The Texans' Crusade

It was no ordinary group of Americans. There were 238 of them, and since most were from Texas, they had not come to Spain for the sun. Missionaries all, they were Southern Baptist laymen--farmers, mail carriers and bankers. Their task: to help the struggling Spanish Baptists stage an evangelistic crusade. "The Bible was a story of people who walked in faith in a hostile land," declared Dallas Cattleman L.S. Rowland in a stem-winding oration, translated from roughhewn English to smooth Spanish by another missionary. "The truth is that we may move all of Spain!"

From the days of the Council of Trent, Protestantism has been virtually an underground movement in Spain. Baptist missionaries from Sweden and the U.S. began work there in 1870 under a short-lived religious-freedom law, but later on the small churches were often shut down. Only since a new law was passed in 1967 have the 10,000 Baptists and other non-Catholics been able to hold public meetings. But the specially warm welcome the Baptists received was also probably the result of recently strained relations between the government and the Catholic Church, which outdid each other in greeting the visitors. Both the mayor and the acting bishop of Madrid sent emissaries to the Baptists' opening meeting in the Melia Castilla Hotel. In return, the prelate was given a Bible and the mayor a cowboy hat, L.B.J.-style.

Bilingual Buttonholing. The next day the Americans fanned out to assignments in 17 cities. In Alicante, 21 of them were greeted by a band, a crowd of 500 and the local Baptist pastor, a convert from Catholicism, who remembered clearly the bitterness of discrimination against Protestants. Said he: "I have not been so nervous since my wedding day." In every city, the meetings drew hundreds of curious Spaniards. The Americans also tried some door-to-door buttonholing, aided by bilingual dictionaries. In Lerida, the local radio broadcast spot commercials for the crusade 14 times daily, and in Cordova, the Baptists handed out 5,000 tracts in one day.

While they were joined together to convert the non-Baptist Spaniards, the two battalions of missionaries were also learning something about each other. The Spaniards were bewildered at first by the sobbing, arm-flailing exhortations imported from Dixie. For their part, the Texans were embarrassed by the thimble-size glasses of wine passed out during the Spanish Baptists' Holy Supper. Teetotalers, they take grape juice.

On the whole, the crusade proceeded smoothly. Last week, at the end of the eight-day campaign, the Baptists could claim about 300 Spanish souls, including that of Feli Martinez, a nun who immediately applied for her passport to the U.S. Later, she says, she will return to Spain as a Baptist missionary.

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