The recent “1st Portuguese Missionary Congress” brought together denominational leaders, 14 missionary organizations, missionaries and church planters, bi-vocational workers and representatives from Italy, Luxemburg and Spain. This Congress was unique not only in the fact that it was the first of its kind in Portugal but because denominational leaders had never collectively expressed their missionary goals for their nation.

Paulo Pascoal of the Portugal Evangelical Association writes: "We must stop and reflect that we can no longer continue in the same pattern and continue to distance ourselves from one another. We have not been innovators ourselves; we have to learn to give value to the role of others in the task (of mission) without leaving out our own responsibility."

The Congress started with an analysis of what the Evangelical church looks like in Portugal. With its Evangelical population less than 1% the research showed 234 strategic centers in their own nation that are unreached. But this information has not kept them from looking beyond their borders. Delegates at the Congress joined together to commission a young woman being sent to serve in Mexico.

Paulo Pascoal continues: "It stood out again in this Congress, the call to the simplicity of the practices of the early Church and above all a return to a missiology that is guided by the Spirit and not by human wisdom. We were tremendously disturbed when we realized that the current practice of the institutionalization of missionary work that contradicts the Kingdom, in favor of planting denominational flags."

We verified that our focus has to be on the 3800 unreached ethnic groups that make up the list that should make the church of Jesus to blush with shame. Portugal, after all, is positioned with four windows open in four directions—to Europe, to the Americas, to Africa, and to Asia—and we must also assume our part in the responsibility to keep the Great Commission.

Visit the conference website