Not Brexiting our mission

EVANGELISM IN EUROPE
Editor Hannes Wiher
VTR Publications. 352 pages. £20
ISBN 978 3 957 760 814

Does Europe need cross-cultural mission? The best people to answer that are French Christians, because in Francophone Europe evangelical churches have been growing and multiplying for over 40 years. This book pro-vides a digest of their thinking, and in many respects they are ahead of us Brits. They saw that their nations needed cross-cultural mission long before we realised the same in our own situation.

This book brings together several papers and articles that provide a comprehensive overview of current issues in cross-cultural mission, but applied to a European context.

There is a valuable discussion of whether Europe is Christian or secular, and evidence that our French brothers understand Islam better than we do in Britain. The authors interact with a wide range of writers in missiology over the last 30 years, giving a useful introduction to their thinking. If you are in UK ministry and didn’t study missiology in college (most of us didn’t), then this book is a great place to start.

The chapters by Neal Blough on Europe’s historical background, Evert van de Poll on Christianity & European Secularism and, above all, David Brown on how the French understand and receive the gospel. He also sketches out his Passerelles seekers’ course, unmatched by an equivalent in Britain, as a basis for church planting. There is rigorous analysis by Hannes Wiher, thinking through how we present the gospel to people of several different worldviews and personality types. Other chapters discuss how to do multi-cultural church, how to relate to African-led churches, and the biblical nature of demonology in the context of both European secularism and migrant African animism.

I have a few reservations. Some chapters have had an unsteady voyage across the Channel, and some things have not translated well. Some chapters state the positions of others with little comment or analysis. It is unclear whether the book criticises the emergent church movement (so hard to define) or sometimes affirms it. The book also deserves better production values.

Finally, we need to affirm that ‘Europe’ is a patchwork of nations, each with different languages and cultures. Over-generalising is dangerous. Compare France with the Netherlands, or Germany with Poland, or Croatia with Serbia, or Spain with Sweden. Each has its own language and history, and they are very different contexts, hence the need for careful cross-cultural mission across Europe, especially in Britain.