Boa sorte (Good Luck in Portuguese)

  

Two or three times a week I walk down the Chaussée d’Alsemberg to the swimming baths – mens sana in corpore sano. When I arrived in Brussels in 1984 the road was one small shop after another, where I bought my bread, my wine and my newspaper. A miserably slow tram also chugged up the hill from Brussels South railway station. The tram has gone underground. Most of the old Belgian-run shops too have gone, replaced by a medley of hairdressing salons, second hand clothes shops, bars, night shops and ethnic food stores. Some survive, most don’t.

Over the last year no less than 3 Portuguese-speaking churches, visibly of Pentecostal persuasion, have opened there, within a hundred yards of each other. I don’t know what they see as their mission field – the local Portuguese immigrant community or the wider Belgian one. If the latter, I wish them well. Belgians are known to be just about the hardest people on God’s earth to missionize (one American evangelical mission society calculated it costs over a million dollars to convert one Belgian!).

So, Boa sorte (good luck!)