"You can't start a church from students!"

How many times have I been asked the question, "How can you build churches using young adults?" Actually, I have heard it more often as an assertion: “You can’t start a church from students!”

Well, fortunately no one convinced the GBIM Porto team of that.

The Comunidade da Graça of Porto, Portugal (Grace Church Porto), began in 1997 when a small group of college students started meeting in Tim & Julie Hawkins’ living room to study the Bible.

Edite (left) and Gami (center) were two of the students who helped start the Porto church

After a relatively short amount of time this student-led group perceived that they were living out the church in terms of worship, community, and mission and realized that they themselves were indeed a full-fledged expression of the local church. Since then, this missions-minded church has seen many people come to Christ and has also started points of light throughout the Greater Porto area.

Grace Church Porto

In 2002, Grace Church Porto decided that it would be wise to start the legalization process in order to be recognized as a valid expression of the church by the government and other churches. This also enabled the church obtain the legal status permitting them to financially support Charis Associates Alfredo & Rita Abreu, the Comunidade da Graça's own missionaries to Lisbon.

Alfredo is the former General Secretary for InterVarsity Portugal and is currently the director of the Portuguese Bible Society. He and his wife have begun a spiritual community in their home in Lisbon.

In June 2005, Grace Church Porto held its charter business meeting where the necessary documents were signed. It was just a short time later that the Comunidade da Graça was recognized legally for the very first time.


Gami Rosário, one of the university students from the 1997 bible reading group, was named the first Portuguese elder of the church, serving alongside GBIM missionaries; Alfredo Abreu will probably be named elder in coming months.

Gami is a child psychologist and Helena is working on a doctorate in psychiatry

Edite Briosa, also from that original student bible reading group, is serving as deaconess and has been a key figure in many of the church’s administrative activities, not the least to mention in the legalization process.

Edite also serves with the European Friends of Charis Associates committee

The church’s missionary vision hasn’t yet waned; it continues to pursue planting more points of light. Grace Church Porto sees itself as a church multiplier, and spiritual family connector, as it continues to pepper the Greater Porto area with expressions of Christ’s Bride.

For example, at the end of 2004 Grace Porto teamed up with an international church in Lisbon, which sent one of its finest couples to Porto to start Riverside International Church. This is now a point of light of about 30 people. Several Grace Church members have planted flourishing points of light, and some are praying towards starting new ones in their workplace, play places, and amongst their friends, families, and neighbors.

The Comunidade da Graça and the Riverside International churches gather for fellowship, worship and witness

So the FGBC can celebrate the coming out party of yet another sister church born from a group of students, the Grace Church of Porto, Portugal!

Plausibility and pray-ers

I had just turned the 8 P.M. news on, desperately wanting to get the latest on the reaction of the Muslim world to the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed with a bomb-shaped turban. “R-r-r-ring!” went the phone. “Gr-r-r-r” went I.

Things degenerated from there. The telemarketer was from France Télécom, the phone company touting its new service. “No thank you.” “But this will only take two or three minutes.” “No. Thank you!” “But it is for our premium service.” “I am not interested. Thank you for the offer. Good bye!” “Sigh!” “Click.”

Can you relate to this sort of exchange with telemarketers? Do you “just say no” before you even hear what they have to say? I mean, this was the French equivalent of “Ma Bell” ! Why did I react this way when this was my phone company offering me a way to save money?
Because in 2003, France Télécom was fined 40 million euros over a phone book dispute.
Because in November 2005, France Télécom was fined 80 million euros for obstructing DSL competition.
Because in December 2005, France Télécom’s mobile division “Orange” was fined 256 million euros having conspired with two other companies to hinder competition. (Source: Libération, Nov. 9 and Dec. 1, 2005)
So I just said “no!” because I cannot imagine France Télécom offering me anything that is not overpriced, because I do not like the thought that the excess that I have been paying them is paying the fines levied against them, and because they have been hindering me from getting better, less expensive service elsewhere.

In comparison, this animosity is just a smidgen of the visceral reaction that many Europeans have toward the Church.

Due to the Crusades (killing others in the name of Christ) and the Inquisition (killing Europeans in the name of the Church), Europeans often just say “No!” to any offer to discuss Christianity, Jesus or the gospel.

This refusal to even listen to potentially advantageous information, whether it be less expensive telephone service or the Good News of salvation, is due to the reigning plausibility structure.

Plausibility structure is a grid of unquestioned assumptions through which new beliefs and ideas are filtered. Plausibility structure is society-wide group-think, the unquestioned, preconceived “givens” in that particular culture. Implausible, unfamiliar ideas, i.e. unbelievable according to that culture’s grid, are filtered out and rejected a priori. Those that are plausible—that agree with the grid—may be kept for further consideration.
For example, the evangelical movement in the United States asks the question, “Why, if there is so much evidence contrary to the theory of evolution, is it still accepted by many as a virtual fact?” Australian microbiologist Michael Denton, in a book that shook the evolutionary world, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985: 75), opines that it is because of the reigning plausibility structure. He explains:

The fact that every journal, academic debate and popular discussion assumes the truth of Darwinian theory tends to reinforce its credibility. This is bound to be so because, as sociologists of knowledge are at pains to point out… the plausibility of any theory or world view is largely dependent upon the social support it receives rather than its empirical content or rational consistency. Thus the all pervasive affirmation of the validity of Darwinian theory has had the inevitable effect of raising its status into an impregnable axiom which could not even conceivably be wrong.

Evolution became the infallible, accrediting grid through which passed any scientific theory and empirical data prior to consideration. It is the active plausibility structure within science, that which is taken for granted without argument. Results and theories, therefore, are inevitably skewed and colored in favor of evolution.

I have often shared reasons for why evangelism and church planting is difficult in France and Western Europe only to receive the response, “Yes, it’s like that here (in the U.S.) too.” Well, no it is not because the United States did not initiate and, after two centuries of spent gold and spilt blood, lose the Crusade wars. The Church in the United States did not subject its own people, for 650 years, to the fear of torture and death to insure doctrinal purity. Europe has a millennium of Christian history riddled with the blood of its own people and carnage instigated by the Church. This affects Europeans in a way that Americans can never comprehend.

Today, Europeans freely cite the atrocities of the Crusades (and the ostensibly religious wars in Belfast and the Balkans) and express their disgust at the Inquisition as reasons to not even consider Christianity; it is no longer plausible.

John Robb, Unreached Peoples Program Director with World Vision, says, “Satan works… by trapping a people in society-wide presumptions about reality.” In settings where “Christ is not obeyed… such strongholds go unchallenged, sometimes for centuries, gaining strength with every passing generation” (see Perspectives, 145-151).

But God has not left believers without resources to evangelize and plant churches within the European plausibility structure. Prayer is divinely powerful. As the Apostle Paul said:
The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. (2 Corinthians 10:4-5 NIV).

I believe that in part, what Robb and the Apostle Paul called “strongholds,” sociologists call plausibility structure. John Robb observes:

Bold, determined spiritual warfare is required to weaken and dislodge these fortresses of presumption which are blockading “the knowledge of God” and denying “the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:3-5). No amount of persuasion can liberate an entire people from such darkness. Prayer is utterly essential.

My wife and I have stepped up our prayers for Europe. Would you please consider renewing your commitment to pray for a missionary in Europe, monthly, weekly or daily? I am deeply grateful to the many faithful pray-ers involved in the spiritual warfare here in Europe and to the intercessory teams that have participated in evangelism and church planting through prayer.

For example, Mary Ellen has been praying for Europe for over 30 years. She wrote:

“Dear Paul, I am thankful that all went well. I woke early Sunday (think I was to pray)…”
“Dear Paul, We have been praying…. I still think of our prayers on the Eiffel Tower…you are working with a good team. Tell them that we are praying for their desires to be realized.”

I am more convinced than ever that “prayer is utterly essential” and that the good things that are happening in Europe today (and the next couple of blog entries will highlight some encouraging ministry developments) result as much from the ministry of intercession, as from the faithful efforts of the Christian workers in Europe. So thanks Mary Ellen, and thanks to all of you faithful pray-ers for Europe!