Pray for: Portugal

Evangelical growth, once a source of encouragement, has become a serious challenge.

• Serious divisions. Many denominations suffered acrimonious splits, especially some Pentecostal denominations. Some recent progress has been made to overcome these; pray for churches to major on the core elements of the faith and extend grace in the minor distinctives.
• Pray for church planting efforts in Portugal. Many more churches are needed. The EA targetted a goal of 4,000 evangelical churches by 2015. Instead, evangelical congegrations actually decreased from 1630 to 964, despite nearly 300 new church plants. 82% of new church plants have congregations with fewer than 25% Portuguese participating. Several groups adopted cell-church models but face the difficulty that, for many Portuguese, a physical building is what communicates religious legitimacy. Pray for continued church growth, for affordable and appropriate meeting places and for leaders for these future churches.