Taking Christ into the Darkness

Christianity Today just posted an awesome article on the evangelical church in Czech Republic and Poland. You can read the entire article here. I am posting excerpts from the article. The Brethren church in Trinec that New Covenant is partnering with is part of the evangelical Brethren Church referred to in the article as one of the only denominations in Czech Republic that is growing. One remarkable survey result is that more Czechs believe in UFOs than in God! Please pray for the Czech people and for the outreach of the church in Trinec.

Common wisdom has it that the Czechs are a nation of atheists, with alcoholics outnumbering evangelicals and more believers in ufos than in God—and this isn't far from the truth. Census data from 1991 and 2001 show that in the decade after communism, the percentage of Czechs who identified as atheist surged from 40 to 60 percent, and a June 2005 Eurobarometer survey from the European Union shows that only 19 percent of Czechs believe in God.
Though priests of all denominations in the Czech Republic still get modest salaries from the government, their churches are increasingly empty. This is in part due to bad press from the most contentious property restitution process in the region. The issue has especially harmed the Roman Catholic Church, which lost a third of its members during the 1990s. Today it continues to press the government for a return of more fields, farms, cloisters, and hospitals, but the increasing perception in society is that the church is greedy.

Karel Taschner, director of the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Prague, says that when Czechs speak about the church, they say, "Ah, ah, we know. They want the property."
But decline is not inevitable. Small evangelical and Pentecostal denominations here have seen steady growth even as belief in God has plummeted. The biggest traditional Protestant church—the Protestant Church of the Czech Brethren—lost nearly half its members in the 1990s, but the Apostolic Church (Pentecostal) tripled its number in that same time, as did the evangelical Brethren Church. The renewal movements within Catholicism are growing as well.

According to the Czech Evangelical Alliance, in 2000 there were 545 evangelical congregations in the Czech Republic. The number of Czechs who claimed affiliation with an evangelical church in the 2001 census is 31,299. Though small, these churches have a sense of excitement about the future. Jiri Unger heads the Czech Evangelical Alliance, a group established at the encouragement of John Stott in 1991, and he calls it a privilege to serve in such an atheistic society. "You can influence so much," he says. "So many things are beginning."

Though believers had hoped for greater results in the heady days of 1989, the low numbers have proven to be a strange kind of blessing. The church, so damaged by 40 years of communist oppression, had turned inward and was incapable of receiving an influx of new Christians.

"We were a ghetto that had to preserve Christianity," Unger says. "But we lost a vision for society, how to equip Christians outside the congregation or its meetings. A major goal is to enlarge the vision of the church, because the church is still suspicious of everything public."

After communism collapsed, the upheavals in society produced great personal and political stress. This led to increased reports of depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, marital problems, and burnout. But when people with problems came to local churches, the churches had almost no resources in place to deal with them.

The 1990s therefore became a decade of experimentation and development as the church expanded its mission and structures. One of the first lessons Christians learned was that Czechs are not open to being preached at—but they are open to relational evangelism, they love camps, and they want to speak English like a native. The result? A massive proliferation of English camps run by Christians.

Bradley Kaspar has helped run such a camp full-time for the last two years with the U.S. missionary organization Josiah Venture. "It's common for students to come to camp two or three years before they accept Christ as their Savior," he says. Many of them have never thought much about God or even know the Christian story, so it takes time both to teach and to build vital relationships. "In the end, solid arguments or convincing apologetics do some good, but the overwhelming factor that brings students to Christ is the love they say they see and experience at camp that they've never seen before."

Young believers now fill the pews of the evangelical churches. This new generation of Christians, the first to grow up without a memory of communism, wants to reach out to their peers in a fresh way, but sometimes this leads to conflict.

Not all the news about Czech society is bad: The same E.U. survey that pegged belief in God at 19 percent also shows a great spiritual hunger among the Czechs. Half the respondents said they believe in "some sort of spirit or life force." Disillusioned with traditional religious practice, many Czechs are open to a new way forward, and a new generation is finally ready to show it to them.

The last 15 years weren't supposed to be this hard—but maybe they had to be for the church to move forward. A new generation now fills the pews and is ready to make its voice heard in Europe, a voice that will sing its old song in a new way. Let's hope it will be heard.