What It Takes to Plant Churches in Europe

The goal is audacious. But as far as James Davis, founder of the Global Church Network, is concerned, Christians need deadlines. Otherwise, they will never do what they need to do to fulfill the Great Commission.

His group gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, last September with 400 ministry leaders from across Europe who committed to raising up and equipping more than 100,000 new pastors in the next decade. The network plans to establish 39 hubs in Europe, with a goal of 442 more in the years to come, for training church planters, evangelists, and pastors to proclaim the gospel.

“A vision becomes a goal when it has a deadline,” Davis said at the event.

“So many Christian leaders today doubt their beliefs and believe their doubts. It is time for us to doubt our doubts and believe our beliefs. We will claim, climb, and conquer our Mount Everest, the Great Commission.”

Davis has a number of very motivated partners in this project, including the Assemblies of God, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), and the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. The network also counts The Wesleyan Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Foursquare Church, the Church of God in Christ, and OMF International (formerly Overseas Missionary Fellowship) as members of a broader coalition working to complete the Great Commission in the near future. If it turns out their European goal is a bit beyond reach, they will still undoubtedly do a lot between now and their deadline.

And the Global Church Network is not alone. In Germany, the Bund Freikirchlicher Pfingstgemeinden (Association of Free Church Pentecostals) has announced plans to plant 500 new churches by 2033. The group, celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2024, told CT it is currently planting new congregations at a rate of about seven per year. Raising up new pastors is key to its growth strategy. 

And the Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland (Association of Free Evangelical Churches in Germany) has planted 200 churches in the past decade. It has grown to about 500 congregations with 42,000 members. The Free Evangelicals also have plans to launch 70 new churches by 2030, at a rate of 15 per year, and then start another 200 by 2040. 

“Goal setting is a bit of a thing in Europe,” said Stefan Paas, the J. H. Bavinck Chair for Missiology and Intercultural Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam and the author of Church Planting in the Secular West.

He’s not convinced it’s a good thing for Christian missions, though. In fact, he doesn’t think ambition, verve, and goal setting actually work.

Paas’s research shows that supply-side approaches—the idea that if you plant it, they will come—seem promising and often demonstrate early success, but the results mostly evaporate. While it is widely believed that planting new churches causes growth, he said, that’s not what the evidence shows.

“Yes, newer churches tend to draw in more people and more converts, but they also lose more,” Paas told CT. “There’s a backdoor dynamic where people come into newer churches but then leave.”

He examined the Free Evangelicals’ membership statistics from 2003 to 2017 and found that church plants often correlated with quick growth but then slow decline. 

“It’s one thing to draw people, and another thing to keep them,” he said. 

Part of the problem, according to Paas, is that the things that attract people to new churches, like great music, dynamic preaching, and a sense of real passion about something happening, don’t translate into deeper discipleship. People don’t get more involved or committed, and when church stops being new or exciting, they fade away. 

This is why church plants often seem very successful in urban contexts, where lots of new people arrive every day; it can ironically prove easier to attract new converts in deeply secular contexts, such as former Communist countries. But getting people to come in the front door is not as big of a challenge as connecting in deep, meaningful, and life-transforming ways. Many newcomers don’t last.

Paas says Christians should focus more on contextualizing, trying new things, and training pastors to build real relationships. While Davis and others argue ambition is necessary to mobilize people to evangelize the world, church plants in Europe succeed through experimentation and creativity, according to Paas.

“Experimental spaces and fresh expressions are much more important than traditional church plants,” he said. “Innovation is much more important than growth-driven entrepreneurship.”

One church doing this is in Eisenach, a small town with about 42,000 inhabitants in the eastern German state of Thuringia. Eisenach has historical ties to the Protestant Reformation—Martin Luther and Johann Sebastian Bach both lived there, though at different times—but today about 70 percent of the population has no religious affiliation. They are, as the Germans say, konfessionslos (“without confession”).

“Belief is just not a thing here,” said pastor Cordula Lindörfer. “When Eisenachers are in trouble, or in crisis, they don’t think of God or the church. They never look to the supernatural. They just don’t see it as relevant.”

That can make planting a church rather tricky. So Lindörfer and her team, with the support of the Association of Free Evangelical Churches, decided not to start with a Gottesdienst (church service) but to focus first on three other G’s: gemeinschaft, geniessen, and gestatten—community, enjoyment, and permission.

At StartUp Church, their plant in Eisenach, the team invites community members to monthly brunches to discuss topics like whether “justice for all” is a utopian pipe dream or something that could be achieved. The church’s first event, back in 2020, was at a pub. They advertised it as a meetup to “discuss doubts, beliefs, talk about God and the world.”

Today, StartUp has a weekly gathering at a local bar named Cat’s Leap, and families socialize at a local park. 

At one recent gathering, people explored the different possible perspectives in the story Jesus told about workers in a vineyard all getting paid the same, even though they worked different amounts (Matt. 20:1–16). 

Lindörfer said most of the people who come to StartUp are between 30 and 40 years old. Her own job is less that of a typical pastor—she doesn’t do a lot of preaching and teaching—and more moderator and convener.

“Eisenachers are all ready for a conversation; they all have opinions and ideas,” she said. “For me it’s all about creating a space where they feel welcome, where people come to connect rather than compete.” 

Paas thinks this is probably the real future of church growth in secular Europe. Success will have less to do with big goals and more to do with the difficult ones, and it will focus on the daily work of making friends, building connections, showing people God’s love, and inviting them to imagine that Christian faith could be relevant to their lives. 

Anyone who thinks that church planting in Europe is going to be quick and easy should probably stay home, Paas told CT. “Otherwise, you’ll get disappointed; you may even lose your faith,” he said. 

Paas hasn’t lost his. 

When he surveys the mission work taking place across the continent, he finds hope in the promise, as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:18–31, that God uses foolish things to accomplish divine purposes. 

“I know this is God’s work,” he said. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.” 

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Church Plant Struggles to Take Root in Liechtenstein

Driving south on European route 43, you might notice there are only five exits for the country of Liechtenstein. Or you might not notice, given how quickly the 24-kilometer-long German-speaking monarchy flies by. 

Sandwiched between Austria and Switzerland and surrounded by the Alps, Liechtenstein is one of the world’s smallest nations. It is also one of the richest. Liechtenstein’s gross domestic product is a staggering $197,000 per person. That’s more than twice the economic value produced in the United States every year and more than three times the value produced by Germany, which is considered Europe’s “economic powerhouse.”

So most people, if they think about Liechtenstein at all, don’t think of it as a mission field.

But most people are wrong, according to the father-son pastor team Paul and Mike Clark. Since June 2022, the Clarks have been trying to plant a church in Liechtenstein. 

“Here there is just as much need for the gospel as elsewhere,” son Mike Clark, 44, told CT on a walk through the capital of Vaduz, a town of about 6,000 people located down from the castle where the monarch, Prince Hans-Adam II, lives with his family.

About 70 percent of the 40,000 people are Roman Catholic. There are some small minorities of other religious groups—8 percent of the country identifies as Reformed Protestant and 6 percent as Muslim—but most people are counted as Catholic. 

“Don’t let the official statistics fool you,” Mike Clark said. “Only about 10 percent of these people are in church on any given Sunday.”

Convincing Liechtensteiners to consider going to church—and to an evangelical church at that—has proved to be quite challenging in a country defined by private capital and established Catholicism. Few people seem interested in conversations about faith. Few seem to feel they have spiritual needs. The idea of something different than nominal Catholicism is very foreign to them.

“We’ve tried just about everything to connect with people,” said Paul Clark, a 72-year-old American who has spent decades in Europe. “Setting up an informational table in Vaduz’s city center. Starting a gospel choir. And now launching an Alpha course in the summer,” which teaches the basics of Christianity.

The gospel choir was popular, but no one came back to the church to visit. Getting permits from city hall for the Alpha course demanded lots of time and energy, but the classes weren’t especially popular.

Maybe it will turn out that people are just not that interested in church. Currently, there are actually more casinos (seven) in Liechtenstein than non-Catholic congregations (five). There are only two evangelical churches: Free Evangelical Church in Schaan and Life Church Liechtenstein in Eschen, where the Clarks minister to a small group of people and dream of reaching many, many more. 

Life Church meets once a month in an office park on the outskirts of town. The church’s setup is simple: a few rows of plastic chairs, a drop-down screen with a background image of the Alps, a smattering of tabletops in the back, and a mix of homemade cakes and store-bought chips and guacamole for visitors to snack on. 

Paul Clark leads worship on acoustic guitar alongside a young man from Brazil playing cajon. One Sunday, about 25 people came to the 4 p.m. service. Most were from partner churches in eastern Switzerland and western Austria. They sang “10,000 Reasons” and “Goodness of God” in German. Paul reminded them what the church plant is all about. Quoting the German lyrics of “Shine Jesus Shine,” he prayed that Jesus would shine the light of his Father’s glory on Liechtenstein.

If numbers remain low, they might close by the end of 2024.

“In my experience, if a church isn’t gaining traction in the first couple of years, it won’t ever,” Paul Clark said. 

He knows what he’s talking about. Paul Clark first came to Europe from Michigan in the 1970s with Teen Challenge. He met his wife, Mechthild, who was also working with Teen Challenge, in West Germany. In the past 50 years, the couple has helped establish six European churches in collaboration with the Association of Free Church Pentecostals. They’re in the German states of Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Thuringia.

Mike Clark followed in his parents’ footsteps and has helped start ministries in Missouri, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. 

Both the Clarks, however, say Liechtenstein may be the toughest place they’ve ever tried to tell people about Jesus. Planting a church has been harder here than anywhere else they’ve experienced.

“There’s a cost for following Christ here,” Mike Clark said. “It’s not your life, but it is a certain loss of anonymity and the social pressure that comes with saying, ‘I follow Jesus.’ ” 

But the father-son pair remain resolute. They believe—or maybe hope is a better word—that some hungry souls have questions about faith that they can’t explore in the context of the Catholic church. They want people in Liechtenstein to have a local evangelical option. Today, many would have to go out of the country for that.

In fact, the original idea for the plant emerged when visitors from Liechtenstein came to the Clarks’ more established church, FCG Bregenz (Free Christian Church Bregenz) in Austria. Similar to Life Church, FCG Bregenz operates out of an office park. It’s located in a former textile factory area on the shores of Lake Constance, in a building with a modern, postindustrial feel.

Heading over to Austria, as boundaries between some of the richest nations flitted by, Mike Clark noted, “Borders are no big deal when it comes to commerce in this part of the world.”

He added, “People shouldn’t have to cross borders to come to Christ.”

FCG Bregenz is very international, though, as are many evangelical churches in Europe. Austrians attend services, but so do people from Germany, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, as well as expats from Kenya, Syria, and the United States.

Mike Clark himself grew up in Germany; studied theology in the US; earned a doctorate in law in the Netherlands; and, with his wife, Laura, spent 15 years in church emergency and development aid work before feeling the call to plant a church in Austria and then another in Liechtenstein. 

The Clarks founded FCG Bregenz in 2016. Mike Clark, who was ordained in a Pentecostal church in 2004, has led it since 2020. 

He brings all of that experience to ministry and his cross-cultural identity comes through when he preaches. When he pops on stage, worshipers might think they are at church in the US. With his beard, skinny jeans, gray sweater, white tennis shoes, and iPad, “Pastor Mike” looks the part of a hip megachurch pastor. But then he starts preaching in excellent German. 

About 60 people attend his Austrian church on a given Sunday, and about that many watch online. According to Mike Clark, FCG Bregenz is one of several churches planted in the westernmost Austrian state of Vorarlberg in the past 10 years. Most of the churches in the network have fewer than 50 worshipers every Sunday, which makes FCG Bregenz a leader. The church has become a training ground for church planters looking to evangelize more Europeans.

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Evert van de Poll, a Dutch missiologist, said Europe presents a particular challenge for evangelism. The weight of a cultural Christian heritage and a century of secularization means few people are seeking out churches. 

New forms of individualized spirituality can be quite popular, but that rarely translates into curiosity about spiritual experiences at an evangelical church.

Van de Poll said he has seen evangelicals successfully reach out to migrants and refugees in Europe. And some churches—in Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and even rich little Liechtenstein—are trying a more seeker-sensitive model, with contemporary worship, relevant preaching, and a message that the gospel matters today. 

But what works on one side of a European border, Van de Poll said, doesn’t necessarily work on the other. 

“You’d think that the basic principles are the same, but borders matter,” he said. “Pastors and missionaries need to appreciate Europe’s diversity and the dividing lines between different states; cultures; and their varying degrees of Protestant, Catholic, or secular influence.”

This may be the lesson the Clarks learn from Life Church in Liechtenstein. Despite their success in Austria and their varied international experience, nothing seems to be taking root in the affluent topology of Europe’s smallest German-speaking state.

Maybe next year, if the church can string things together that long, a few shoots of life will appear in
the soil.

But maybe not.

“If nothing comes from our efforts … we are probably going to close up shop,” Paul Clark said. “But God called us here, we know that.” 

Evangelicals Flourish in One Town in Switzerland

For a small town, Buchs has a surprising number of churches. The municipality on the eastern edge of Switzerland has a Roman Catholic community, of course, and a Swiss Protestant congregation, but it also has an Evangelical Alliance church, a Free Evangelical Church, a New Apostolic Church, an International Christian Fellowship, and the nondenominational GRACE.Church. 

In fact, there is about one evangelical congregation for every 1,000 people, which has earned Buchs the nickname “Canaan on the Rhine,” a promised land for Swiss evangelicals. 

Only about 2 percent of Switzerland identifies as evangelical. But in Buchs, for some reason, about 10 percent of people worship at an evangelical church.

Why is this town different?

The pastors leading churches in Buchs have a few theories. There may not be a sociological explanation, they say—the Holy Spirit works in ways beyond human comprehension. 

“There is something prophetic in this place,” Ben Stolz, pastor of GRACE.Church, told CT while sitting in a Buchs café drinking a cappuccino. “The town has a deep spiritual background.”

Ulrich Zwingli, the 16th-century Reformer, was born just outside of Buchs. The farmhouse where he was raised still serves as a place of pilgrimage and spiritual reflection.

More recently, the charismatic preacher Leo Bigger was born in Buchs. Raised a Catholic, he was a disco promoter and had his own rock band before becoming an evangelical and rising in the leadership of the International Christian Fellowship (ICF). Today he’s the pastor of the largest Protestant congregation in Switzerland, ICF Zurich, and the fellowship has grown to about 60 congregations in 13 countries. One of them is in Buchs, of course, led by wife-and-husband team Sarah and Werner Eggenberger.

Stolz’s church attracts about 150 people on an average Sunday, with another 30 or so checking in online. The nondenominational congregation is one of the largest in the city and is known for contemporary worship, a relaxed atmosphere, and topical sermons.

Stolz, who grew up in Buchs, describes it as a “modern,” “living” church. He dreams that one day Europe could be “dotted with vibrant, healthy communities” like GRACE.Church, “where people come to know Jesus Christ, experience healing, and thrive through their growing knowledge of the love and grace of our wonderful God.”

Some people, he knows, find that vision upsetting and even offensive. Several years ago, the Catholic theologian Günther Boss, just across the border in Liechtenstein, used GRACE.Church as an example of what was wrong with modern Christianity. He said its theology was thin, its sermons “repulsive,” and it was simultaneously too modern and too old-fashioned. 

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“In their form they are very jazzed up, youthful,” Boss told the Liechtensteiner Vaterland, one of the country’s two daily newspapers. “But in their content they are reactionary and have very narrow moral ideas.”

Such criticisms are not uncommon in Europe. Free churches—those that operate without state-granted privileges—are often stigmatized as strange, antisocial sects. In Buchs, however, there are enough evangelicals that most people know one, and here attacks carry less weight than they might elsewhere. 

“We go to each other’s weddings, attend one another’s funerals, celebrate births and baptisms together,” Martin Frey, the pastor of an official, authorized Swiss Protestant church, told CT. “This helps educate people about the free churches and makes the ‘sect’ image seem outdated.” 

Frey considers Stolz a friend and likes to drink coffee with him at the café. He works with other evangelical pastors in town too. They have theological differences, of course, but he knows them, relates to them, and can see how invested they are in meeting Swiss residents’ spiritual needs. 

People in Buchs find something in an evangelical church, according to Frey, that they can’t find in more mainstream religious communities.

“To raise hands, to stand and sing, to proclaim in tongues is very, very far away from the typical Swiss mentality,” Frey said. “The Swiss tend to hold back.”

Yet some people in Buchs feel they’ve connected with God and other Christians only when they stop holding back—overcoming or at least overlooking their own instinctual restraint. 

Olivier Favre, a Reformed Baptist pastor and sociologist who coedited Phänomen Freikirchen (Free Church Phenomenon), argues this is the key to evangelicals’ success. They understand human needs. They show people how to connect to each other and have a relationship with the divine. 

“In our very individualized society, where many are alone, the idea of a personal relationship with God, belief that he answers prayers, that he can heal the sick and effect miracles, meets a spiritual need,” Favre writes.

In this way, of course, Buchs is no different than other European countries. The town may have a unique history, a sense of spirituality, and enough evangelicals that they’re not seen as odd and marginal as they are in other places. But still, people are people. Europe is Europe. And efforts to evangelize are all pretty similar. 

At a recent vision Sunday at GRACE.Church, Stolz laid out a plan to grow the church. The formula is friendship and faithful Christian witness, he told CT. He hopes this will soon lead to the construction of a new building in which to worship, making one of the many churches in Buchs a little more visible. 

He wants GRACE.Church to be like a light to people in the dark. Or a warm fire for those who are cold.

“People are lonely,” Stolz said, “and the churches here in Buchs are here to help build connections.” 

Ken Chitwood is CT’s European correspondent.

The post What It Takes to Plant Churches in Europe appeared first on Christianity Today.