Why Should Europeans Share the Gospel?
Editor’s Note: The following article is a shortened transcript of City to City Europe’s video “Why Should Europeans Share the Gospel?”
Learn more about City to City Europe’s Evangelism Project here.
Stephan Pues:
Today, we're having a conversation about a great question: “Why should Christians in Europe be motivated to share the gospel with anyone else?” The whole vision of City to City Europe is to see movements of the gospel in the cities of Europe, and that has a lot to do with church planting, leadership development, training, coaching, and more. But today, we're digging deep into the very core of what we want to actually see: we want as many Europeans to believe in the gospel as possible—people who love to share it and are motivated and equipped to share it. And that leads back to our question today: Why should we motivate them?
Let me introduce our guests to you. First of all, there is Giotis Kantartzis, the pastor of a Protestant church in Athens. He leads a city network and church plants, and he is our regional catalyst from City to City Europe for the whole region of Athens. Next, we have Evgeny Bakhmutsky, a planter and pastor of a very missional church in Moscow. He leads the church planting initiative in Moscow and other cities in Eastern Europe. He is also an author and speaker about many topics related to the gospel. And then we have Tim Keller. He is the planter and former pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, New York. He is also the founder of City to City Europe, author of many books, and a leader with a lot of interest in things that are going on in Europe.
Let us get into our topic and begin with you, Tim. You're not from Europe, but you have had the opportunity to plant a church and have a lot of gospel conversation with people. In your talks, you sometimes state that you’ve had hundreds of conversations with skeptical New Yorkers. What personally motivated you to do that?
Timothy Keller:
Thank you. By the way, I have done four evangelistic weeks in the United Kingdom, and an awful lot of the people I was evangelizing with were not only British, but also made up of a good number of other Europeans, as well. In many ways, New York City is not that different from many big cities or university towns, so the kinds of questions you ask people in gospel conversations are similar.
Before I came to New York, even though I was a minister, I think I evangelized mostly out of a sense of duty. In some ways, when I got to New York City, which is more like Europe, I actually enjoyed evangelism more. I think I was able to do it better because Christianity was a little stranger to people. But in other places, that’s not always the case. I think you may find in places like Athens in Moscow, areas that are predominantly Catholic or Orthodox, that people often think they know what Christianity is all about. So they don't even give you a hearing. And in the Southern United States, everybody thinks they already understand Christianity, so they don't give you a hearing.
I found that even though there was more hostility, there was also more ignorance. If you presented Christianity in a way they didn't expect, it was easier to do—easier to surprise people with some of the unique offers of the gospel. So, I actually didn't do a whole lot of evangelism until I moved to New York City when I was almost 40 years old. So there's still hope for you all out there.
Stephan Pues:
Evgeny, how about you? The outside assumption is that talking about your faith in the gospel is not that easy in Russia. What's your personal motivation?
Evgeny Bakhmutsky:
You know, Stephan, it's very true that many people think faith is a very personal thing that they don't want anyone to see. But I think the biggest reasons to speak openly about it are, first of all, the glory of God. When you see his beauty, you can't keep silent. In that way, we're all natural evangelists. We all speak about what we love. So the more I see Christ’s beauty and glory, the more I want to share him with others from my heart. The other biggest reason is compassion to my people. I look around and I see that my city needs the redeeming work of my savior. I just want to see my city be redeemed through his grace. I think those are the two biggest motivations in my life, in spite of all the obstacles.
Stephan Pues:
Giotis, you're the pastor of a very established church in the middle of Athens, right beneath the Pantheon. (Great view.) You have a lot of people that believe the gospel in your church. But what do you think hinders their desire to share the gospel, and what is something that motivates you?
Panagiotis Kantartzis:
I’m tempted to say that what has been said is totally right. We all know evangelizing is our duty and we want to do it because we love God and we feel compassion, but our reality is still that we don't evangelize. Having said all of that, we come again to the question of why we don't. I can speak about others, but let me focus on our own experience. We come from a part of Europe that, in a way, is quite different from Northern Europe and other parts of Europe. We are a small community of evangelical believers, 0.3% in a country which is culturally Christian. The majority of the people they see us as a falling cult, something which is suspicious.
And so the answer to why we don't evangelize, why we are not open with our faith, is first of all fear. We are afraid that, as a minority, we will develop this fortress mentality of walling ourselves off and avoiding the hostile territory of the world.
The other reason is cynicism. Many of the narratives about successful church plants from the United States suffer from what I call “Steve Jobs syndrome.” By that, I mean that most people in the United States love telling how they started small and grew into these multi-billion companies or huge, crowded churches. I think they do that with good intentions; they want to encourage us with these stories.
For example, let’s say Tim came to us and said, “Let me tell you about Redeemer. We started small and now we are in four locations.” Surely, this is amazing. But then we think, “Okay, that is too extreme to ever happen to us. Why bother?” A question I always have to face is, “What do you aspire for? I mean, we're 0.3%. Let’s say we plant four or five churches. I mean, even if we start a hundred churches, the best that can happen is going from 0.3% to 0.4%. What's the difference?” I think these are some dynamics we need to address when we think about motivation.
Evgeny Bakhmutsky:
I think that's a great motivation for such a situation: that we may be laying down one more brick for the spiritual awakening of our nations. Maybe we're not going to live to see that, but we've made it to 0.4%, and maybe one day another generation will see the spiritual awakening.
Timothy Keller:
To go from 0.3% to 0.4% is a lot to me. It's like when Jesus mentions the king that gave one group ten talents, the other five talents, and so on. And the person with five talents makes another five, and the person with ten makes another ten. And the king was equally happy with both servants. He didn't ask the person with five why he didn’t get ten like the other servant did. So if you're in Moscow or Athens and go from 0.3% to 0.4%, first of all, that's more than I could produce. Think about it in the frame of that story. That's the motivation: you want to please the Lord that saved you. Consider how many talents you start with. The Lord just wants you to multiply the talents you have. And it can happen! If we start talking to people, there will be progress.
Panagiotis Kantartzis:
I totally agree with that. In my office, I have a big sign that says, “We invite the unexpected to happen.” I mean, this is Christian history: when there is no hope, God does the unexpected. But you need to be there to invite the unexpected. It’s a little bit of an oxymoron, but it is what it is.
There are many good reasons why we shouldn't be scared and should move forward instead. And I think we all agree that eventually, the motivation of evangelism is not numbers. It's leading people to faithfulness and worship. Many times, that's the only reason we keep doing it when we don’t see big numbers.
Stephan Pues:
Evgeny, a couple of months ago you sent me a picture of a large church planting conference in Russia. So, there are a lot of people that want to start new churches and share the gospel with people in their city. Why are so many people motivated to share the gospel and to plant more churches?
Evgeny Bakhmutsky:
There are many reasons—some of them are great, some of them maybe not so great. But it’s a pleasure for me to talk about the great ones. I think the first reason is that many Eastern Europeans are still searching for their own identity. Some of them have already found it in their religious or even ethical roots, but it would not take much time for them to experience the satisfaction of a rediscovered, reconstructed identity based on Jesus Christ, because only the gospel can bring peace and joy and satisfaction to their hearts. I’ve seen many skeptical and searching hearts today in the former Soviet Union opening up. It's just happening. There's a massive amount of people really waiting for the gospel.
Also, predominant religious and social institutions continue to lose their influence and power. That's also another way to see how the gospel truly unites people better than any institution. Certainly, there are many people who realize that communism—and even democracy—are not the answers they are really looking for. There should be something bigger, stronger, deeper, beyond us. And again, the gospel is the only true answer. When people see a gospel-centered community, it's such a huge difference from formal religious institutions. They want to come and see this multi-ethnic group of people loving each other and having something unique that you can't experience anywhere else. Many people from established churches want to see such churches. So they try to revitalize, replant, or even plant new ones.
Stephan Pues:
Tim, let me ask you a question since you’re not from Europe. I remember during the City to City Europe conference, we had a conversation about how Europe is in a unique phase. It was different quite a few generations ago, when people were open to talk about religious things and share the gospel. And in certain places in the world today, it seems much easier to bear fruit. But now it seems like Europe is now in a drought in terms of sharing the gospel with our friends. You said something very hopeful in that conversation that I think would be helpful to hear again.
Timothy Keller:
Yes. I do think European evangelicals have something of an inferiority complex. There’s a temptation to think, “Oh, we're not very big.” They hear about things going on in China and Africa and Latin America and feel like they’re falling behind. But what I said to you that day was that you're actually pioneers in many ways. The challenge that's coming to the whole world is the challenge of secularism, which is very, very strong in Northern and Western Europe. And it's also there in Eastern and Southern Europe. And it's in North America. And it's also spreading to the biggest cities everywhere. So in terms of dealing with this obstacle, you're at the head of the curve.
Some years ago, I read a book by D. T. Niles, an Indian Christian who talked about the stone of stumbling. He thought that every faith had something they didn't like about the gospel. He said Hinduism stumbles over the incarnation. Islam stumbles over the cross. Buddhism stumbles over the resurrection. All of those faiths believe you need to be saved. But we've never faced what secularism gives you, which is a disbelief that we need salvation at all. In some ways, they even think that what they really need to be saved from is your effort to evangelize them. They need to be saved from people who think they need to be saved. And that is a really tough barrier that I don't think the Christian church has faced. It's not exactly like anything even the early church faced.
I find that European Christians are possibly more aware of history than a lot of other Christians around the world. They tend to be pretty analytical. They tend to enjoy theology. I think this challenge is going to take a lot of historical and theological thinking, and a lot of sociological thinking. It's going to take a lot of inventiveness to answer the question, “How do we share the gospel with secular people?” And because you are in the most secular part of the world, you're the laboratory. And therefore, instead of just saying, “Oh, it's hard to do,” you must do it! And you must teach the rest of us because, to some degree or another, the biggest cities of every part of the world are becoming very secular. You can go to the middle of Mumbai or Delhi, and those young urban professionals who are running the country will be Hindu in name, but when you press underneath that, you’ll find they’re a lot more European than their parents or grandparents. They're much more secular and individualistic.
So what you are facing in a strong way, the rest of us are facing in a weaker way. And we're all having trouble winning those kinds of people. We can win over traditional people, and even people in other religions. But when it comes to those hard and secular people, it's tough. So, I'm not saying it's going to be easy. But you're the pioneers. The Lord has put you in a position where you could actually exert leadership. Those of us who are, frankly, white and Western have to be careful not to think we're the leaders of the whole world’s Christian church. We're not. But we can serve the whole church. And this is one of the ways in which we can actually serve the world’s church.
Stephan Pues:
Evgeny, is that idea of leading other Christians in sharing the gospel with a secular culture hopeful to you?
Evgeny Bakhmutsky:
We're quickly heading towards the situation Tim just explained. I see more and more people in Moscow becoming secular, and people are hard to reach. We also have Russian Orthodoxy, Jewish, and Muslim populations, many of whom are increasingly secular. It's really such a unique situation. So we need to learn about them in order to be able to talk to them. We can give these people something valuable, but we need to learn much about them. I’ve found that the gospel can be accepted when it's understood, and in order to present it in an understandable way, you’ve got to understand your audience. If you understand the way they think well, you can present something to them well. It will be in a language they can comprehend.
Stephan Pues:
How can we understand secularized people’s interests, needs, and ways of thinking before approaching them with the gospel?
Timothy Keller:
Try to find out what the stone of stumbling is, where there's overlap between the culture and the gospel. For example, there's a lot of things that a Muslim would agree with a Christian, and it's also true for secularism.
In Tom Holland's new book Dominion, he shows how a lot of today’s secular moral values like human rights and caring for the poor are actually values that came from the Bible. What you want to do is start with the overlap and talk about the things you agree with. The way you reason with anybody is to say, “Do you believe this? I believe this, too.” And then we talk and we both agree. After that, you might say, “But if you believe that, then why don't you believe this?” Try to get to the things they don't agree with by starting with the parts they do agree with. You start in the place where you both agree and then you move into the place where you disagree, and then you argue on the basis of that. That's the reason why you need to understand secularism, or the culture of anybody you're talking to.
Panagiotis Kantartzis:
This secularization is interesting in Greece. We live in a country that tends to be very traditional—and it’s not just Greece, but many other Eastern Orthodox countries. Secularism is still under development. But strangely, we are far ahead of it because we are already a church that tries to evangelize in a context where the power structures are not helping us. They aren’t protective of the church, which is a feature you find in a lot of places in Northern Europe. Even the state is against us.
But strangely, secularism in our context is a good thing. In most Western places, it's a challenge that we need to face somehow. But we welcome it, believe it or not. Why? Because, in a way, its main thesis is to break ties with your traditions—which sounds like an opportunity to us, because people being tied to tradition is a big obstacle whenever we try to witness. So that presents us—and even other Western places in the world—new ways to evangelize. Even in the Netherlands, even in Germany, even in the United States, it gives you new opportunities to have authentic evangelism, not cultural evangelism.
Timothy Keller:
I remember that my parents moved to Johnstown, Pennsylvania many years ago. Johnstown was a heavily Polish-Hungarian, Catholic, blue-collar steel town. And if you tried to evangelize the older generations, they would say, “I'm sorry. I could never go to a Protestant church because I'm Polish.” But when you talked to the grandchildren in their teens or twenties, they had become more secular and felt more free to try other things out. In that sense, secularism can be good. There's another side in which it's bad, but there's always an advantage as well as a disadvantage for sharing gospel in every new cultural wrinkle. And it's our job to try to minimize the disadvantage and try to capitalize on the advantage.
Stephan Pues:
I want to ask a final question to the three of you. Let's take the visionary approach. Let's say that in a few years, the vast majority of European Christians are very motivated to share the gospel with everyone that they possibly could think of. What could happen if everyone shared Christ with people around them on a regular basis as the early church did?
Evgeny Bakhmutsky:
Whether it’s the spiritual awakening of a single soul or an entire city, revival is connected to individual gospel conversations. It starts with one person or group just doing what Christ’s disciples did long ago. Sometimes we think we’ve got to have something completely unique, but we already have the gospel and we have God himself in our sight. If every believer starts evangelizing now, the Holy Spirit will move him or her in the right direction. We're also not talking about evangelism just as a personal, private project, but a group effort for the community, as well. They will share, they will discuss, they will analyze. And we do hope that Europe experiences a real second awakening.
Timothy Keller:
When I was in seminary, I read a book by Michael Green, who was the rector at St. Aldate's Church in Oxford for many years and a great scholar of evangelism in the early church. He made the case that in the early church, evangelism didn’t happen through people bringing their friends to hear some great speaker. Nearly all evangelism was done through gospel conversations, ordinary people just talking to their friends. And he gave all the reasons why it actually wasn’t safe to bring non-Christians into church services sometimes.
I remember saying, “Oh, that's interesting.” And now I'm near the end of my life saying, “This is the only way forward in places like Europe, and increasingly in North America: non-believers have to be incubated, as it were, in gospel conversations with friends.” And at a certain point, they might get to a position where they can go hear the great speaker. But frankly, if even 10-15% of all European Christians started to get very intentional about gospel conversations, you would absolutely have another revival.
Stephan Pues:
Well, then let's do that. Let's find opportunities to motivate each other to have gospel conversations with everyone around us. I think the gospel is the greatest, most beautiful thing on this planet and that's why we want to share it. That's what City to City Europe is all about. Our vision is to create movements of the gospel. For this to happen in Europe, it would take exactly what we’ve been talking about today: gospel communities being intentional about sharing the gospel with everyone.
Learn more about City to City Europe’s Evangelism Project here.