Welcome to Extremadura Express! This information sheet brings to you the work of OM in the Spanish region of Extremadura and western Spain in general. We hope you will find it interesting and helpful.

And welcome to the OM Western Region team! In the photo above are some of us at the team retreat in June, meeting in the beautiful district of La Vera. Despite being mainly composed of long-termers, the team is in constant flux. During this year we have included people from five European and seven American countries. This colourful cultural mix is a joy but requires constant communication and interpretation thereof to ensure that we are all able to understand and support one another. This is particularly true due to the distances involved and forms of activity which must be among the most varied imaginable. More in this and future issues!

A bit of history

In the late 1980s OM was invited by the evangelical (Protestant) churches of Extremadura to help them in reaching Spain’s most undeveloped region. As Spain came into the European Community, this was by far the most economically backward region, but in addition to this the presence of the evangelical churches was equally scant. Among the one million inhabitants there were less than 700 church members in 1988. Through summer campaigns most years from 1989 and church-planting projects from 1993, OM has contributed its drop in the ocean to help church membership more than double and the number of churches in Extremadura triple in a decade. Our efforts have been worthy, but not all as successful in visible terms as we would have liked. This year, while we successfully passed one church into local hands, another point which would thereby have become very distant from the remainder of our team, had to be closed down.

Currently OM western region, which has outgrown Extremadura itself, aims to continue supporting the local churches through direct involvement with them and principally through the church-planting programme. The programmes are:

• Church-Plants in: Trujillo, Coria, La Vera and Talavera.
• The regional co-ordinating office in Plasencia,
• The social support office has just moved from Plasencia to Talavera.
• An all-year “Camp” aims to provide many support activities.

For more information about OM in general please go to: www.om.org