Car crisis Sunday and a church discovery

Uh-oh! The car didn't start. As I thought, the battery is beyond rescue, its ability to retain charge is  terminally reduced. Whether this is a matter of age, or a deficiency in alternator charging, needs to be determined. In case, this happened I'd arranged to call Ged at nine to confirm I was on my way, or call for help. The most effective solution was to take a taxi to their place, and collect a spare car of theirs to drive to Velez Malaga. I walked back to Calle Maestraza, by the bullring, where there's taxi rank, and took a ride to their place, in the hills nearby above the autovia.

It's the first time I'd driven a Honda Accord, and would be happy to do so again, as it didn't give me a second's anxiety. I just fitted into it and didn't didn't need to worry its controls. In the event I got to the church in Velez Malaga at the time I would have wanted to be there, half an hour beforehand. It was something of the surprise to those who'd been warned that there was a risk of my being last due to the latest car crisis.

By the time I returned to St George's, Doreen and Gilly had met with Confirmation candidates and briefed them about the Ascension Day service. Then they briefed me about the service, in which I have little to do, for a change. That's a lovely situation to find myself in, at the end of an unusual morning, to say the least.

Just as I was finishing lunch, Doreen called to say that her car had broken down on the autovia on her way home. She was waiting for the grua to turn up at the time. What an odd turn of affairs that both clergy cars on which normal services rely should break down on the same day.

Late in the afternoon, I took my Sony HX300 camera with me on my paseo and re-traced the route to the barrio El Molinillo and St Philip Neri Parish Church, hoping to get the photo I wanted of the west facade with a slightly wider angle lens. Even so, I couldn't capture the complete facade, just a bit more of it. Ah well, never mind. The Museo George Rando wasn't open, so I wasn't able to make another visit, so I turned back on Calle Ollerias, to make my way back to the port, to check out the cruise ship arrivals of the  day. Here I made quite an unexpected discovery.

There was a notice board beside an open archway on the street, announcing the 'Iglesia Evangélica Española del Redentor'. There was a simple courtyard at the heart of a three storey building at the end of the short passage from the street. Attached to this, a largish salon, presumably a chapel, which was closed, then corridor leading out into another brightly decorated courtyard flanked on two sides by small apartments. After a few minutes of pondering, the custos, a tall burly man, came to check me out, and we conversed for a while in Spanish. 

I learned that the church houses 70 odd refugees and asylum seekers, mainly from Central America and Africa. It's impressive for a minority church, founded in 1869. The 'Iglesia Evangélica Española' (IEE) denomination of which it's part, belongs to the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the World Council of Churches, and comes out of part of Calvinist, rather than Lutheran reformation history. 

Spain didn't experience the upheavals of the sixteenth century reformation which produced a huge culture shift and political divisions in northern Europe, but protestant missionaries came to Spain in the late 18th, early 19th century. Lutheran and Reformed and other evangelical churches developed as a result. Later on the scene, when the Irish CofE was disestablished in 1880, it started missionary work in the the Iberian Peninsula, and established indigenous branches of the Communion in both Spain (IERE) and Portugal. These initiatives were never without their problems and persecutions for the established church, but thankfully today peace, harmony and partnership in witness prevails.

Heavens above, I just realised that this is the two thousandth blog post I've made in the eight years I have been writing 'Edge of the Centre'. Well more actually, come to think of it, I forked the blog under the title 'Spanish Sojourn' (88 posts) for my first Costa Azahar locum in 2012, then again under the title 'Sicilian December' (46) in 2013. Both were special first time experiences, but now, I rather wish I'd kept them all under one blog title