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Thanks to Ernest Hemingway, bullfighting is big business in Pamplona. Every year up to a million people flock to this northern Spanish city for the nine-day Running of the Bulls Festival celebrated by the writer.

Bulls aren’t the main attraction for Hal and Jane Ward, although they do believe in “taking the bull by the horns” to share the gospel. Hal was a high school teacher in Alabama, Jane a Canadian graduate of Christ for the Nations (CFN) School of Missions when they heard God’s call to the Basque country. They had met in Spain five years before when Jane was on an outreach for CFN and Hal was taking courses.

The Wards learned then that the Basques were a unique people group living in the foothills of the Pyrenees, between southern France and northern Spain, with a language and culture all their own. Basque separatists have often captured headlines in their long struggle for an independent homeland. Bombings by the terrorist ETA wing have claimed over a thousand lives.

Even in a country where evangelicals number less than one percent of the population, Spain’s 3,000,000 Basques are one of the least evangelized minorities. This fact was enough to uproot the Wards from their comfortable lifestyle in 1996 when they joined Operation Mobilization and moved to Pamplona, in the heart of the Basque region. As the town’s only foreign workers it was soon evident that acceptance into this bilingual culture would take time and tact.

The Language Ticket
The Euskara tongue spoken by the Basques is probably the oldest surviving language of Europe. During the decades of Franco’s rule (1939-1975) its use was forbidden, which means that today it is only spoken by the young and very old. Spanish is widely accepted, but many Basques still claim Euskara as their heart language.

Although Hal estimates 30 evangelical churches exist in Basque country, not a single Protestant church holds services or Bible studies in Euskara, although some Catholic churches conduct mass in it. When Hal witnessed in the street to a group of teenagers he realized the language’s significance. One teen retorted that if he couldn’t tell him about Jesus in the Basque language, it wasn’t worth listening to. So the Wards set about learning Euskara.

“To the Basques, being Basque and speaking it is the same thing,” Hal says, “which is a huge open door to ministering to their culture for anyone who will take the time to learn it.”

The couple’s eight-year-old son Isaac started attending a Basque-speaking school when he was only three; their daughter Chloe, however, went to a Spanish school. “No one here does that, but it is our way of saying we love both groups. The two schools are often at odds with each other. Because we think positively about both groups, we are challenging peoples’ prejudices and breaking down dividing walls.”

Crossing the Catholic-Protestant Chasm
The two children sometimes feel the pressure of being Protestants in a Catholic community, however. Seven-year-old Chloe was on a field trip with her public school, touring an old monastery, when a teacher led them in a song and prayer to a statue of the Virgin Mary. Instructed to kneel, Chloe refused. The school has now eliminated many such activities, and worship is on a volunteer basis.

Hal and Jane introduced open-air evangelism, and soon began to design and produce their own literature for distribution. In 1999 they opened an evangelical fellowship in an area of Pamplona that had none. Besides regular services, Biltokia Cristiana (Basque for “Christian meeting place”) offers children’s clubs and conferences on topics of interest to nonbelievers, such as “Where is God When Bad Things Happen?” “Balancing Professional / Family Life,” “The Five Languages of Love,” “Improving Communication in Your Marriage” and “The Search for Security in a Changing World.”

Pamplona’s populace includes 30,000 students who attend either the Catholic University of Navarra or the Public University of Navarra. No evangelistic outreach existed on either campus. Two students, business major Alex and Janaay, a Mexican lawyer who is completing her doctorate, have been working with the Wards to reach the campuses.

The student outreach has proven extremely difficult. Alex has officially registered a group on the public campus, BiCU or Biltokia Cristiana Universitaria, though there have been no converts and little interest so far. Janaay has made few inroads to the private campus as it is dominated by Opus Dei, a radical Catholic lay order. Once she was stopped from hanging posters for a meeting and told that the people behind BiCU were enemies. The Wards are praying about a New Testament and literature distribution on campus next fall, in cooperation with the Gideons and the Bible Society.

New Wine: Music and Drama
Music and drama, an integral part of any European culture, have also been incorporated into the Ward’s Vino Nuevo (new wine) ministry. Jane aptly uses her wide experience in teaching and creating mimes. This year they expect the completion of the first professionally produced praise and worship CD in the Basque language, focusing on songs by and for children.

Since Basques have been fighting a lengthy uphill battle to regain cultural ground against Spanish and French, music in Basque is especially meaningful. The music for the recording is original, much of it Scripture set to music. “We didn’t want to just use translations of choruses already sung in Spanish or English,” Hal says. “We are using Basque instruments (a txalaparta—rhythm instrument—and trikitixa, a type of accordion) for one song.”

The Wards invested a lot of time listening to Basque contemporary musicians and watching children’s and young people’s programming on TV, and collaborated with numerous Basque Christians. “We have about 25 participants from seven churches of different denominations and cities all over the Basque provinces.”

Both Hal and Jane are praying that this new evangelistic tool will build bridges of understanding between lost people and the gospel. They believe that exposing young Basques to the word of God in song can have a ripple effect upon the whole population.

“Our province, Navarra, was once the birthplace of missionaries, including Francisco de Javier, first missionary to India and Japan. Our desire is to see God move again amongst the Basques, and send them out to bless the nations.”

Debbie Meroff is a photojournalist based in London, who writes for Operation Mobilization and other Christian periodicals.