New European Bridges: What is our Father Doing?
Presentation at the State of Europe Forum, Amsterdam, 9 May 2016
Drs. J.K. Mellis
When you look at Europe, and at the increasing numbers of non-Europeans residing in Europe or trying to take up residence here, what do you see? Click on the video link to watch the video that was shown at the beginning of my workshop presentation (6:26 minutes).
First, how do you see Europe? As a continent, where Christian values are under threat: from secularization as well as from Islamic and other non-Christian, non-European groups? Is this God’s perspective?
The video ended with an image of the Enneüs Heermabrug (left)—a new bridge connecting the new district, Ijburg, to the rest of Amsterdam. Why the image of a ‘bridge’? If you follow the history of the Church from the 1st century right into the 20th century, you will find that the continent of Europe functioned in many ways as God’s main bridge to move the Gospel from the Middle East to the ends of the earth. This movement of European missionaries reached its peak during the past five centuries, with many coming from European immigrant populations in the Americas. My American parents—of Dutch, Scottish and German ancestry—were part of that movement.
Yet as the 20th century was drawing to a close, Europe had become the only continent in the world where Church membership was declining, and Christians in the non-Western world began to outnumber Christians in Western countries. Was God finished with Europe as a bridge? Or was he just busy constructing a new kind bridge in Europe to accomplish his eternal purposes?
A second theme in this video is found in the initial theme song—it is the biblical theme of God inviting people from all over the world to a great ‘wedding banquet’. And two kinds of immigrants are pictured: people from many nations who have not yet understood that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is for them, and people who are coming to Europe from many non-Western nations where they grew up in the Church. At the time I co-created this video, ten years ago, there were an estimated 900,000 immigrants in the Netherlands from Muslim countries; yet another estimate put the number of immigrants from Christian countries at 800,000.
About the same time, Jonathan Livestro (a Dutch journalist) noted how political and media attention was focused almost exclusively on Muslim immigrants, not on those with a Christian background, even though at that time, new ‘Christian’ immigrants were outnumbering new ‘Muslim’ immigrants by a ratio of 2 to 1! And in this article, ‘Holland’s Post-Secular Future’, Livestro noted another startling statistic: that the post-war decline in church attendance in the Netherlands had stopped in the early 1990s. While traditional Dutch churches continued to experience declining numbers, the overall church attendance leveled off, due to the dramatic growth of youth churches and immigrant churches.
So what is God doing? In one of the earliest Christian speeches in Europe, Paul said:
He made from one man every nation [Gr. ethnos] of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling places, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might... find him. (Acts 17:26-27 ESV)
How did God make the nations? In the Torah we read of how through Noah’s descendants, ‘the nations spread out over the earth’, ‘by their clans and languages, in their territories and nations’ (Gen.10:32, 31,20,5 NIV). And what was God’s ultimate purpose?
In the Psalms we read that ‘all the nations’ he had made would come together to worship him, and to ‘bring glory to his name’ (Ps.86:9). And this is what we see happening in John’s vision: redeemed ‘tribes’, languages’, ‘nations’ and ‘peoples’ worshipping God and the Lamb together (Rev.5:9; 7:9; 15:3-4). In this closing picture in the Bible, there is no more mention of nations divided by the boundaries of separate territories. Rather, we see multi-cultural, multi-lingual worship in a multi-cultural mega-city, the New Jerusalem—with diverse nations bringing their ‘glory and honor’ into this city of heavenly origin (Rev.21:26).
Between 1996 and 2005 there were a variety of attempts in Amsterdam at multi-cultural worship involving both indigenous Dutch Christians and a wide variety of immigrant Christians. But this trend seems to have petered out over the past decade, though there are some ongoing efforts by Christians in various parts of the Netherlands: at multi-ethnic worship and partnerships in prayer and service. Even as Paul discovered in the 1st century, most Christians need a revelation in order to see this formerly ‘hidden’ mystery and how it is to be administered—such that the ‘many and varied wisdom’ of God can be made known through the church. Yet I believe that such multi-ethnic worship gatherings and partnerships represent the new bridge that our Father is wanting to build here in Europe—to demonstrate the goal of the Gospel, of nations as ‘co-heirs’ in Christ, leading the way toward ‘all things’ being brought together under Christ as head (Eph.3:6; 1:9-10).
But if God determines where all nations and ethnic groups live, why is he bringing so many Muslim immigrants into Europe? Because alongside the urbanization and globalization of his world in the late 20th century, God has been doing something new in the Muslim world. And this is the third theme of the video. When you saw the person in the white jelaba walking around Amsterdam, when did you finally realize that this person was actually a Muslim background believer (MBB) in Jesus?
In his recent book, A Wind in the House of Islam (2012), David Garrison has published the results of several years of research on Jesus movements in the Muslim world. For the sake of ‘clarity and consistency’, he defines a Jesus movement in a Muslim people group as comprising ‘at least 100 new churches or 1,000 baptisms that occur over a two-decade period’. But before 1980, there had only been 3 such movements since the rise of Islam in the 7th century: two movements during the last two decades of the 19th century (in Ethiopia and in Indonesia) and a new movement that began in Indonesia in the late 1960s. Yet between 1980 and 2000 there were an additional 11 such movements; and an additional 69 movements to Christ between 2000 and 2012!
One of the factors in many of these movements is the appearance of Jesus himself to Muslims in dreams and visions—a widespread phenomena that is portrayed in diverse stories recorded in another book published in 2012, Dreams and Visions: Is Jesus Awakening the Muslim World?[i]
The man in the video, who has been a colleague of mine for most of the past decade, comes from a North African Muslim people group, among whom such a movement is taking place, both in his homeland and in Europe. So now there are not only 'Jesus movements' in each of the 9 geo-cultural 'rooms' in the traditional 'house of Islam', but at least two in Europe as well. And colleagues of mine who work with the second of these movements, are building a new European 'bridge'. Instead of perpetuating the old European bridge, of Europeans going to disciple other nations, they travel as ministry partners with their new brothers and sisters—both on visits to the home country of these MBBs, and throughout Europe.
In the Gospel of John, we read that Jesus made the following statements:
The Son…can do only what he observes the Father doing… The Father is deeply fond of the Son and shows him everything he himself is doing.’ (5:19-20)
And then, anticipating the coming of the Holy Spirit, he told his disciples:
Jesus said, ‘…I am ascending to my Father and YOUR Father. … As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending YOU.’ (20:17,21)
‘In that day YOU will ask in my name…for the Father himself is deeply fond of YOU.’ (16:26-27)[ii]
If we, as indigenous and immigrant Christians are ‘co-heirs’ in Christ, adult sons and daughters of a God who is our Father too (Med.#4, #5), are we working with him in what he is doing today: in Europe and among Muslims? Or are we still ordering our priorities according to what we saw him doing in the past, or according to the human perspectives of our own culture and the international media?
When I came to the Netherlands as a missionary 40 years ago, I had no idea that I too would become an immigrant, nor that I would learn new things from the Bible about Jesus and about my Father through the cultural perspectives of my Moroccan immigrant neighbors. As unlikely as it seems, I learned that God as our Father is an important bridge for communicating the Gospel to Muslims. In the books of stories I have written [iii], you can learn about more intercultural bridges for the Gospel that I discovered within their traditions, while trying to simply work with my Father in what he is doing.
Working with him across cultural divides is always challenging, but it is also enriching and brings great glory to him.
Be sure to check out the other resources (videos and articles) that I have posted to this page (Immigration and the Church in Europe), and the many meditations that explore what Paul calls ‘the Mystery’ of God’s eternal purpose, and the implications for what God has accomplished in Christ and inaugurated through the Holy Spirit: for all nations and for our relationship with him as our Father.
When I was a young man, an Afro-American elder in an inner city church in Harlem, New York issued a challenge that has stayed with me all my life. In closing, I pass on his challenge to you: ‘Are you going to be part of the solution...
—by helping develop a multi-ethnic Church that bears witness to our urban future in the New Jerusalem—
...or will you remain just another part of the problem?’
Like in one of the two following ways:
-a European expression of the New Babylon in which one or two ethnic groups dominate all the others in the multi-ethnic European community of nations...
-a New Babylon-style, 'Enlightenment' version of the New Jerusalem: where a Christian idea of 'kingdom culture' is dominated by Western individualism; and where our respective ethnic, language and tribal identities are not valued but are considered merely a thing of the past.
NOTES
[i] See also the following article.
[ii] These texts are taken from the 4-voice harmony of the Gospels that I composed for both Muslims and Christians: The Good News of the Messiah by the Four Witnesses.
[iii] Discover these ‘bridges’ in story form by reading one or both of my books: Abu Sharif, the Mystery of the Hundredth Name (available in English, Dutch, Spanish, French, German and Fulani), and Rode Dromer (available in Dutch and in Norwegian as Mostafas DrØm).