Reaching Out To A Lost Spain

Prayer Walks in Granada

Julio Arria and his family are DG workers based in Granada Spain and seconded to the Team Expansion team there. The Team has a very ambitious project to prayer walk in the 17 regions of Spain including the capital of each region. There are 7,500 villages and towns in Spain with no church at all. A solid year of logistical work and planning went into this major effort. 60 volunteers, many from the US, were divided into 8 teams; Julio and his family led a team of 10 people that was divided into smaller groups to prayer walk.

The first day was very, very hard. No one would talk with them or pray with them. The Americans were very discouraged. They had never “prayer walked” before, some of them did not yet know how to share their testimony or the Gospel. At the end of the first day some were even in tears. (I prayer walk – it’s very difficult and in Europe it’s even harder.) They wondered “how can we do this? We don’t even speak the language.” Julio led the group to pray together, then he encouraged them with the Word, and at the end of the prayer time he boldly, by faith, declared, “tomorrow the Lord will give each group of you two open contacts and they will speak English.” (Julio won’t tell you this but he is a man who prays 3 hours a day – and his life reflects that.) That’s faith!

The Lord Came Through!

Julio reports “we prayed with Yolanda, who was sitting on the beach, waiting for the evening to take her own life. The team approached her and asked, “Can I pray for you?” Yolanda said “yes.” They told her that they had traveled from the United States to pray for her. Yolanda opened her heart, confessed Christ, received a Bible, and was connected to a local missionary for follow up. She’s alive today! Just on their team, there were two other decisions for Christ, 8 Bibles were passed out and 10 contacts established with missionary teams!