Portugal from the inside: doubled in ten years

The second number in this series comes from the 2021 Census, the most recent Portugal has carried out, and it is among those that most made me think about the way we preach: in ten years, the number of Portuguese who declare no religion rose from about 615,000 to more than 1.2 million, from 6.8% to 14.1% of the population aged fifteen and over. No other group grew as much. Evangelicals grew too, it is true, from 0.8% to 2.1%, but from almost nothing, while the non-religious started from an already large group and simply doubled. If the trend continues, and everything suggests it will, the next Portuguese generation will have more people with no religion at all than people in every evangelical church combined, several times over.

What this number does not show, and what one only learns by living here, is that this departure from religion is not done in anger. In more than twenty-five years of missionary work I have passed through places where the Christian faith was openly opposed, and Portugal is not one of them. The Portuguese who leave religion do not slam the door; they simply stop coming in. They do not argue with the gospel; they just see no reason to think about it. The Evangelical Alliance, in a 2019 survey of five hundred non-evangelicals, found 62% with a positive opinion of Jesus Christ and 78% who felt people were more open to talking about spirituality than before, and at the same time only 24% who would accept an informal conversation about the Bible. That is the portrait: sympathy without interest, openness without seeking.

For someone coming from Brazil, where open-air preaching still draws a crowd and where the word "church" still means something to almost everyone, this demands a change of method and, above all, of patience. Evangelism here is slow and drawn out, made of relationships, of invitations repeated over months, of neighbours who first trust the person and only then listen to the message. That is why I insist so much on simple, clear and objective Bible teaching, because when someone finally is willing to listen, they need to hear the whole gospel and not a fragment, since there will rarely be a second chance in the form we are used to.

I admit there are days when this number weighs on me, because it is easy to look at 1.2 million and feel small. But the same Census that records the indifference also records that the gospel keeps reaching people no one expected, and the Alliance's 2025 report shows that almost half of new converts were Catholics who no longer practised, that is, people who were exactly on that road out of religion and who, instead of leaving for nothing, found Christ. God is sovereign over secularisation too, and He has no plan B.

If you pray for Portugal, I ask you to pray for two things at once. Pray, yes, for revival, for I believe in it and I know that when God moves, what a whole lifetime of effort cannot achieve is done in a few months; church history is full of such seasons, and I see no reason to think Portugal is excluded from them. But pray also for what we do while revival has not yet come, because it arrives in God's time and not ours: for churches with the patience to sow for years in ground that seems not to respond, and for Portuguese who, in the midst of indifference, are awakened to the question they stopped asking. Whoever waits for revival with folded arms wastes the time of sowing, and whoever sows without hoping for it forgets whose the harvest is (Ps 126.5-6). The next article in this series will be about the other side of this coin, the 80% who still call themselves Catholic, and about what it means to preach to those who think they already know the gospel.