An Anglican pastor, a Methodist missionary and a Pentecostal missionary have joined in a common project in Madrid that has broken down barriers and strengthened ties.

It is an Arab Christian community, the first in the capital of Spain and “the third in Spain, after one in Barcelona and the second in Malaga”, says Daniel Johnson, one of the founding pastors of  “Kanisa in Madrid”, a Christian church that holds weekly meetings since October 2018.

Johnson, an Assemblies of God minister from the United States, has been a missionary in Granada before, also focusing on reaching out to the Arabic-speaking people who mostly identify with the Muslim faith.

In Madrid he found that there was not a church that spoke entirely in Arabic to the large Arabic-speaking population in the capital with Arabic as their mother tongue.

He was not alone in recognising this need; he soon found other Christians with the same sensitivity and calling: Duane Miller, who is an associate pastor of the Anglican Church in Madrid and his wife Sharon, and Raouf Soleiman, an Egyptian missionary of the Methodist Church.

Praying together

“Every Monday we had a prayer walk, and the idea of doing something came up”, recalls Johnson. Since then, the Christian community has been built “on trust. We try to focus on the essentials and leave the rest in the Lord's hands”, he explains. They now meet in a room at the 4C Christian Centre on Tuesday evenings.

For this community, it is important to make itself known to the evangelical churches in Madrid, which “sometimes may have contact or visits from Muslims, and they don't know how to talk to them or help them, we are available to them”, points out the missionary.

Online presence

In addition to the public meetings they hold every Tuesday afternoon, they have a website and are active on Facebook and Youtube, where they broadcast their services.

Making themselves known on the internet is also important for them, as many Arabs first approach the gospel through these media.

Johnson told Spanish news website Protestante Digital that they are in contact with other missionary initiatives in other parts of Europe, where they are seeing that more and more people from Muslim backgrounds are interested in the gospel.

They hope that the community can grow and also be an example that it is possible to carry out missionary work among Christians with different sensibilities, but with the same goal: to present Jesus to every language, people and nation.