Indians, Pakistanis, Nepalese and Bangladeshis are some of the population groups being reached by the Rhema evangelical church in the city of Barcelona and its metropolitan area.

This community began in 2010 with a group of just four people attending and holding one service a month. Since then, they have experienced a steady growth.

Six months later they met every fortnight and by mid-2011 they had a group of 30 people. In 2017 they became the first Punjabi church officially registered in Spain.

“For me, this church has a call that people can have a relationship with God, not a religion”, pastor Ajay Kumar told Spanish news website Protestante Digital.

From a non-Christian background, Kumar recalled that before becoming a Christian he “went to all the temples”.

Over 300 every week

The Rhema evangelical church now brings together over 300 people every week, between 90% and 95% of whom do not come from a Christian background.

The pastor pointed out that the church has “translations of the Bible in languages such as Urdu, Punjabi, Indian and Nepali”.

“We focus on the Southeast Asian population that has come here, but we also offer services in Spanish because our new generations are already Spanish and Catalan. Some of our younger ones don't know how to read Indian, for example”, added Kumar.

Missionary calling

According to the pastor, the idea of being a community focused on particular ethnic groups has been a motivation for mission.

“The Indian ethnic group also needs Christ. In the history of Spain, no one had ever reached them as a group before”, he stressed.

Furthermore, they have collaborated ( even financially) in the opening of a Nepalese church in Barcelona, inaugurated in September 2023, and they carry out Bible studies with families from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

All that, with the support and approval of the Spanish churches and pastors, who “have opened their doors to us knowing that all these migrant people from Southeast Asia can hear about the Bible here in a way that they cannot in their home countries”, explained Kumar.

They have just baptised two families from Muslim backgrounds.

Collaboration with other churches

After starting its services in Spanish, the Rhema church gives a lot of importance to the development of projects in collaboration with other churches.

That is why they were one of the communities that participated in a recent evangelistic campaign. “We have had a good experience so far, churches need to collaborate and be together”, said Kumar.

Rhema has similar needs to other churches, for example, regarding the difficulties to adapt the facilities to the current regulations.

“We could say that our situation is no different from that faced by most evangelical churches in this country. There is always some problem with this issue, but I think the growth of evangelical churches is opening the eyes of the political parties a little bit”, underlined Kumar.

Young people and politics

Other concerns that Rhema shares, in general, with many evangelical communities in Spain are the generational change and the participation in politics.

“We must focus on helping young people to feel a hunger and thirst for God. In our church we have a lot of young people and an important part of our work is focused on that, so that little by little they can find God”, he said.

Regarding the relationship between evangelicals and politics, Kumar has in mind the Indian model, which he rejects, where there is a religious denomination that is having excessive influence on politics, as was seen in the elections that ended in June.

However, he believes that “it would be important for the church to have greater representation in political spaces. Politicians use us, but never give us credit. This is one of the main gaps in all countries”.

The pastor of the Rhema church calls for more involvement and cooperation from Western politicians on the situation of the persecuted church. “No one has spoken about the situation of Christians in Manipur”, he lamented.