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On the surface, the Betel Church, one of the two largest evangelical churches in Madrid, Spain, seems like countless other young Protestant faith communities recently planted around the globe.

Most Protestant groups in this predominantly Roman Catholic city worship in crowded office space or in church members' homes rather than in gilded church halls or historic cathedrals. Likewise, Betel's congregation sits on metal folding chairs in a former book factory on the dusty outskirts of Madrid.

During worship one recent Sunday morning, Betel's 500 members, belting out praises to God, look healthy enough. There are only a few signs that this is a community that lives and dies together.

There is, for example, the persistent cough of pastor Raul Casto, wearing a warm jacket and sitting in the front row. Occasionally, he gathers his strength to join his wife and two daughters in giving thanks to God in spite of the AIDS epidemic that has visited his own household. Down the row, where another family worships, the frail body of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl gives silent testimony to the HIV that both she and her parents carry. Overall, there is a spirit of unity among a people who together in Christ have beaten the long odds against overcoming addictions to heroin and other illicit drugs.

FIFTY PERCENT WITH HIV

Betel formed as an outgrowth of a gospel-based drug rehabilitation program, which began ten years ago without psychiatrists, doctors, or methadone. The rehab program was part of the ministry of missionaries with Worldwide Evangelization for Christ International (WEC).

The missionaries who came to Spain were church-planters, not rehabilitation experts. The fruit of their labor is the transformed lives of those who formed Betel Church—though heroin has left about 50 percent of the church with HIV, the virus that causes aids.

"AIDS has made a family of this church," says Casto, 37, who was rescued from heroin only to find, four months after marrying a WEC missionary from New Zealand, that he was HIV positive.

Of the 12 pastoral leaders (six couples) at Betel, five have tested HIV positive, including Casto's wife, Jenny, though only Casto is suffering from AIDS. He was the first convert in the nascent drug-rehabilitation outreach.

In the beginnings of the Betel residential treatment program, WEC missionary Lindsay McKenzie of Australia invited the destitute Casto into his apartment. Casto, who had trafficked in drugs and was supporting his heroin habit by burglary and robbing at knife-point, was awaiting a court hearing.

Since that cold January night in 1986, some 15,000 people have passed through Betel residential programs in 60 locations throughout Spain, Spanish-speaking North Africa, and centers that have sprung up in missionary thrusts to Italy, Germany, Mexico, and New York City. The centers are largely self-supporting from sales of second-hand goods and the services provided by recovering addicts. Betel Center claims a 15 percent cure rate, double that of other rehab centers. Although there are countries with a more serious HIV problem than Spain, there have been 16,500 AIDS deaths here since 1981.

Betel Church represents both the hope and the oncoming darkness of incarnational ministry. "People here carry the sentence of death within them, so for them, Christianity is very real," says Betel leader Elliott Tepper, a married father of three. "You have to live for eternity-there's no sense in planning a long career or accumulating wealth."

Evangelical Christians make up a motivated minority of about 80,000 people in a country of 39 million. Betel members compete for places on the evangelism team, a drama troupe that has drawn up to a thousand people at Madrid's Plaza Mayor. Kent Martin, a 36-year-old WEC missionary from Pennsylvania, along with his wife, Mary Alice, says, "These are the most dedicated Christians we have ever met."

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July 17 1995, Vol. 39, No. 8