When Kent Albright, a Baptist pastor from the United States, arrived as a missionary to Spain in 1996, he was unprepared for the insults and threats, or the fines from the police for handing out Protestant leaflets on the streets of Salamanca.
He said: ‘Social animosity was big,’ and recalled one woman who whispered: ‘Be thankful we don’t throw stones at you.’
He couldn’t have imagined that, 25 years later, he would be pastoring an evangelical congregation of 120 and count about two dozen other thriving Protestant churches in the city. And there’s a distinctive feature to the worshippers: most of them are not Spanish-born, they’re immigrants from Latin America – in Albright’s congregation they number about 80%.
These figures reflect huge surges in Spain’s migrant, and evangelical, population in recent decades. In 2000, there were under 500,000 legally registered migrants in Spain; now there are about 7.2 million. And Albright believes about 20% are evangelicals.
One of the newest members of his congregation is Luis Perozo, a former police officer and asylum seeker from Venezuela who arrived in 2020 with his wife, Narbic Escalante.
‘I was a lifelong Catholic,’ Escalante said. ‘When I arrived in Salamanca, I entered the [Catholic] church, looked everywhere, said hello – and they ignored me.’
Perozo and Escalante soon visited Albright’s church; one of Perozo´s uncles had emigrated earlier and was already a member. ‘The next day, Pastor Albright was helping us find a house, appliances and kitchenware. He moved us with his van,’ Escalante said.
The last official census conducted by the Justice Ministry’s Observatory of Religious Pluralism found 1.96% of Spain’s population was Protestant in 2018. That is a total of over 900,000 people, almost ten times the figure in 1998.
