not Spanish, it's Catalan. Next slide. So this is a picture of our church during a church retreat. We try to, once a year, get away to a cheap beach hotel, maybe a half hour north from where we live, and have a weekend. We invite a special speaker to come in, and it's a time for us to have extended worship, extended fellowship, and hear from somebody, encouraging messages. This was from maybe two or three years ago, just to kind of give you an idea of what our church family looks like. We have 50-something members in our church, which we're really thankful for. That's a mid-sized church in Spain. On Sunday morning, similar probably to you guys here at Dayspring, we may have 80 people. That's really a pretty good-sized church. A lot of churches in Spain are considerably smaller than that. And our church is very diverse. We have a number of members who are Catalan, who were born in Catalonia and been there all their lives, but we also have an international contingent. We have a family from Holland, we have a lady from Russia, we have people from Latin America, so our church is very cosmopolitan. Next slide. I've been an elder in the church since 2006, and usually I've been working with at least one other elder. There's been a couple years where I've been there by myself, But for the most part, I'm working with somebody else, and I'm not the main preaching or teaching elder. I'm in the preaching rotation, typically. I preach once every couple months. But I oversee the teaching ministries, and together with Nurdia, we've done premarital counseling, and I've done a few other things. Next slide. And my wife is very involved in the church as well. She has two main ministries. She coordinates the children's ministry, so she's in charge of finding the curriculum and preparing the lessons and coordinating the calendar with the teachers and so forth. and she's involved in the music ministry. So here she is singing with our daughter, Tanya. That was, I don't know, maybe three years ago now, something like that. One specific ministry that she has that's really neat within that music ministry is that she translates songs from English into Catalan. So here in the US, we are blessed with a richness of songs, both traditional hymns and new music that's being produced by musicians like the Gettys, for example. I imagine that you use music of different kinds, and some's more modern, some is more traditional. In English, there's so much, and it's rich. Songs that are easy to sing as congregations, songs that are full of good theology, that are even Didactic. In Spanish, there's a lot of that, but in Catalan, not much. So my wife, who is the fun, gifted, creative part of the family, she translates songs from English into Catalan. And that's for use in our church, but we've talked together with some other people back in Catalonia about the possibility of someday maybe publishing those translations and making them, however we do it, open source. I just said bueno, by the way, just a little bit of Spanish in there, just to keep you on your toes, yeah. But to make that available for other churches in Catalonia. And that's something, actually, that you could be praying for in the future. Next slide. Our church was a church plant back in the early 2000s, and we were involved in it from the very beginning. Initially, it was led by two of us. I was there together with another American missionary. The other guy's name was Steve Phillips. He was also sent by Grace Bible Church, which is the church that Craig Marshall pastors. By the way, Craig is my boss. So speak well of me to Craig when he comes, please. Steve and I were both sent by Grace Bible Church in Escondido, and we worked together for, I don't know, 10 or 12 years. And it was kind of funny because Steve is tall and I'm not, so he was Don Quixote and I was Sancho Panza. And the example fit, not just physically, but Steve was kind of always dreaming and kind of up in the air like Don Quixote and I was Sancho Panza, pulling him down and trying to put his feet back on the ground. But jokes aside, Steve and I prayed that the Lord would raise up national elders to work together with us and eventually to replace us. Our goal was really to work ourselves out of a job. Steve left, he took another church in 2000, I don't know, when was that, honey? 2012, 2013, something like this. It's been 10 years or so now. And since that time, the Lord has replaced him with two nationals. So now I'm still an elder in the church, but I'm in the minority. So there's one gringo and there's two Spaniards, and it's wonderful because I can step into the background. I mean, it really makes a difference. If a thoughtful non-Christian were to come into our church on a Sunday morning, and the first thing they see is me, presiding or preaching, and I can be doing it in Spanish or in Catalan, but it could give that person, if they're looking for an excuse not to believe, it gives them an extra excuse. Oh, these evangelicals, that's an American thing. Look, here's the American. But the message, I could say the exact same thing as Isaac, one of my co-elders. If Isaac says it, it just comes in in a different way, a better way. So our prayer was that we could be replaced by Spanish nationals, and God has responded to that prayer. He's granted that request. Isaac is our paid guy, so we have one full-time paid elder. I'm really proud of our church. We can pay a pastor. That's not to be taken for granted in Spain. A lot of churches don't pay their pastors, and it's either because they're too small, or maybe because they don't value the ministry of the word as much as they should, and they spend their money in other ways. But we pay our pastor, and we're super thankful. So Isaac is our paid guy. He does most of the preaching, most of the visitation, most of the discipleship. And he is a graduate of the seminary where I teach. So when he does things right, I tell everybody, I taught him everything he knows. It is actually really gratifying to be able to enjoy the ministry of somebody that came up through the ranks at the seminary where I teach. So we're thankful for him. Gifted speaker, he's got a heart for evangelism, and his wife, Anna, is really sweet. She's great with young people. And this picture is a little dated. They now have three kids, ages, actually, Mateo, their oldest, had a birthday just yesterday, didn't he? How old is he, is he six or seven? He's six, okay, so between six years old and one year old, they're kids. And another elder is Jose. So Jose's been a member, together with his wife Laura, of our church for 10 or 12 years, or maybe even a little longer. It's been a while now. And Jose was great from the moment he arrived at the church. I thought, this guy could be an elder. But he's also very humble, and he resisted Steve and I's efforts to bring him in as an elder for almost a decade, because he felt like he was too young, he wasn't ready. But thanks be to God, the same Sunday that we recognized Isaac as an elder in our church, we also recognized Jose. So in an instant, I was in a minority. It was great. Jose is our worship leader. He's a musician, plays the guitar. He's really talented. He's actually got a couple of CDs out with his music. He hasn't been to seminary, but he's just got a knack for ministry things. He's a great communicator. So he preaches, and he preaches a little too long sometimes, and he goes round and round a little bit, but he's my mother-in-law's favorite preacher in the church. Not me. Not anymore. He took that honor away from me. So we're thankful for him. And we've tried to get him some theological training. He's taken some classes online. We've done some preaching workshops together in the church. But that's another thing to pray for. I'll summarize some prayer requests at the end of the presentation. Speaking of theological education, studying online and so forth, we'll transition into the second sort of main ministry activity that we have in Spain, and that's the seminary. So here's the name of our seminary. I don't know why, but institutions in Spain love to have long names. So this is actually two names, really. You can read that. The Facultad de Teología, what does that mean? It's a theological faculty. And then the rest of the name is an acronym, IPSTE, which means what stands for Instituto Biblico y Seminario Teologico de España. So historically, the name was just IPSTE. It was Bible Institute Theological Seminary of Spain. But in 2011, we got official government accreditation. which was a miracle. And I'll tell you why it was a miracle in just a second. But when we got government accreditation, we had to become a faculty. So it's like university. So now we're a theological university, and the rest of it, it's really long, but that's what it is. Let's go to the next slide. This is a picture of me speaking at our graduation a couple years ago. I've been teaching at the school for 18 years now. And in all honesty, they took me in the very beginning because they needed warm bodies. There was, in 2006, 2007, a turnover. A bunch of professors left. It was for the better. The seminary's had its ups and downs over the years. It's been around for 50 years. We're coming up on our 50th year anniversary, but there was a shift from slightly more liberal leanings theologically to more conservative leanings in 2006. Bunch of professors left, and they needed people to teach, and they asked me to come. I spoke in chapel once, and the principal said, oh, your Spanish is pretty good for being an American. How'd you like to come and teach full-time? All right, I'll do it, and so that's how I got started. The school, since I've been there, received its accreditation. So 2011, the Spanish government gave us official accreditation. Most seminaries here in the United States have accreditation from the government, whether it's state or whatever. And accreditation here in the United States allows students to get loans, to get grants. Their degrees then could transfer on if they wanted to study further post-grad, whatever. And that's the same for our school now. So get this. We're in secular Spain, where historically, when Spain was Roman Catholic, evangelicals were seen as a cult, like Jehovah's Witnesses. And in 2011, out of the blue, the government gave us accreditation, which means our students can get grants that cover all of their tuition. So our students can be paid by the government to study conservative evangelical theology. Isn't that amazing? And then there's this other paradox, which is also really interesting. Okay, so this is a paradox, but in Spain, public school, right? So your kids are in a public grade school or high school. The school is required to offer Roman Catholic religion classes. But if there's eight or more evangelical families in that school and they request evangelical religion instead of Roman Catholic religion, the school has to pay somebody to come in and teach it. Isn't that amazing? So our students, they get a Bachelor of Arts in Theology, they can go on and do one year, a master's degree in education, and they can get paid to teach evangelical theology in public secular schools. Paradox. So we have a number of students. In fact, I'll show you a picture of some of our students here in a few minutes. One of whom, he has his full salary, he works full time just teaching evangelical religion in public schools. He's evangelizing kids and he gets paid by the government to do it. Absolutely amazing. So anyhow, our school is fully accredited. And this is a picture of our campus. Our campus is an old beach hotel. All right, so depending on who I'm talking to, I emphasize one of those two adjectives, old or beach. If we're trying to recruit new students, it's an old beach hotel. It's a seven minute walk from the beach, it's true. If we're trying to raise money for the school, it's an old beach hotel, which is also true. The building is in need of some TLC, you could say. So we're really thankful for the building. It's in a suburb south of Barcelona. It's 10 minutes from the airport. It's on a piece of land. It's like a cul-de-sac, and there's, I mean, it would cost millions of euros to buy just the land that it sits on today. It was purchased in 1974 by Greater European Mission, and we're still there. But the building was built in the 50s. when Franco was dictator, and there weren't many regulations, and part of it just sort of sits on the ground, and there's lots of life in the building besides just the students. I won't tell you the gory stories, but I'll just say this. What happens when you exterminate all the rodents? No more rodents, but bugs, yeah. So we'll leave that up to your imagination. No, I'll just tell you a story real quick. No, I won't. Yes, I will. I got 12 minutes. I can do it. Teaching Greek one morning, like 9 in the morning, and this cockroach falls out of the false ceiling, right on the floor in the middle of the classroom. One of the girls screams. One of the guys takes his shoe off, smashes it. It's just missionary. That doesn't happen at Westminster Seminary. Were there any cockroaches, Jason? No, I don't think so. Phoenix Seminary, Jordan? No, it's not happening. So anyway, we're thankful for our building, but we do have a fundraising campaign that we're working on. So I'll tell you about that also at the end. Next slide. One of our projects we have, but we have 45 or so students. Not all of them are full-time. A number of them are part-time. But does that sound like a lot? 45? When you're in Western Europe, secular Western Europe, in a conservative theological institution, 45 students is a pretty good number. So we're thankful for that. But we'd like to extend our influence. So we're gonna start an online program. During COVID, we had to shut down completely. And the lockdowns in Spain were just really strict. And I know there was lockdowns. I don't know what Nevada was like compared to California. We know more about what it was like in California. But we had to go online entirely, immediately, for the rest of that year and for large portions of the following year as well. Completely online. So I had no idea how to use Zoom. And in a week, we had to figure it out. But our learning curve got really steep. We learned about all this technology, how to use it. One of the things that I learned is that I can take my iPad, and I can put my outline on my iPad, and I can project it on a screen. So this is me teaching. I'm in the upper right-hand corner wearing my Denver Broncos hat. Any Bronco fans, by the way? Why are people putting their heads down? Who do you root for if you live in Reno, Nevada? The Bears, all right, that's great. 49ers, all right, you don't root for the Raiders, do you? Raiders, okay. Well, the Raiders historically have been rivals to the Broncos, so maybe that's why some people are putting their heads down. Anyway, we learned how to use this technology, and we realized that even though it is work, it's not that difficult to start an online program. So it does require work. But our goal is this year to have our entire first year, we have a four-year program, we want to have our entire first year online. Why is that? Because we get requests every year from people around Spain asking us when we're going to put our program online. People who maybe have jobs, maybe a lone elder in a church who can't For his church's sake, for his family's sake, he can't afford to pack up and move for four years to Barcelona to study with us, and yet he still wants to fill his theological toolbox, at least some, and we want to provide an opportunity for people like that who can't come and study with us in person. It's always better to study in person, I'm convinced of that. But we do wanna increase our influence and reach some of those people who can't come study with us. And like schools in the United States, you're studying at Phoenix Jordan online, am I correct? Okay. Will you finish your degree? Okay. You're intelligent, you're disciplined, you'll get it done. What's the percentage of seminary students who start their degrees online in the United States who actually finish? It's like 10%. It's really low. There's just a lot of difficulties inherent in studying online. It's really challenging. But what happens a lot of time is those online students study for a year, and they enjoy it, and they see that God's gifted them in that area, and then they're willing to pack up and move and finish out the degree in person. And we're hoping that our online degree can be a stepping stone to see more students come to study with us in person. So we're working on that. Next picture. Student body, I already said, 45 or so students, full or part-time. Next slide. This is a picture of our full-time faculty. When I say full-time, I'm talking about guys who are there every week. So our local church, I described to you our church, our church actually is self-sustaining. What I mean by that is the Latents could leave and our church would press on. Proof of that is the Laytons have been gone from our church for a year and the church has grown. Maybe we should leave. But the seminary is not self-sustaining. It's been around 50 years, and it is still very much a missionary work. It's like a seminary plant. Why do I say that? Because financially, we are not self-sustaining. We depend on funds from the United States. And from Northern Europe, we receive significant donations from Holland, for example, every year that help fund our professor salaries. But the other reason why it's not self-sustaining is because we don't have that many national professors. So here, full-time guys, five of us. A Spaniard, Manuel, is our principal. Carlos, down on the right, he's New Testament, full-time as well, he's also a Spaniard. The guy on the upper right, Bernard, is Dutch, so he's a missionary from Holland. Then there's me, and then Arturo is Mexican. Arturo studied at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, but again, the majority of the full-time faculty are foreigners. So this is something that we also ask for prayer for. First of all, that the Lord would raise up Spanish nationals who can teach theology. And this is, it's a tall order, because we're looking for guys who need, they have to have degrees, we're accredited, so you have to have, ideally, a PhD. You have to be fluent in Spanish, well, obviously. You have to love the local church. You have to love Jesus. I mean, sometimes people who get their PhDs, that's not necessarily a given, unfortunately. And we need to have the funding to be able to pay these people. So we're getting towards the end here, and I'm gonna summarize all these prayer requests here in just a second. Let's hit the next slide. Real quickly, I'm running out of time. I was gonna tell you four stories about four of our graduates, but just to kind of give you an idea what our graduates do, we'll just hit a couple of them. Down in the bottom left, that's Pablo and his wife Anais. He graduated eight years ago from our seminary, and he's now in the south of Spain. He took a small church that was dying. They had like 10 members. We received their prayer letters, and I remember the first prayer letters were depressing. We prayed for him. He went to rejuvenate the church. But in three years, they're up to almost 30 members. And it's not just finding straggling evangelicals around town. They've baptized new believers. They've seen conversions. We're super grateful. I mean, to see your students go out and do things like that is just so heartwarming. Upper left, Alejandro, he's Presbyterian. So think like PCA, Presbyterian Church in America, that kind of Presbyterian, awesome. He's got that teaching certificate I told you about. So he's pastoring and half his salary comes from midweek when he goes and he evangelizes kids in public schools. Those are the kinds of things that our graduates are doing. Next slide. One other, I guess two real briefly, ministry activities that we have. I get invited to speak in different places outside the seminary, outside of our local church, in conferences and retreats and things like that, which is always, it's always a blessing to go to other parts of Spain and see what the Lord is doing. And, yeah, next slide. That's me speaking. Next slide. I do some writing, and I've had some books and some articles and book chapters published. And what's neat about that is a lot of that gets distributed in Latin America. In Latin America, there's a lot more evangelicals, churches. There's also a tremendous need for theological education. So it's a real blessing to see some of my stuff. I'll be really honest with you. What I publish is a lot of times what I've worked on, what I've taught in my classes. So I polish it, I polish it, and then I publish it. But it's like, oh, instead of just sharing it with six or eight or 10 students, it gets published, and then it goes down to Latin America, and hopefully, anybody know Jim Adams, by the way? Does that name ring a bell? Jim Adams? He's in Arizona, but he's a missionary in Latin America for a long time. His son, David Adams, is in Columbia, and he runs an evangelical publishing house, and I've had stuff published with him, which is great. Okay, prayer requests, really quickly. For our family, this was taken at Christmas, kind of a family Christmas picture. Pray for our kids, that they would grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. They're all kind of in different places in their faith, and just pray that the Lord would work in all of their lives. And we're leaving, like I said, at the end of the month. This is our last stop on a summer road trip where we visited supporting churches. We've got two weeks in Colorado, basically. We've got a lot of meetings, but we're gonna try to get a little bit of rest before we go back. Pray that we could rest and get a little recharged before we head back to Spain. Next slide. For our local church, pray that we could be more effective evangelistically. I'd like for us to be more assertive. So not aggressive or overbearing, but most people in our town know that there's an evangelical church in town because we have a sign, and the sign gives off to the main street that goes up through town. So most people know that we're there, but most people have no idea what we believe. We would like for Jesus to be non-ignorable in our town. And we've tried, we've done different things where we've had special events, we invite people to our church, we try to do things outside the church. People are just so uninterested, it's really difficult to strike up spiritual conversations with people. So pray for wisdom, pray for perseverance, and pray for assertiveness in evangelism. And then for the seminary, pray for more students, And pray for our building project. So we got a visit right before covid from the local building inspector and she came in and she said this door is too narrow. You don't have enough bathrooms. This floor is too slippery and you don't have a forced air system. You don't have a fire escape. And she said, if you guys don't fix all this, we're gonna have to shut you down. We're gonna have to take away your public activities license, which would mean as a school, we'd have to shut down. So we started a fundraising campaign. This is in like 2018, right before COVID. And we need to raise about 600,000 euros. Does that sound like a lot? Well, it is and it isn't because Westminster Seminary raised $22 million to build their new residency. So 600,000 euros isn't really that much. And thanks be to God, we've raised about 40% of that already. So we're really thankful, and we've been able to do a lot of work already. The building inspector, the same lady, came by a couple months ago and she was happy to see the work that we've done. We've got, she said, a year and a half, maybe two years to finish everything. So if you could pray for that, pray for our funding in that regard, we'd really appreciate it. So it's almost 10 o'clock, I should quit. Should I quit? Do we have time for a question or should we just wrap it up? Okay, a question or two or? Yeah. Yes, thank you. So the question is, what about the Muslims? So I didn't explain all the details on the slide, that pie chart with the percentages. Official government statistics say that 5% of the population in Spain is Muslim. I think that those statistics are probably low, it's probably closer to seven or eight percent, and it's very evident. So the Muslims around the country have mosques or houses of prayer, they call sometimes their meeting places in towns where they can't have mosques. They don't really adapt culturally, so they wear their typical garb and the ladies are wearing their head coverings and so forth, so they're very, obvious around, and that they're growing in percentage because the birth rate in Spain is 1.2 amongst Spaniards, but amongst the Muslims it's much higher, and for Morocco especially, the Muslims immigrate to Spain looking for work. It represents a unique opportunity for evangelism. We have friends who are missionaries in Morocco, and it is dangerous. So my buddy down there, he knows he's got guys following him. He's very careful when he shares the gospel. Sometimes he feels like the Lord's telling him to keep his mouth shut and he won't share with a particular person that he's meeting. And we've been trying to convince him that he should come to Spain. Because in Spain there's religious liberty. And you can share the gospel with the Muslims all over the place. And there's protection from local law enforcement. So we think that it's a special opportunity for the church in Spain to reach out to the Muslims. The Moroccans go, a lot of them go back to Morocco annually to see family. I mean it's just a hop, skip, and a jump from Gibraltar basically down to North Africa. And if the Lord were to convert some of them and they head down to see family members, they're gonna be the best evangelists that you could imagine, really. In our school, we have a class specifically about outreach to Muslims. So yes, and that's another thing to pray for as well. Thank you, that's a good question. All right. Let me pray for you. All right, you wanna take this? Yes, thank you, thank you. Father, I thank you so much for what we've heard here today. Father, I thank you for our brother, Matt. And Lord, we do pray for him, for Nuria, for their children. Lord, we especially pray for this family that, Lord, you would help him, he and Nuria, as they seek to raise their children and to continue to encourage their adult children. And Father, we pray for these kids, Lord, that as they Lord, we thank you for the love that they have. Lord, we thank you for the love of their marriage that is very evident. And Father, we pray that, again, your continued blessings upon this marriage. Lord, help our brother as he seeks to be more romantic and understanding of things. We pray for his church. Father, help him as he seeks to work with his elder team to be more understanding. Father, help this church, Father, to grow where you have planted them in that context. Father, may they be winsome ambassadors. Father, may they have wisdom as they seek to share in this town. And Father, I pray for Cabrillos. Father, we pray that Lord, as our brother has said, that Jesus would be someone that cannot be ignored in this town. And Father, we pray that this church, Lord, though small, would be given opportunities to plant other churches. Father, we pray that this church would grow and would multiply leaders who are nationals. Father, we pray that they would grow, Lord, by seeing people come to a saving faith and knowledge of Jesus Christ. Father, help them as they seek to know when to share, where to share, Father, even how. Father, we pray for the seminary. Father, we pray that, Lord, for you, 600,000 euros is not even a drop. And Father, we pray for your provision for them. And Father, for this building, Lord, we pray, Lord, you'd give the faculty wisdom as they seek to lead. Father, we do pray for more students. Father, pray for our brother for his writing ministry, Lord, that many would read. And Father, that, Lord, again, people would have questions. And Father, we pray for the online program, that, Father, all aspects of this would grow. And Father, we pray again that the result would be Spanish nationals who are working in Spanish churches to plant churches in Spain. And Father, we pray, Lord, for that day that Spain would be far more willing to bow the knee to you. Father, we pray for those who are atheists there, for Muslims. Father, again, Lord, you and you alone can turn a heart of stone into a heart of flesh. Father, give our brothers and sisters, Lord, wisdom there. And Lord, thank you for the opportunity you've given us as a church to get to know them better. And Lord, we just lift them to you now in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. We've got like 10 minutes or so before church starts, but we're going to try and grab a picture here, because one of the things we need to get is a picture. Like I said, you've got about 10 minutes until service starts.