Nancy Obregón arrived alone in Ecuador 12 years ago and since then has cared for the elderly in the Madrid district of Usera. When she felt the saddest she went to the temple next to her house and there she found other emigrants like her, who also cared for the elderly, who had also left children in Quito and among whom she found a new family. Jorge and Selvia, Colombians from Chocó, arrived in Spain together and together they continue to attend a church in Carabanchel every Thursday and Sunday. When they arrived, “he drank a lot and had a hard time keeping his job,” he says, pointing to his partner, dressed in an elegant black jacket with two fingers left on the sleeve. “But in the temple we have formed a community and everything has calmed down,” says Selvia. Behind them is Jordán Morales, a 28-year-old Salvadoran who arrived in Spain as a teenager. He was “averse to drugs and alcohol” and flirted with Latin bands, but “I learned the way of the Lord” and even the rain he sends us today “is a test that strengthens us,” he says enthusiastically.
All of them were this Friday at 2:00 p.m. in line to access the Plaza de Vistalegre during the Good Friday event that brought, for the second time in Spain, the Brazilian preacher Edir Macedo, founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.
Macedo is the Mbappé of preachers. The Globetrotters of oratory. And it's not a gratuitous comparison; neither in income nor in convening power. The event brought together almost 10,000 people, more than all the musicals represented in Madrid combined this weekend and three times more than what he himself called a year ago. In income, the figures are even more spectacular. Businessman, banker, owner of a media network that competes with Globo, Edir Macedo has been part of the list of Forbes as one of the richest men in Brazil, thanks to a fortune of more than 2 billion dollars that includes properties all over the world. Her influence is such that Dilma Rousseff could not avoid campaigning through her Church, although she later openly supported Bolsonaro.
After 4:00 p.m. the main course of an almost two-hour show arrived for which you only have to pay “the will” although a hundred volunteers walk among the faithful with the dataphone in their hands. Everything was prepared to receive Macedo on stage when the opening act of the Show, a burly man with a Brazilian accent, asked all the invalids and sick people to come to the stage. Then, one by one, dozens of them gathered in front of the stage. Some limping, others with a cane, others with bald children by the hand… And he asked all of them to “invoke God very loudly.” “Do you believe in the word of God? Do you believe in the word of God?” he shouted as he turned up the volume of the music. “So from now on he is healed and is free of that cancer, that tumor, that spinal problem or that disease that the doctors said he did not have.” more solution…”, he continued screaming as he went from side to side of the stage.
When there were more people in front of the stage, he pointed to a woman.
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-What is your name?
-Mari, he said with a Venezuelan accent.
-Why do you carry that crutch?
-I got vaccinated two years ago and since then I have developed an autoimmune disease that prevents me from walking
-”You are cured, come up I shouted here,” he told her, mixing Spanish and Portuguese.
As Mari went on stage, the pastor in a suit and tie pointed out another woman who had a problem with her neck and was preventing her from becoming erect, but “I'm cured now,” he said, moving his head from side to side. And you? She pointed out again. “I had a problem with my spine and I couldn't walk,” another woman responded, jumping up and down to demonstrate the miracle. She told those who had cancer “to go back to the doctor to confirm that they were cured,” she said like someone leaving the workshop on the way to the ITV.
When he finished 'healing' cancers and joints, Mari entered the stage. An assistant to the preacher said that Mari was homeless and that until now she suffered from an illness that prevented her from walking without crutches. However, thanks to the hands placed on her head, where five minutes ago there was a woman who suffered from “an autoimmune disease that affected her hip” there was now a woman who walked normally on stage. In a show off, she even walked with the crutch on her shoulder as if she were a soldier on parade. Vistalegre burst into applause and tears
After accomplishing the first miracle, the pastor ended the first session and the lame, blind, one-eyed, cancer patients and children with leukemia returned disappointed down the central aisle to their seats.
It is estimated that in Spain there are about 1.5 million evangelicals who have grown exponentially in recent years. In 1998 only 0.2% of the population considered themselves evangelical and in 2018 it is 2%. With almost 1,500 worship centers, Madrid and Barcelona are the places with the most faithful, followed by Andalusia and Valencia with about 500 temples, according to the Observatory of Religious Pluralism. In the case of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God of Edir Macedo, the sect specialist, Luis Santamaría del Río, denies that it is an evangelical church and describes it as a sect. “Anyone who attends one of their weekly services will realize that it is actually a money-making machine with an evangelical religious facade, but deep down it is not an evangelical confession,” he explains. The Federation of Evangelical Religious Entities of Spain (Ferede), the body that brings together the Spanish Protestant churches, has rejected its inclusion on several occasions.
During the almost two hours that Edir Macedo spoke non-stop on stage, his speech was again and again about one idea: “Even if you are a despicable person, you are welcomed here,” he repeated, walking from side to side. “Maybe you came into the world because of a mother's chance and you don't even know your parents, but from now on God is your family,” he repeated to the faithful, many of them arriving from Valencia or Seville, who politely vacated the premises without leave a paper on the floor.
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