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Where Is the Church in Europe Going?

By Gordon Showell-Rogers

Where is the Church in Europe going?

In one sense, this is an impossible question to answer. In the financial markets people make hundreds of millions of Euros by predicting the rise or fall of currencies—others lose hundreds of millions of Euros.

Fortunately, we know that all is not lost in the Church. In fact, the opposite is true.¹ So the question is not “Will the Church in Europe one day arrive?” but “In what condition will the Church in Europe arrive?” or “How will the Church in Europe arrive?” To find a possible answer, we need to think about both where we have come from and where we are.

For the sake of time and space, this article looks only at evangelicalism, instead of the wider question of all those who profess Christianity. In the English-speaking world there are several definitions of evangelicalism. Church historian Dr. David Bebbington refers to four “main characteristics of evangelicalism,” namely, conversions, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism. Dr. John Stott also includes: the Bible and the cross and evangelism and conversion. Stott himself talks in terms of three evangelical “priorities”:

• The revealing initiative of God the Father
  
  
• The redeeming work of God the Son
  
  
• The transforming ministry of God the Holy Spirit

Evangelicals are Trinitarian Christians who are convinced that Jesus is the only Saviour and that the Bible is the ultimate authority. An experience of Christ associated with these convictions is the experience of evangelicalism.

Evangelicalism is often either misunderstood or misrepresented, and sometimes evangelicals’ own actions misrepresent the Christ we serve and the scriptures we seek to understand and follow. But this is evangelicalism at its core.

There are three possible futures for evangelicalism in Europe.

1. It goes under. Matthew 16:18 confirms this will not happen globally. Indeed, the signs of hope for the Church in Europe include the growing presence of many Christians from the Majority World (many of whom understand the missionary importance of their presence in Europe).

2. It withdraws from society and lives in an increasingly irrelevant corner. It has occasional excursions into the world to persuade a few others to come to the holy corner as well. If it does that, and uses a special language that is completely incomprehensible to most people, some will join it in the corner simply because a monastic existence has some attraction. In the meantime, society will slip away to hell.

3. It withstands various social pressures, enjoys increased influence in society, and sees many people finding Christ and growing in him. So what are some of those social pressures? Having talked in an earlier article about trends in society, we now return to two trends that have a direct impact on the Church.

• Secularism. Europe’s evangelicals gratefully acknowledge that secularism has brought some big benefits to evangelicals in countries like Spain, France, and Turkey.
  
  
• Fundamentalist Secularism. Today, however, there is a radical form of secularism on the march in Europe, which is fundamentalistic. It is aggressive and seeks to exclude all people of faith from public life. This is, of course, hopelessly inconsistent because it is itself a faith (in no god), so it really should exclude its own people from public life as well.