The Basque Country did not become the most secularized region in Spain through indifference. The secularization is the result of a verdict — a morally serious judgment about an institution that used Christ’s name to prosecute Basque sacred imagination at the Inquisition trials of Zugarramurdi in 1609, and that blessed Franco’s suppression of Basque language and culture in the twentieth century. The Christ the Basques rejected deserved rejection. What they have never fully encountered is the Jesus of the Gospels — the Galilean peasant from occupied territory who stood with the condemned and was executed by the collaboration of institutional religion and imperial power. That Jesus is not the one their history handed them.
Our Journey exists because introducing that Jesus to Basque young people is not a quick transaction. It is patient, decades-long, incarnational work. And it is work that the Church in the English-speaking world largely does not know needs doing.
This publication is for the church leaders, pastors, mission practitioners, and theological thinkers who want to understand what faithful Gospel witness looks like in one of the most challenging and most spiritually significant mission contexts in contemporary Europe. We will publish theology, missiology, field notes from the actual work in the Basque Country, and introductions to the cultural and intellectual tradition that any serious missionary engagement must reckon with.
The Community We Are Building Here
We are not building a newsletter. We are building a theological imagination.
What that means, practically, is this: we want the people who read this publication to come away not just with information about the Basque Country, but with a genuinely transformed way of thinking about mission in post-Christian contexts — the kind of thinking that recognizes the Spirit of God at work in a culture before any missionary arrives, that takes the history of wounds seriously rather than skipping to the invitation, that understands incarnational presence as a decades-long commitment rather than a program cycle.
We want this to be a community of readers who are thinking hard about the questions that the Basque context forces into the open: What does it mean to introduce Jesus to people who have good reasons to distrust the institution that bears his name? How does the missionary honor a culture’s own deep spiritual instincts rather than replacing them? What is the role of language — of the tongue that was criminalized, of Euskara — in a theology of Gospel presence? How long does faithful mission actually take?
We published a complete nine-part theological series called — Zurekin Egon Da Beti: Introducing the Jesus of the Gospels to Basque Young People — that lays out the full missiological framework. Alongside it, we will publish field notes from the actual work: stories from the mountains, the txokos, the cuadrillas, the long dinners where the Gospel has room to breathe. And monthly, we will introduce the primary sources — the literature, the sculpture, the ethnography, the history — that give this context its depth.
This publication is free. It will always be free. Because the argument should be as widely read as possible.
Zurekin egon da beti. He has been on their side all along.
This Journey became the seed to forming JOY Ministries. That phrase is the animating conviction of everything JOY Ministries does. The Spirit of God was present in the Basque mountains long before we arrived. Long before any missionary arrived. Long before our Basque son watched an American basketball team play in the Basque Country and his uncle made a phone call and a coach made another phone call and we said yes without knowing what we were saying yes to — and long before all of that, in a kitchen in the Basque Country, in a grandmother’s patient listening, in a dream about a house at the end of a driveway he would not see for months.