Home

Greater Europe Mission

Why Czech Republic, Hundley

Why Europe, Yancey

Why Europe, O'Sullivan

It was during World War II that Bob Evans noticed the spiritual needs in Europe. In 1949, he returned to France to start the European Bible Institute. Since then much as changed in Europe but the original vision has not. 

Greater Europe Mission exists to assist the peoples of Europe in the building up of the body of Christ so that every person in Europe is within reach of a witnessing fellowship.

My wife and I have been with the mission since 1990. We are convinced that the only way to reach Europe for Christ is by cooperating with the national efforts. We have been pleased to focus our energies into Eastern Europe. We were the first couple that Greater Europe Mission placed into the former Soviet Union and the third missionary couple to move into Odessa, Ukraine. Through our partnership with the Russian-speaking Baptist Unions, we have assisted them in developing several schools and planting several new churches.

On holy ground, a hollow sound
Czechs' shunning of religion in part blamed on Soviets

By Tom Hundley
Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent
Published April 30, 2006

PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- The Czech capital is cluttered with churches. From humble parish chapels to the Gothic grandeur of St. Vitus Cathedral, the wonderment of Christian faith seems to ooze out of the city's every pore. But the churches are mostly empty, and the only wonder to most Czechs is why anyone at all bothers to go. Czechs are among Europe's most fervently secular people. According to a European Union survey published last year, only 19 percent of Czechs said they believed in God; most of the rest proclaim themselves atheists. Only the former Soviet republic of Estonia had a lower percentage of believers.

Jan Kittrich, a 30-year-old Prague lawyer, is typical. He described himself as an atheist but quickly added that he had nothing against churches. "I love to visit them," he said. "But I see them as historical objects, not as religious places."

The Czechs are not alone. From Ireland to Italy, church attendance across Europe is down drastically, and apart from Western Europe's rapidly growing Muslim communities and the staunch piety of Poles in the east, religion as a moral force in public life continues to wane. By all accounts, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is a devout Christian. But when Blair recently told a television interviewer that his religious faith informed his worldview, he was lambasted from the left and right. The message for British politicians was clear: If you happen to have a religious urge, keep it in the closet.

Mark Lilla, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, has described present-day Europe as "the closest thing to a godless civilization the world has ever known."

Europeans and Americans share a common civilization and many common values. But in matters of faith and religion, Europe and the U.S. appear to be headed in opposite directions. Especially since the 2004 U.S. elections, Europeans have expressed surprise and alarm at the increasing intensity of American religiosity. Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission, has spoken of a widening "values gap" between Europe and the U.S. But religion has long played an important role in U.S. civic life. God's name is invoked in the Declaration of Independence and on currency. More recently, "God Bless America" has become the sign-off of politicians across the spectrum.

President Bush is hardly the first president to proclaim America to be God's instrument on Earth. John Kennedy, in his 1961 inaugural address, declared with certainty that "here on Earth, God's work must truly be our own." Europeans are more diffident about God, and the Czechs more so than most Europeans.

Lori Gregory grew up in Philadelphia and is a Christian missionary in the Czech Republic. She and her husband, Bill, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, came to Prague 13 years ago to work for Young Life, a Colorado-based organization that focuses on teenagers. It has not been an easy path. "When we bring up the subject [of faith], it's like asking if you believe in UFOs. That's what we're up against here," Gregory said. "In the States, you can assume most kids know why Christmas is celebrated. In the Czech Republic kids think baby Jesus is like Cinderella or Shrek. ... They think it's all a fairy tale."

Given four decades of communist rule, perhaps that is not surprising. Kittrich, the lawyer, had one grandmother who told him stories from the Bible, and another, a police colonel, whose home was filled with statues of Lenin and Stalin. "That was her religion," he said. His mother, he said, was a member of the "hippie generation" that rejected all religions and ideologies. Kittrich's first encounter with a church group came while he was a teenage exchange student in Elkin, N.C. He began attending services at the local Methodist church.

"Three times a week there were church activities--suppers for homeless people, youth groups. I joined the soccer team. The people were really nice, and it opened my eyes," he said. "But it always seemed more of a social community than a religious community, so when I got back here, I didn't follow up." Kittrich acknowledges he often thinks about religion. "But I don't think I'm missing anything," he said with a shrug.

Rev. Tomas Halik, a Roman Catholic priest and professor of philosophy at Prague's Charles University, is not surprised at this spiritual indifference. He believes Czechoslovakia's communist rulers and their masters in Moscow targeted the country for "an experiment in the total atheization of society."

The crackdown on the church and clergy was much harsher than in Poland, Hungary or even the Soviet Union, and the decades of repression did serious harm to the Czech religious identity, Halik said. "Czech society is not really atheistic--it's worse. Czechs today hardly know anything about religion," he said. Halik, who likes to joke that he "converted from agnosticism," was secretly ordained in East Germany in 1978. During the communist era, he became well-known as a spokesman for the Charter 77 group, which later would play a key role in the 1989 Velvet Revolution that ended communism. Throughout those years, he kept his ordination a secret from everyone, including his mother.

These days he leads a small but robust congregation in Prague made up mostly of university students. "After 1989, there was a great expectation that the church would be an important force for the renewal of the nation," Halik said.

When Pope John Paul II visited Czechoslovakia in 1990, huge crowds turned out. But when he returned for a third visit in 1997, the crowds were embarrassingly thin. (Among Czechs who claim some religious affiliation, 83 percent are Catholic, 10 percent are Protestant and 6.4 percent are Orthodox, according to EU figures.)

Church missed a chance

Halik said the Czech Catholic Church wasted a golden opportunity in the early 1990s, mainly because it had no experience in public life and most of its priests "only knew how to operate in the old communist style--the liturgy and nothing more."

Dusan Trestik, a historian at the Center for Medieval Studies in Prague, agreed. "I think you have to say the church failed in the needs of modernization," he said. "The church was offering traditional Christianity for grannies." But Trestik noted that the Czechs' standoffishness toward religion predates the communists by centuries. Christianity arrived in the Czech lands in 865, but its defining moment came in the 1400s when Jan Hus, rector at the University of Prague, challenged the authority and teachings of Rome. For this, he was burned at the stake. "In all aspects, it was a Protestant Reformation a century before Protestantism," Trestik said.

The Czech lands fell under the control of the Habsburgs. Catholic authority was restored, but Czechs henceforth regarded the church as something imposed. When ordinary Czechs identify themselves as atheist, they usually don't mean it in the strict sense. When pressed, most Czechs acknowledge they believe in "something."

"Even rational people need to believe in something, something bigger than themselves to make sense of their lives," said Dana Hamplova, a Prague sociologist whose research has found that while Czechs mistrust organized religion, they rank very high among Europeans who believe in the power of fortunetellers and other non-traditional forms of spirituality. "They are looking for something, for guidance, and in the pure sense, it's religious," she said.

Pavel Rican, a religion professor at Charles University, refers to this as "somethingism" and describes it as a "degenerated religiosity" that has become the norm in much of Europe. "Superstitions, cults, interest in herbs--there are so many people now to whom salvation means good health," he said.

What caused the demise of traditional religion among Czechs and other Europeans? Is it the fault of the church, or did the faithful change in some fundamental way?

Church `gives me nothing'

"I go to church infrequently. It's boring. It gives me nothing," Rican said. "Yes, it's a failure of the churches. But this is something that is characteristic for the whole of Europe," he said.

George Weigel, a leading American Catholic intellectual, argues that Europe is becoming a "post-Christian society" with a ruling elite that is openly hostile to religion. "It would be too simple to say that the reason Americans and Europeans see the world so differently is that the former go to church on Sundays and the latter don't," Weigel wrote in his 2005 book, "The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America and Politics Without God."

"But it would also be a grave mistake to think that the dramatic differences in religious belief and practice in the United States and Europe don't have something important to do with those different perceptions of the world--and the different policies to which those perceptions eventually lead," he wrote.

Pope John Paul II believed Europe's poverty of spirit was linked to its postwar affluence, or, in the specific case of Eastern Europe, to its post-communist embrace of American-style consumerism. That may be a harsh judgment--if anything, the American experience seems to suggest that spirituality and consumerism need not be mutually exclusive.

Europeans tend to be disdainful of this American-style religiosity.

"This kind of do-it-yourself Christianity--people like Billy Graham and Jesse Jackson and all the TV preachers--would be impossible in Europe," Trestik said. "Christianity like some kind of supermarket is completely impossible in Europe."

But European religious leaders can't find a way to stanch the loss of faith among their flocks. While some are trying to make the institutional church more accessible and user-friendly, the Catholic Church, by far the continent's largest denomination, seems to be consoling itself with a "less is more" approach, arguing that the numbers in the pews matter less than the depth and quality of faith of those who do believe.

"We know we can't go back to the Catholic Europe of the Middle Ages, so we will have to find some compatibility between Christianity and secular humanism," said Halik, the secretly ordained priest.

But can Christianity and secular humanism be compatible?

"Faith and doubt are like two sisters," Halik said with a mysterious smile. "They need each other."

----------

thundley@tribune.com

Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

Why do we need missionaries in Europe?

God's Funeral, What will keep faith from nearly disappearing in America ?

Philip Yancey, Christianity Today, September 9, 2002 , page 88

Henri Nouwen wrote with melancholy about return visits to his boyhood home in the Netherlands , where in one generation vibrant Catholicism had faded into a quaint ritual. A few months before his death, he spoke to a paltry crowd of 36 students at the seminary he had attended, once bustling with hundreds of eager candidates for priesthood. Nouwen's own devout family had rejoiced in his choice of vocation, though many in the family later lost interest. He was called on to christen a niece or nephew, yet mostly as a cultural relic. "I feel like an entertainer who is far from entertaining," he said after one such event.

On a recent visit to the Low Countries, I encountered many reminders of the decline in European faith. Dutch Christians told me that a century ago, 98 percent of Dutch people attended church regularly; within two generations, the percentage fell into the low teens. Today it is under 10 percent. Almost half the church buildings in Holland have been destroyed or converted into restaurants, art galleries, or condominiums.

I attended a vespers service in a Belgian church renowned for its stained glass. Ten of us sat under the high Gothic arch­es, my wife and I the only ones younger than 70. Outside, far more tourists were complaining about the sign announcing the church's closure to tourists during the service. For a majority of Europeans, the church seems wholly irrelevant.

A German correspondent wrote me about Europeans' reaction to the World Trade Center attacks, "American leaders called a National Day of Prayer, and ordinary citizens temporarily flooded churches and purchased Bibles in record numbers. Germans had no comparable response. Instead, on talk shows and editorial pages, they have turned introspective: Muslim fanatics are willing to die for their God; we no longer even believe in God. What do we have as an alternative?"

I sensed some of the same existential anxiety in the Netherlands, still reeling from the assassination of a popular politician in May. Right wing and openly gay (not an oxymoron in the Netherlands), Pim Fortuyn voiced alarmist concerns that many Europeans feel about immigration. Muslims have a more pronounced and visible presence in Western Europe than in the United States. Xenophobic movements in Germany, Spain, and France have fed on the resulting anxieties.

My hosts in the Netherlands look to the United States as a model of a modern nation that maintains a vital religious faith. Whenever I visit Europe, though, and see the mostly hollow shells of the church, an institution that dominated the continent for 1,500 years, I wonder if the same pattern will play out in my homeland. Will the decline of faith that A. N. Wilson, himself one of its symbols, documented in the book God's Funeral occur in the United States?

Wilson writes, "God's funeral was not, as many in the 19th century might have thought, the end of a phase of human intellectual history. It was the withdrawal of a great Love object." Wilson admits a deep loss in at least two areas. For the first time in history, many people no longer feel the need to pray or worship, Also, uniquely, many see no world of value outside themselves, no objec­tive transcendent truth. Human beings alone must define their values and meaning. If the previous century offers any indication of the result, we face a bleak future indeed.

But I have some hope that the United States will not go the way of Western Europe. In the first place, we have strong seminaries and Christian colleges that engage secularism. Perhaps more important, the American church has long been a mission-sending church. (Sometimes I wonder if God continues to bless our nation, despite its decadence, for this reason alone.)

American Christians trained in Enlightenment reductionism can learn about spiritual warfare firsthand on mission trips to South America . We can learn about suffering from the church in China, about passionate evangelism from Africa , and about intercessory prayer from Korea. Just as nothing threatens my faith like a visit to the agnostic portions of Europe, nothing invigorates my faith more than a visit to churches in non-Western countries.

Perhaps we have not heard the last from the church in Europe either. I met with Paul Nouwen, Henri's younger brother. Paul told of sitting at Henri's funeral, after his unexpected death at 64 in 1996, and hearing people from many countries speak of Henri's influence.

"I realized that, compared to Henri, I have nothing," he said. "And as I sat there listening, the difference became clear - Henri had God. That made all the difference." In a humble spirit, Paul Nouwen proceeded to tell of the changes he was making to better prepare for his own death and to restore a relationship with the God whom his brother knew so well. As his brother testified, Henri, who had lived as a missionary in North and South America, ended up as a missionary back in his heartsick homeland.

Saving Our Religions

What may keep us praying.

By John O’Sullivan

National Review Online

July 25, 2002 12:35 p.m.

 When Pope John Paul II arrived in Toronto this week for the World Youth Day Congress, he was arriving on a continent that is still significantly religious and leaving a continent that seems to have abandoned religion for agnosticism and material affluence.

It is almost 100 years since Hilaire Belloc pronounced of Catholicism: “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.” It seems a great deal longer.  In Belloc’s day, Europe was the center of the Christian world from which in the previous three hundred years missionaries had ventured forth to convert the heathen. Today the Christian world is increasingly the Third World where the new Christians tilt dramatically towards evangelical and traditional forms of belief.

Christian conversions from other religions, mainly Islam, are proceeding rapidly in Africa and Southeast Asia. In Latin America, evangelical conversions within Christianity are transforming bad Catholics into good Protestants. As a result, Christian missionary traffic has gone into reverse gear. Catholic churches in Europe rely on priests from the Philippines and India, and African bishops attend Anglican convocations to reprove their Western counterparts for liberal theology and sexual libertinism. It was a sign of this new world that the traditionalist candidate for the Archbishopric of Canterbury, defeated this week by a saintly but liberal academic theologian, hailed from Pakistan.

Missionaries are certainly needed in Western Europe. Regular church attendance there has sunk to single digits-seven percent for most Christian denominations in Britain, even lower in France and Germany. By comparison with this gloomy picture, North America still looks moderately devout. About 40 percent of Americans and 20 percent of Canadians say they go to church regularly - and probably at least half of them are telling the truth.  If Europe is a post-Christian society, then North America is still a moderately observant one. But both exist in a world where Asia, Africa and Latin America are passionately devout.

But things may not be what they seem. Europe may simply be further along the road of modernist “disenchantment” with religion than either the U.S. or Canada. From the 1930s to the 1950s, European churchgoing imperceptibly became a matter of social respectability rather than a desire to worship God. From the 1960s, when everyone suddenly realized that his neighbor would prefer to sleep in on Sunday as well, church attendance progressively collapsed. Over time, society became increasingly secular in law, custom, social atmosphere - and eventually in religion too.

And this is producing a religious paradox worthy of G. K. Chesterton. Paul M. Zulehner, dean of the theology department at Vienna Catholic University, sees what is happening in Europe, not as irreligion, but as a frustrated religious impulse: “We are observing a boom in religious yearning and at the same time a shrinking process of the churches.” Why so? Because, says Zulehner, “the churches have secularized themselves.” How true is this? The shrinking of the secularized churches is obvious enough. In Western Europe it is often hard to distinguish the local church from a social service agency; Bishops reserve their prophetic fire to denounce cuts in public spending rather than private sins; and church buildings are turned into office blocks. But where is the boom in religious yearning?

My colleague, UPI religion editor Uwe Siemon-Netto - a rare former foreign correspondent with two theology degrees - points to such events as the sale in France of over 100,000 copies of a new translation of the Bible within a month of publication, the packed theaters for performances by the Comedie Francaise of a new translation of the Psalms, the crowds in Germany attending consolatory religious services after the 11^th of September, the rising numbers in opinion polls (since the 1960s) who describe themselves as religious believers, and the large congregations at non-mainstream evangelical services in churches often established by Third World immigrants.

It may be that Weberian “disenchantment” is merely a phase that the prosperous go through before arriving at a sense of religious awe at the mysteries of Creation. And not only the prosperous. Some Latin Americans left the Catholic Church because it had forgotten that the poor had souls as well as bodies and devoted too much of its teaching to their material concerns as part of its “preference for the poor.” North America may be at the early “social respectability” point on this learning curve. The signs of a decay of belief are certainly there: religious attendance declines in those areas where no one knows his neighbor; polls show that a vulgar form of moral relativism is the orthodoxy of educated young people; and in the pedophilia scandal, Catholic bishops plainly placed more trust in Freud than in God.

What may save North America from this looming agnosticism is the decentralized character of its religious institutions. The U.S. in particular has always had a free market in religion. So, as older mainstream churches fall to the secularizing temptation, the result may not be the anomie and despair of post-Christian Europe but the rise of charismatic, Pentecostal, evangelical and other “spiritual” movements, even inside the Catholic Church. The “age of secularization” would then be a very brief one in North America compared to Europe’s 30 years.

Here the Pope may exert a vital personal influence. Even to many who dislike his theological conservatism, he appears above all else a man of deep and radiating spiritual goodness. That spiritual appeal has penetrated the hearts of the Third World poor in earlier tours. It has won over countless young people like those at Toronto this week. Will it now enlighten and uplift the dehydrated souls of post-Christian intellectuals and exhausted consumers in the post-Christian West? If so, it will be his strangest and perhaps deepest triumph.