Madrid (EFE).- The number of people who declare themselves Evangelicals has multiplied by ten in the last 20 years in Spain, where there are currently 3,300 registered congregations, and Evangelicals are part of the second religious confession after the Catholic Church.
The participation of an evangelical televangelist in an act of the PP in Madrid this weekend has put the media focus on this religion, with great weight in Latin America.
The Federation of Evangelical Religious Entities (Ferede) has ratified its political neutrality and has recommended that its ministers of worship “avoid using their pastoral influence to condition the vote of believers.”
As explained to EFE from Ferede, the increase in the evangelical religion in Spain is due above all to migration from Latin American countries, but also from the African continent and Romania.
This growth, which was more accentuated in the early years of the 21st century, has been slowing down, although it has not stopped increasing and, within the Evangelical Church, the currents that have grown the most are Baptist, Charismatic and Pentecostal churches, not only in Spain, but all over the world.
Thus, while in 2004 there were less than 1,000 evangelical parishes registered in the Registry of Religious Entities of the Ministry of Justice, currently this figure is around 3,300.
The number of evangelicals in Spain multiplies by 10 in the last 20 years
And according to the Observatory of Religious Pluralism, the Evangelical, with 4,348 places of worship distributed in 803 municipalities (1,500 more than in 2011), is the second religious denomination behind the Catholic Church, with more than 22,000 and ahead of Muslims. , with 1,751 places of worship.
In 2018, 2% of Spaniards declared themselves Evangelical, compared to 0.2% in 1998. Ferede estimates that in Spain there are some 1.5 million faithful who regularly attend Evangelical parishes.
Madrid, with 780 places of worship, and Barcelona, with 915, are the autonomous communities with the greatest presence of evangelical places of worship, followed by Andalusia (678) and the Valencian Community (459).
The migratory flow, a factor that explains the increase
For Ferede, one of the factors that explains this increase in the number of faithful and the establishment of new churches is the unprecedented migratory flow in the recent history of Spain, especially since 2000, which brought evangelical faithful from different countries of the world, especially from Latin America, but not only.
It is also explained in the impact on the gypsy people from the 1960s (since the Evangelical Filadelfia church, of gypsy ethnicity, is the most numerous with around 1000 places of worship).
Also, Ferede emphasizes, it is due to the social work among drug addicts and marginalized people since the 1980s, which has given rise to new churches throughout the national territory and in several countries around the world.
All this, added to the “missional emphasis” of this religion, together with the concept of “universal priesthood of all believers” typical of the evangelical faith, with organizations “not hierarchical but democratic, autonomous, participatory, close and very dynamic in terms of its cultural adaptation.