Urban Idealist

This past week I had a chance to go to Seville, Spain with a CA research team. (It’s funny that in the past two weeks I’ve been to Prague and Spain, before these trips I had only been out of the center of Paris one time over the past 9 months!) When Jen and I interviewed with CA over three years ago, these teams were something that I wanted to be a part of. The main objectives of these teams are to go to a city, meet w/ leaders, do some cultural observation, and determine what possibilities there are for CA to begin a work there. Starting new churches is what I am passionate about and serving on these teams is a cool opportunity to serve. I learned a lot about asking the right questions and seeing things through a strategic lens.

My friend Rogier did a good job blogging about our trip. Christian Associates (CA) primarily starts English-speaking international churches for the emerging culture in cities across Europe. So the two things we were looking for the most were: 1. Is there a large population of people in the city who would fall into the category of ‘emerging generation’? 2. Is there a population of English-speakers in the city?

I’ll share a few glimpses of my trip that will reveal what we found.

Seville has a great football club (soccer team), and they won the UEFA cup the day before I got there. The championship game was held in Scotland and there was a huge group of fans on my plane returning home from going to the match. Most of the fans were about my age…late or early 20’s. So in line I started to talk with one of the guys about the game…well tried, because he didn’t speak English.

When I landed in Seville I wasn’t quite sure where to catch the bus so I asked another young couple from my flight. But they didn’t speak English and just pointed and made gestures…but were helpful. On the bus into the city I had no clue where to get off the bus and asked a few people if they spoke English, but ended up speaking French with a French woman to get an idea where to go from her tourist book.

When the bus ended I just followed a crowd of people. I asked a few more people if they spoke English and finally found somebody who did. They were German.

The rest of my trip was more of the same. Thankfully I remembered some Spanish from when I lived in California. Understanding French was helpful too as they are similar languages…I could pick up on the main ideas of a conversation when I really paid attention. We had a great team of people who could speak Spanish, so they conducted most of our interviews and did the ordering! So, our mission to find English speaking people was hard. There are a few thousand American students and few more thousand European international students who go to Seville to study. We concluded that the only significant population of English speakers are these students.

Our search to find marks of the emerging culture in Seville could not have been more different! There are 60,000 students at the university and the city as a whole feels really young. Everywhere we would go we see young people…at Starbucks, in the cafés, at the shops, at the pubs, at the university…At night the city was alive with people going out and enjoying the nightlife culture. However, the people that we saw were primarily Spanish and Spanish-speaking.

This revealed to us that there is a huge need for a church with the CAI DNA, but we would have to maek a few adjustments on our normal strategy of entering the city. There is a huge population of Spanish young adults, but it seems that not many of them are connected with Jesus despite their highly religious culture.

I had a chance to go to a church that we were told was a ‘post-modern’ church of 200 people. When we got there they were singing praise songs written in mid 80’s and the demographic of the church was much more weighted towards an older age in comparison to who we saw in the city. I know that a CAI type of church that did ministry in Spanish would be effective here.

My hope is that God would raise up leaders who speak Spanish to lead a movement in this really amazing city.

That concluded my post, but there are some other random Seville facts that I wanted to list!
Seville is the hottest city in Europe according to average temperature and record high. They hit 50 degrees Celsius one time in recent history! That’s 122 Fahrenheit…think: air conditioning is a good think.

Seville was first a Moorish (Muslim) city, then an ancient Roman city, then a Catholic Roman city, and now a modern Spanish city…The main cathedral in the city center reflects how each era has just built over the previous…It’s like historic pluralism!

Seville has a really cool downtown with super small streets. It was awesome to watch cars try and navigate them…even on the ‘bit streets’ I had to lean against the wall and suck-in so that I wouldn’t get hit!

Seville is really inexpensive compared to Paris! The same drink at a Starbucks in Seville (there were like 6 of them!) cost at least a euro less than in Paris.

Ok…that’s enough for now!