In spite of 21 percent unemployment and two years of recession challenges in Spain, three self-funded church plants have recently started there, accelerated through the Eurasia Region’s Power of One missional initiative.

The Calella Church of the Nazarene is a daughter of the Barcelona church, which has an average attendance of about 100. The work began when three families from Calella, who had been traveling the 90 minutes each way to Barcelona, decided to start meeting closer to home, with the Barcelona church’s support.

In September, the group, which had grown to 25 adults and almost as many children, celebrated the grand opening of their new sanctuary, a storefront they have rented with their own money, said Ignacio Pesado, pastor of the Barcelona church.

“The couples who started it are in charge,” he said. “We wanted to develop leadership locally. Every week we send preachers, people who help with worship, but they’re learning how to preach, teach. One fellow is taking guitar lessons. Now they’re starting Bible studies and Sunday school and they’re teaching the kids.”

The new church has a Saturday children’s program which sees 20 to 25 kids each week. They also have Sunday morning worship, regular couples meetings and other activities for outreach into their community.

The couples meetings have been particularly effective, since it was the witness of the core families’ improved home life and relationships that enticed their friends and relatives to give the church a try.

“Their lives are different,” Pesado said. “The other members of their houses or their friends are coming because they see a difference.”

Calella church advertised the couples meetings simply as marriage and family support groups, not emphasizing that they were connected with a church.  Some of the early attenders initially made it clear they were not interested in religion. But as they worked through the biblical study material and saw transformation in their marriages, they realized God was at work and became open to involvement in the church as a whole.

“Some of the couples were having a lot of problems and now they’re working better between them,” he said. “They’re seeing the changes, so they’re really excited.”

In May, Power of One launched on the Spain District. Pesado credits the accompanying resources as helping to establish the new work, because it included specific instructions and tools.

In Montequinto, a suburb of Seville, another church has been organized from a cell that was meeting for several years, and grew recently under Seville’s new pastor, Jorge Cabero Vaca, said Kyle Himmelwright, district superintendent.

“The mother church has seen significant gains in attendance, baptisms, and new Nazarenes, and the growth has spurred on their evangelistic desire to spread the Gospel to the surrounding communities of Seville,” he said.

In Zaragoza, several members of the Church of the Nazarene there had been praying about the possibility of planting another church closer to where they live. An obstacle was the lack of funds to secure a place for the new group to meet.

They put together 200 euros per month to rent meeting space, but this was only one-third of the average price for such a space. Then they found a man with a space who offered them a one-year lease for 250 euros per month because they were a church. The pastor, Joel Castro Bueno, counter-offered 200 euros. The man agreed.

The church plant in Zaragoza has a core group of three families who are spending the next month and a half cleaning and fixing up the space, with the goal to launch their new church at the start of 2012. They plan to worship with the mother church on Sunday mornings and then host their own meetings in the afternoons, Himmelwright said.

The “Power of One” initiative, launched in September, is designed to help local churches in every field to become engaged in evangelism, discipleship, church planting and community transformation, providing tested and proven resources written by Nazarenes across the Eurasia Region.

The initiative includes a package of materials that is believed to have local and regional impact.  Translated into 23 regional languages in all, the materials offer sound holiness doctrine and strategies for the local church to engage their communities and start new churches.  The materials cover the four growth dimensions of missional development: internal, external, devotional and transformational growth.

The Church of the Nazarene in Spain is 29 years old, with six organized churches and nearly 500 members.