Portugal from the inside: the church is growing, so what now?

I close this series with the number that most surprises those who look at Portugal from Brazil, because it contradicts the image of a field where nothing happens: according to the Portuguese Evangelical Alliance's reports, average church attendance went from 49 people in 2016 to 73 in 2020, 86 in 2023 and 104 in 2025, and in this latest survey, of 509 pastors from across the country, 88% said their churches are growing. Baptisms per church rose 44% in two years. About 13% of the churches that exist today were founded after 2020. I am grateful to God for every one of these numbers, and I make a point of sharing them with the same transparency with which I share the difficulties.

But whoever reads the reports to the end realises that the growth has a face, and that face is, to a large extent, Brazilian. In 2023, 38.1% of pastors in Portugal were of Brazilian origin, as was the great majority of foreign members; at the end of 2024 there were almost 485,000 Brazilians with legal residence in the country, a third more than the year before. An earlier study by the Alliance itself, from 2020, showed that 40% of churches planted in the previous twenty years were less than 25% Portuguese, and that 70% of those were led by Brazilians. In other words, a good part of the growth is the Brazilian church reorganising itself on Portuguese soil, which is a real blessing, since these are brothers and sisters being cared for, but it is not yet the Portuguese church being born.

I know this reality from the inside, because I am myself a Brazilian pastor in a Portuguese church, and I know how easy it is for an immigrant congregation to become an island, with the accent, the songs and even the schedules of another country, where the Portuguese neighbour comes once and does not return, not because he rejects the gospel, but because he feels that house is not for him. Portugal's missionary challenge in this decade is not only to plant more churches; it is to make the existing ones bridges rather than refuges, and that requires the immigrant who came to work to learn to see the Portuguese person next to him as a field, and not merely as a host.

There is, and this is where gratitude returns, a 2025 figure that filled me with hope: 54% of new converts were born in Portugal, and 48% were Catholics who no longer practised. For the first time in many years, the growth is not only among those who arrive; it is also among those who were always here. God is doing what only He does, and our work, in Cascais and wherever the Lord takes us, is to prepare workers who know how to preach to the Portuguese with clarity and disciple with patience, so that this fruit which is beginning to appear is not lost for lack of someone to tend it.

I end this series as I began it, with a request for prayer and nothing else. Pray that the growth of the churches in Portugal reach the interior, native Portuguese and the younger generation, which are exactly the three places where the numbers show it has not yet arrived. And pray that those who have may give; that the strong churches of the coast, Brazilian or Portuguese, send people where no one wants to go and sustain them for as many years as it takes, because, as I wrote in the first article of this series, in inland Portugal no one plants alone, and it was like that, with strong churches holding the ropes for weaker ones, that the apostle Paul made the work advance. The four numbers of this series, with the charts, the district map and material ready for your church's missions Sunday, are on the "Challenge in Portugal" page.