70 groups and congregations meeting in the country. Yet only 20 have permanent places of worship. The rest—all 50—are meeting in borrowed spaces. “The church members are missionaries and active. Because of that, the church has grown in number of members, but the facilities have not grown proportionally. It is one of the challenges faced by the Adventist Church,” says Fernando Melo, president of the Adventist Church in São Tomé and Príncipe. The lack of infrastructure is a looming threat to the progress the church has made in the past few decades. “No more members can join these groups,” says Melo. “We need to expand the congregations, which have already been established. Congregations don’t have a chance to grow because of their poor physical space and because they don’t look like a real church.” HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Melo’s assessment is correct in that few of the worship spaces that Maranatha visited look like an actual
church. One group rents a former disco club, where the remains of an old bar still stand. A congregation meets in a scrap metal box on the side of the road. Yet another group meets under a tarp in the front patio of a woman’s home. The Agua Marçal church, located in the city of São Tomé, is one of the more unusual structures. It is a two-story building with basic framing and a roof. There are no walls and no floor. Eleven years ago, this skeleton was the beginning of a family home for Manuel Frota. He had been living in his mother’s home and planned to build a house next door. But not long after he started the project, the construction materials were stolen, and Frota’s meager wages as a shoe cobbler could not afford him more wood. He gave up on the project. A couple years later, Frota’s church, Boa Morte Adventist Church, asked him to host Bible studies on his property. “It started as a small group. We invited people to study. And then we had a service and prayed. Others showed up.
Neighbors came, and the group grew,” says Frota. He invited his small group to join Boa Morte. But with all the outreach, the congregation grew so large that they could no longer fit into the church. As a solution, church leaders asked Frota to start a separate group at his property. Now, there are 70 baptized members and many visitors worshipping at Frota’s church, which was named Agua Marçal. On average 140 people gather at this unfinished structure every Sabbath; half of them have to sit outside. “We have some issues because the space is small. We need to expand the place,” says Frota. Space isn’t the only issue. “When the dry season comes, the place gets full of dust. The movement of a large number of people raises the dust, causing serious health conditions,” says Francisco Bonfim, pastor of the Agua Marçal church. “When the rainy season comes, we have difficulties, too.” Despite the challenges, Bonfim is grateful to Frota for his hospitality. But
STRANGE TEMPLE: Members spill out from the skeletal structure that is the Agua Marçal church. On some Sabbaths, the 70-member congregation will double in size because of visitors and children.
MISSIONARY: Pastor Fernando Melo, president of the Adventist Church in São Tomé & Principé, says 50 out of the 70 congregations in the country have no church of their own.
Photo by Leonel Macias
w w w.maranatha.org
Photo by Julie Z. Lee
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