When she moved to Spain from Mexico, it took Irene Quiñonez eight months to make friends with Alma*. When the Spanish woman was comfortable enough to bring her daughters to a Christmas dinner at one of the Nazarene Churches in Madrid, Spain, Quiñonez rejoiced––finally, a beginning.


Irene Quiñonez spent two years investing
in friendships to earn the right to share
her faith in Spain.

For eight months, she’d been greeting the woman and her daughters in the street, often to no response. Eight months of silence inspired eight months of prayer, and when the chance came to help Alma’s daughters learn English through a summer club, the friendship began. Since then, the two enjoyed sharing coffee and talking together each week.


Project Caleb missionaries taught English to school
children as a way to meet needs in Spain as well as
to build relationships through which they could share
Christ's love. Photo courtesy Maria Rodriguez.

For Quiñonez, a volunteer missionary from Tijuana, Mexico, it was one of several relationships over the past two years that completely redefined her idea of ministry. 

“When I left Mexico I thought that you could just evangelize people with a Bible or a tract in your hand,” said Quiñonez, “but being here in Spain I learned that you need to have a relationship with people… When they start seeing Christ’s love they ask, 'Why are you so different? What’s going on?’ And they start becoming curious and begin to appreciate who you are.”

Even though she spoke the language, Spain was a whole new world for Quiñonez and the other volunteer missionaries who came from South and Central America in 2007. Eight of them, assigned to churches in Spain (Madrid and Barcelona) and Italy (Catania and Florence), comprised the first wave of Project Caleb, a partnership that formed in 2004 to both mobilize missionaries from outside North America and help revive churches in the post-Christian nations of Western Europe.

It was an experiment to see how feasible it was for the Mexico and Central America (MAC) and South America (SAM) regions to send missionaries, something they’d never done before. “The idea was to encourage and motivate young missionaries from Latin America to go and serve through a Nazarene system rather than joining the scores of para-church mission agencies in Latin America,” said Eurasia Regional Director Gustavo Crocker, who began the dream with the late Bruno Radi.

Caleb hopefuls went through extensive training on their home regions for a year before coming to Eurasia. In the end, eight were chosen: Jorge David del Ángel (Mexico), Irene Quiñonez Soto (México), María Eugenia Rodríguez (Mexico), Vanessa Cruz Blandino (Nicaragua), Jean Carlo (Brazil), Jessica Torres (Argentina) and Pablo and Viviana Tello (Argentina).



Latin American volunteer missionaries from Mexico, Nicaragua and Argentina spent two years of
ministry in Spain while others from Brazil and Argentina served in Italy.

Teams arrived in August 2007, and spent one week training with Kyle and Jayme Himmelwright, missionaries to Portugal, before being traveling to the churches that would host them for two years as they worked to establish cell groups and plant new churches alongside current ones.

The Madrid teams worked steadily to develop Christian Family Centers (CFCs) throughout the city, managing houses where people could join Bible studies, discipleship lessons or tutoring sessions for schoolchildren. They visited nursing homes, schools and friends of friends, and helped with district events like summer camps, children’s activities and screenings of the JESUS film.


Through Christmas dramas, Project Caleb volunteers reached out to neighborhood
families and involved new believers in Nazarene churches in Spain and Italy. Photo
courtesy Maria Rodriguez.

“The district changed because the Caleb teams worked full-time, door-to-door, making contacts, working with children, pouring themselves out,” said Noemi Fernandez, who helped host the teams in Spain. “People living in the country must work to survive and do not have much time to evangelize as the team did.”

The Alcalá de Henares church has re-opened, growing from eight to 25 members. Sixteen CFCs now exist in Spain, three new mission points have been established and seven churches have been trained and equipped for children’s camps. The teams built relationships with hundreds of people through English classes and academic tutoring, and the district received more new members this past year than they had ever received in the history of the Church of the Nazarene in Spain. 

“Spain is one of the least evangelical countries in the world with .4% evangelical Christians,” said Mark Ryan, missionary to Spain. “The Caleb missionaries confronted a culture and society drastically different from their home countries. Through prayer, creativity, determination and personal relationships they not only were able to bring new believers to Christ, but equip the churches of Spain to harvest the thousands of seeds planted throughout Madrid, Seville, Barcelona and Zaragoza.”

In Catania, Italy, the team began a community center, offering everything from classes in English, sewing, painting, Bible exploration and computer to a soccer club. In Florence, Pablo and Viviana Tello worked with six small groups to encourage growth and discipleship, and assisted with Sunday school, youth ministry, missions, worship, preaching, visiting, evangelism and leadership, as well as exploring choreography, drama and concerts as new ways to share the gospel.

“Project Caleb simultaneously showed the type of commitment necessary to develop significant and genuine relationships with Europeans and the type of fruit that can come when our leaders’ time is freed up from the restraints of bi-vocationalism,” said Kyle Himmelwright, missionary to Portugal. “These teams were able to pour themselves into developing authentic relationships with people and many of them were able to break down some of the stereotypes that Europeans have about the immigrant population and vice versa.”

Simultaneously, D. C. Martínez (El Salvador), E. R. Raymundo (Mexico) and J. B. Cruz (Guatemala) were deployed to the Middle East as the first Isaiah Project team, where they worked to build relationships and serve their neighbors.

“We may not see a huge transformation right now, but we’re sure God used us to plant seeds over there,” said Cruz. “I just know they were sensitive to whatever we were saying. I know God touched them, but we were just instruments, just tools moving from one place to another.”

On 31 July, the teams returned to enthusiastic churches who supported them from afar through giving and prayer. They will continue serving in various ministries throughout SAM and MAC.

“When I was a teenager I wanted to work in something like this, but the Church of the Nazarene didn’t have anything for [people in my region],” said Rodríguez. “I feel that I’m a new person, that I’m different; my mind is open, my world is bigger now. I have come back to Mexico to share what I did in Spain, but also to prepare more teenagers who feel like I used to.”

*Name changed to protect privacy.

-- This story was originally printed in Where Worlds Meet, the newsletter of the Eurasia Region. To subscribe to Where Worlds Meet, visit www.eurasianazarene.org.