Post-Christian Leadership

Lessons We Can Learn from Western Europe

In 2000, I transitioned from church work in Europe to pastoral work in the US. Much has changed over the last two decades, but many things remain the same.

What remains constant—and even more pronounced—is the continued collapse of the Christian faith on the European continent. European countries are well known for a rich Christian heritage but also for a lack of receptivity to traditional church work today. One study, for example, suggested that it costs 1,800 times more to lead one person to Christ in Belgium than in Cambodia. Or that per hour of ministry, three of the four least receptive “mega-peoples” to Christianity are French, Russian, and Czech (along with Levantine Arab).

Prague, Czechia is where I spent the majority of the 1990s. I often puzzled over how to make church relevant to people who had more or less called themselves Christian since the ninth century. The mission work of Cyril and Methodius bore great fruit for centuries, but contemporary Czechs show general apathy if not outright skepticism toward Christianity.

Christian leaders across Europe face the exceedingly difficult task of doing church in lands where less than 5% of the populace participates in church life with any regularity.

What has changed or is changing is the approach of a few European Christian leaders. Perhaps the old saying is true that necessity is the mother of all invention. Or more aptly in this case, it may be that the hopeless task of leading the church in Europe today is forcing some to finally ask a most important question: How do we put the mission of God at the center of church life?

Healthy trends are hard to spot, however, amidst the plethora of unhealthy developments. Some European church leaders, in actions akin to those of white Christian nationalists in the US, are playing with fire by linking their hopes to nationalist politicians. Some church leaders dream of reestablishing Christendom on the European continent through political power. They have cast their lot with wannabe despots who promise to “protect the church” while simultaneously threatening the rights of Muslims, feminists, liberals, and homosexuals. Voters in Poland recently threw out such a governing party that had sought to reassert “conservative, Polish, Catholic values” while dismantling basic democratic norms. This is at play across the continent, with real threats in countries like Slovakia, Serbia, Hungary, and the Netherlands. Putin’s Russia is a dangerous beacon for those who long for a protective strongman.

Not all church leaders are toying with tyranny. In fact, most churches in post-Christian Europe are rather fatalistic about their future. Their main thought is how to pay the bills and keep the doors open. Some “national” churches receive some government support, yet this funding is tenuous and flagging. Almost without exception across Europe, church bishops and leaders have watched with horror as citizens eschew weekly mass and worship gatherings. This decline that began shortly after World War 2 has yet to ebb.

Given this harsh reality, many churches are trying to manage their decline by cutting costs, importing cheaper clergy from the global South, or simply shuttering buildings. Revered places of worship have been decommissioned, sold, and converted into restaurants, apartments, or offices. Others remain open mostly as museums. Even evangelical, reformed, and independent churches struggle to attract younger generations as they quite literally age out.

Yet hidden among the seemingly hopeless and detrimental tendencies, I wish to highlight two healthy, missional moves in some European churches. A few European post-Christian leaders are leaning into innovative ways of doing church. In this minority movement, leaders are not asking, “How can we protect what we have?” Instead, they are laser-focused on this question, “How can we be a missionary church here at home?”

This is happening in at least two significant ways. My names for these two trends are my own creations. I’ll illustrate each with a specific example that I have witnessed firsthand. Rather than doubling down on old strategies that aren’t working, both of these exemplify innovative ways of thinking. They reveal what’s possible when leaders embrace mission as their core identity.

To be clear, finding these healthy movements was not initially easy. They are buried under an avalanche of relative despair, in which many faithful Christians are toiling unproductively with no imagination for how to do things differently. These new and hopeful movements are led by people who have relinquished the mindset of Christendom and are embracing their homelands as part of God’s mission field.

The first healthy trend in Europe among post-Christian church leaders is what I would call a movement toward Incarnational Ministry to the Marginalized. These are works focused on doing healthy Christian community, often among displaced peoples, and on empowering skilled leaders to focus on discipleship and outreach rather than on administration or preaching.

My example comes from Frankfurt, Germany, but there are outstanding mission-minded churches in places like Hamburg, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. Their key leaders think of themselves not as guardians of inherited institutions but as leaders of entrepreneurial enterprises. The writings of Stefan Paas, a Dutch professor of missional theology, help shed light on the thinking behind what is taking root.

A recent church plant in Frankfurt, Germany points to a key example of post-Christian leadership. An unbelievable 50% of the city’s residents are not native Germans. Frankfurt, the financial hub of Germany, has 46 city quarters. Many outlying areas like Niederursel are home to overwhelmingly large immigrant populations. An amazing 70% of the 17,000 people in Niederursel are not native Germans. 

In the city quarter of Niederursel, Mosaic Church Northwest (Mosaikkirche Nordwest) is flourishing. Collaborative planning from across Germany propelled Jason Lim, a homegrown German leader, into this effective, incarnational ministry. On a cloudless June day, we met with Mosaic Church in the morning, shared in their weekly potluck, and then walked across the Niederursel district with Jason. We encountered Afghans, Turks, Iranians, Taiwanese, Ghanaians, Bolivians, Croatians, and so many others. Jason knew many people by name.

Mosaic Church Northwest provides the only active Christian presence in the neighborhood. There are just two church buildings in that neighborhood, a liberal Protestant church and a Catholic parish. Both are nearly abandoned. The Protestant church is set for closure, and the Catholic parish opens only a couple of times a month.

Doing church well in this context requires a deep commitment to entrepreneurial ministry. Rather than spending his week preparing a sermon or working on administrative details, Jason outsources most of the preaching and management details to church members, some of whom are still babes in Christ. While their weekly Sunday gathering is clearly a focal point, they are present in the Niederursel neighborhood day in and day out.

Many of those who gathered with them for worship and their weekly potluck didn’t come as Christian congregants but as interested onlookers who love the community being built by Jason and his team. The church is involved in the lives of people, learning about their needs and walking alongside them amidst daily struggles. For many immigrants, the Mosaic Church has become their family.

Interestingly, Tim Keller was an important influence on folks like Jason Lim. As Keller stepped away from full-time ministry with Redeemer Pres NYC, he launched City to City Europe. Through that endeavor, he mentored and coached church leaders, trying to pass along tools to think critically about how to be post-Christian leaders. Tim’s name is spoken with great reverence by many European church leaders who are living out this vision in remarkable ways like what Jason Lim and his team are doing in Frankfurt.

The second healthy trend in Europe among post-Christian church leaders is a movement toward Blended Ecology Churches or New Forms of Christian Community. This is most visible in the United Kingdom in what has been called Fresh Expressions or Pioneering. The focus is on taking the church outside the walls of traditional church compounds and into gatherings that don’t often resemble traditional church at all.

The origins go back to several key developments. First, missionaries with the Church of England and Church of Scotland began returning from places like Nepal, Congo, and Uganda. With their eyes open to the missionary enterprise, they were shocked to discover their home countries were quickly becoming mission fields. They spoke openly about the need to rethink the shape of church work domestically.

Second, some folks in an English church parish began experimenting with what they eventually called Messy Church. It was a way of acknowledging that some non-church-goers might be interested in God but were unwilling to walk into a liturgy or worship service, regardless of how "traditional" or "contemporary" it might be. Many in the Church of England were upset that Messy Church lacked a formal liturgy. These critics seemed to complain, “What is a church, after all, without the eucharist and the spoken word?”

To the surprise of many, Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, elevated the principles behind Messy Church and made it a key component of his vision for reimagining the church. Rowan Williams titled his 2004 annual report Mission-Shaped Church. This was an exciting and collaborative effort intended to pull church leaders away from merely thinking about institutional concerns. While Williams did not disparage the need to care for the “inherited church,” he argued that the church would die unless it were also willing to invest in fresh expressions of the Christian community.

Church leaders such as Michael Moynagh took the challenge. Moynagh’s writings, including Church for Every Context, have become the clarion call for a kind of post-Christian leadership. Through the Fresh Expressions movement, they are slowly transforming the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, along with having a profound effect on dying Methodist and Baptist Churches across the UK. Even the Church of England’s Christian Mission Society now has a major wing focused on training and supporting pioneer leaders at home in the UK.

We visited one such work in an English Cotswolds village near the Welsh border. The church parish in the farming town of Brimscombe in Stroud was a dying outpost of Anglican Christianity. Perhaps out of desperation, church officials backed a pioneering church worker and his team who have built an unbelievable, blended-ecology, mission project. This outpost, which occupies a key spot in central Brimscombe, looks nothing like the church as we know it. Church leaders are reshaping the church to meet the mission rather than trying to shove their mission into the shape of the church.

At The Long Table, their pay-as-you-can café, we were blessed to have lunch with Will Mansell, the lead pioneer for this undertaking. They are blending thrift shops and social enterprises to benefit the community. There’s even a fledgling monastic community. A signboard at the entry highlights eight enterprises housed in this “church facility” that employ almost 50 people.

Will and his team aren’t just focused on creating jobs or selling used furniture. Most of their workers and “customers” aren’t Christians, and that’s the point. This isn’t church for the already churched. This is a mission-shaped church meeting people where they are and where their greatest needs lie. They’re focusing on discipleship and on forming small Christian communities. Sometimes they do this openly. Sometimes it feels covert.

But at no point do they pass out fliers for the Sunday church service. They are bringing the church into the lives of people throughout the week. They gather at different points and times for varying forms of spiritual growth and worship. Together, all of these endeavors fall under the umbrella of the Brimscombe Anglican Church. It was both breathtaking and eye-opening. (Note: In March 2024, the Brimscombe project faced an unexpected threat. The property owner has decided to sell their property without giving them a chance to extend their lease or counter the offer. This leaves their fledgling work in a precarious position. Not only are 53 jobs at stake, but their experimental form of building a Christian community is also in peril. This points to the fragile nature of such undertakings and the need for great flexibility—topics worth exploring in more detail.)

Perhaps the work of Jason Lim in the Niederursel neighborhood of northwest Frankfurt and of Will Mansell in Brimscombe, Stroud District of Gloucestershire, might be hard for many to imagine. However, they provide two models for post-Christian leadership in Europe today. I pray for the emergence of similar leadership models here in the US.

---

Jason Locke is the preaching minister for the College Church of Christ in Fresno, California. He and his wife Julie spent seven years as missionaries in Prague, Czechia. Jason also worked for eight years as a campus minister at West Virginia University for the Morgantown Church of Christ. He obtained a Doctor of Ministry from Abilene Christian University, where his doctoral thesis focused on the work of re-missioning in a local church.