The Pilgrims and Priests of the Changing West
The following is an excerpt from an interview with missiologist Stefan Paas on City to City’s How to Reach the West Again podcast. In the discussion, Paas brings a hopeful look at our mission as exiles in secular culture and in cities in particular.
Paas is the author of Pilgrims and Priests: Christian Mission in a Post-Christian Society, which he and interviewer Brandon O’Brien reference often in the following conversation.
BRANDON J. O’BRIEN: Stefan, you currently study church planting and missional movements in secular Western culture. How did you end up in that topic of study?
STEFAN PAAS: It’s been a bit of a winding road, actually. I earned my Ph.D. in Old Testament studies and was planning on a career in biblical studies. But at the same time, our family had planted a church and were invited by a couple of churches in the neighborhood to work with people with issues that hindered them from attending regular church services—psychiatric problems, poverty, fear of people, and so on. That was our first experience in that kind of mission.
Then, I started working for a church as a consultant on evangelism. I started writing books on evangelism, basically just by learning on the road and reading about it. That's how I developed myself into more of a missiologist. After that, I was invited to apply for chair of missiology at a university, and the rest is history. I've done all sorts of jobs before that, including painting and washing windows. But the golden thread through all that has been my continued interest in missionary evangelism. I'm the kind of practitioner who wants to think about what he's doing, so I was always a reflective practitioner in those roles.
BJO: We're tackling difficult, complex topics of mission and evangelism in secular culture. I think quite often, especially in the United States, diagnosing the spiritual climate of the secular West can be very bleak. We tend to see the state of things as bad and getting worse. How would you summarize the spiritual climate of the secular West both in general and in your context of Northwest Europe?
SP: To be honest, I find it a very difficult question. I think where you come from theologically determines how you look at it. If you're from an Anabaptist background, you tend to look at Europe as though it has never really been Christianized. If you come from a People's Church background or a Presbyterian background, you may think it is sort of Christian. All throat scraping aside, I'd say Europe boasts Christian culture in the sense that we experience a lot of institutions and practices in Western culture that broke off from Christianity at some point and radicalized but are still recognizably Christian in some way.
For example, take the response of the Dutch government against the COVID pandemic. What we saw was a great shared concern about the weak and those who were very vulnerable to the disease. I'd say that is not a pagan impulse. That's something that we learned on the way in the past two millennia, probably because of centuries of preaching and gospel-sharing.
So, that makes this whole discussion of “What is the West?” so difficult, especially when it comes to the spiritual condition.
sense-making is a lot of what I try to do as a theologian. I try to find responsible narratives—responsible in the sense of being faithful to what Jesus and the Apostles taught us—and also being realistic when it comes to our culture in order to build a story of hope.
I'm constantly surprised, I must say. For example, my current mission is doing a podcast together with a journalist where we invite all sorts of guests—mostly non-Christians—and talk about spirituality, secularization, and the state of society. And what you see is actually a lot of mutual recognition. You share a lot of intuitions and feelings with people, and many of them are committed atheists or people who seem to be a bit past religious inclinations.
As far as I think Christian responsibility goes, our first responsibility is the church. And there is a risk in being too negative about culture, where the church becomes a reactionary force that is extremely polarized around issues of nationalism, Islam, the pandemic, you name it. It's almost everything. And they forget to love God and their neighbors. Usually, I'm not that concerned about culture. That, to me, is quite an abstraction. I meet a lot of people, and they're all different. What I am a bit concerned about is the church—not just the church emptying, but mostly the church's response and the response of church people against these developments.
BJO: I think it's a helpful insight that our ecclesial or theological tradition will at least influence the starting point for our thoughts on culture. I was reflecting recently that among many evangelicals, especially in North America, there is a recurring idea that previous generations were always better and we're continually slipping away from something. Historically, different generations put the blame somewhere else, so this is not unique, but there does seem to be an impulse to tell a declining story in evangelicalism.
SP: Yes, and I suppose that's not just evangelicals; that's probably private tradition. What we're talking about is not so much objective observation on analysis. We're talking about sense-making narratives. We try to make sense of our world. And we do that through the lenses of our own heritage and theology. But I think it's important to not be too closed off from other perspectives. We need to remain in dialogue with other Christians and non-Christians to be ecumenical.
I also explore this a little bit in my book on church planting. I discuss the thought that theological heritage, to a large extent, determines what I call “sense-making.” Sense-making, rather than analysis, is something we need. In the fourth chapter of my book Pilgrims and Priests, when I talk about exile, the question in the back of my mind when writing was, “What has God got to do with all this? How is God active in the secularization of our culture?” This is a daring question because most Christians would immediately say, "Well, of course, he’s got nothing to do with that. He's against it." But if that is true, if God is not present somehow in the secularization of our culture, then I think we are really in dire straits—it would mean that God has left us!
So, I'd say sense-making is a lot of what I try to do as a theologian. I try to find responsible narratives—responsible in the sense of being faithful to what Jesus and the Apostles taught us—and also being realistic when it comes to our culture in order to build a story of hope.
BJO: I've been ruminating on the essay “Culture and Conversion in Christian History” by Andrew Walls, where he talks about the fact that history marches on and things change, and the gospel has to reincarnate in whatever new culture it encounters. I hear a little of that in what you're saying—that if God is at work in secularization, that means Jesus can be incarnate in this reality. It may take a significant shift of imagination for us to see it, but there is activity, and we're not without hope.
SP: True. There is a sociological story of decline that should be taken somewhat seriously since we do see declining numbers of Christians in the West. But I'm not buying into the story that our culture is darker now than it used to be. Partly, because I believe that secular culture is also a post-Christian culture—it’s produced by Christianity to some extent. Our late-modern secular culture couldn't have come to be without Christianity.
And like I said, I learned that from reading, for example, Charles Taylor. He says in his essay on Catholic modernity that in late-modern culture we're dealing with intuitions and practices that have broken off from Christianity and radicalized because we've moved outside of Christianity. And though they've radicalized, even though it is not always a good thing, they're still recognizably Christian. That is what I think renders the missionary task so complex. We're not just dealing with a pre-Christian culture or a pagan culture. There is a new thing happening here, and we're still trying to feel our way around it. Often it's a bit embarrassing to see that in this culture, some aspects of the gospel seem to be understood better by those outside the church than by many people inside the church.
We're not just dealing with a pre-Christian culture or a pagan culture. There is a new thing happening here, and we're still trying to feel our way around it.
BJO: There are definitely places within the West that are still culturally Christian, more or less. Before your current post in Amsterdam, you lived in a smaller, less urban part of the Netherlands. How would you compare the experience of moving from a place that was less secular to a place that's more secular? What did you learn in that transition?
SP: Most people who have only a tourists' knowledge of the Netherlands think it's completely secular. This is true for some areas, but there's actually quite a strong Bible-belt area in the Netherlands running from the northeast to the southwest. You’ll find quite a lot of towns and villages there where large minorities or even majorities are still churchgoing.
I came from one of these places: a town in the southern part of the country. But in 2005, I went to Amsterdam with my family, and I noticed one of the most important differences was a social one. I mean, you know that there are non-Christians, of course. Even where I lived previously, it wasn’t that there weren’t any non-Christians—our neighbors and close friends weren’t all Christians. I had heard anti-Christian arguments and dealt with them in conversation before. But being in an anti-Christian social climate is different. In the Bible-belt society, it was a normal thing to be a Christian. What I learned when I moved to Amsterdam was that I am a social being as well as a rational being. I can deal with all sorts of arguments, but when you live somewhere where virtually no one is interested in what you believe and doesn’t even make an effort to refute it or criticize it, when what you believe is just completely irrelevant, that does something to you. I think all our arguments, all our thinking, is embedded in who we are, who we belong to, and is wrapped up with our feelings of self-worth, dignity, and acceptance.
I felt exiled. I felt like Daniel and his friends when they went to Babylon and were given new names. You feel like the social structure is telling you your God is dead, basically. “New gods are superior; greater gods are reigning here.”
The second part of living in a deeply secularized culture is that it also helps you refocus on what's really important in your faith. In places like Amsterdam, there are not the same issues of subtlety between theologies (which are truly a luxury in Bible-belt areas). Here, you're just happy if you meet a Christian, whether he's Roman Catholic or Pentecostal or whatever. Knowing someone who believes in Jesus is already a big blessing.
Schools, for example, are another issue. I’ve noted that in America, there's a lot of homeschooling. In Holland, we don't do that. So all children, Christian or not, are going to school. We do have Christian schools, but most of them are in the Bible belt. In Amsterdam, then, your children go to a school where they are one of the very few Christians. What you learn in an environment like that where there's very little institutionally or socially that supports you trying to raise your children up in faith is that your church family becomes very important. They create almost the only space where you can “speak Christian” and where you can read the Bible together and develop a Christian worldview.
However, my wife and I couldn't go back to the Bible belt, we don’t think. Sometimes we talk about it, but we have learned to appreciate that it is not always a bad thing for Christians to live in a secular environment. Like I said, you concentrate on the things that are really important. You get to know a lot of friends from other churches and have a lot of non-Christian friends as well. It makes your life much more interesting.
BJO: I resonate with a lot of that, particularly in my experience of moving to New York and raising children in the city.
I think it's pretty obvious what the consequences would be if I come from a Bible-belt region and I try to evangelize or disciple Christians in a secular, urban space where the mental framework and social structures of faith are missing. Thinking of the opposite situation, though, if you live in the Bible belt of the Netherlands and preach about the rampant secularization of society in a town where those realities are not really there, do you see a risk in that evangelistic approach?
SP: Well, obviously, there is a risk if your self-identity as a church becomes completely centered on being different or being against culture. I don't think that's what we're called to do. We're called to follow Jesus. And sometimes this could mean that we run counter to culture, and sometimes we just meet a lot of great people, Christian or not, who seem to act in the same ways we do.
I explain in the introduction of my new book, Pilgrims and Priests, that the work emerged from my being in a secular Western context—a city where only 3% of the population attend church at all, half of them being immigrant Christians from Africa and the other half mostly imported Christians from the Bible belt. That was the reality. And I expected that the book wouldn't be relatable to churches in Bible-belt areas, but the opposite was actually true. Many pastors read it and invited me to give a lecture or speak on the topic, and what I found was that the reality of deep secularization has not yet hit them, but they are very scared that it will happen.
If you visit a church, for example, in the place where I came from, what you see is a church full of people. And most of them are young. It looks very active in terms of religious presence, at least, but they are afraid that their town will secularize and they’ll lose their teenagers and all that. It's not a very realistic fear, but it paralyzes a lot of theology and spirituality.
I always try to help them see that the secularization that haunts them is not simply a bad thing; God is there as well. And he may have a plan with it. That is what I'm trying to help people understand through the Bible with its traditions of the diaspora and the narratives of exile. If Christians can no longer make sense of secularization, then secularization will likely have run its course; it’s at that point that our theological imagination will have secularized as well, and then what story do we have to tell?
BJO: The fear you just described connects with something you mentioned in your book: a sort of latent nostalgia in conversations about mission in secular society—a nostalgia for Christendom. I think when most evangelical Protestants think of Christendom, they think of Europe and Catholicism. We don't want that, but we do still kind of long for the cultural respectability and acceptance that we imagine from a previous age.
SP: One of the big questions of mission is, of course, “What's the purpose of it? What do we want to achieve when the mission is completed?” The general idea I put forth in my book is that in all sorts of missionary ideas and missionary ecclesiology is the implicit idea of Christendom: the idea that mission, somehow, in some way, tries to achieve a totally Christian society, either by individual conversions—just adding them up until everyone has converted—or by the transformation of cultural ideals to be Christian.
There's a lot to be said about that, but I go on to analyze six different church models. In all six of these models, they seem to assume that Christendom is more or less still present. One example would be the more liberal-minded Protestants or Catholics who still lean on the idea that our laws are somewhat influenced by Christianity.
On the other side of things, you have Anabaptism. Because of their strong sense of counterculturalism, they have this idea that Christendom is still more or less there as something to resist. The push against the lax, liberal, violent, military-supporting national church. I have a lot of sympathy for this mindset, as I explain in the book, but I'd say that Anabaptist ecclesiology makes the mistake of thinking that really secular people will understand what you—the person on mission—are doing there. From a missional perspective, Anabaptist ecclesiology seems to assume that if you're part of a Christian compound or a counter-cultural group in a secular space, there is still a sort of vaguely Christian understanding or inclination around it that recognizes what you are doing with your radical Christianity, and somehow—maybe reluctantly—respects it.
What we're doing in mission is building signs for the kingdom, and sometimes signs are temporary. Like a sandcastle on the beach. It's beautiful, and you have a lot of fun when you’re doing it. In one way or another, it may also present some comfort and blessing—something genuine. But it's not always there to last.
These and a few other church models seem to assume in one way or another that Christendom is still present, and then there are a few others that seem to assume that Christendom is broken, that it has crumbled away and we need to restore it. Take, for example, church growth. If the purpose of mission is numerical church growth, you can do the math and achieve your missional purpose when every person in the world has become a Christian—the world becomes the church. What is that other than Christendom?
Now, of course, church growth theory is a very stripped-down kind of theory with its opposite perspective being more intellectual or institutional, more transformational. But in some way or another, I sometimes push my friends that go the more transformational direction and ask, "But when will this transformation be finished? What do we want to achieve?” Whenever something transforms, it can always fall back, or deconvert, in a way. That's why I like to use the language of signs; what we're doing in mission is building signs for the kingdom, and sometimes signs are temporary. Like a sandcastle on the beach. It's beautiful, and you have a lot of fun when you’re doing it. In one way or another, it also may present some comfort and blessing—something genuine. But it's not always there to last. In mission, especially in the secular West, you'll meet a lot of these kinds of missionary initiatives: they’re not without results, but often these results are very precarious, temporary, even disappointing sometimes—at least, disappointing from the perspective of large-scale culture change.
BJO: It's interesting you mention sandcastles. We interviewed Makoto Fujimura, a Japanese-American artist, and he uses the same image to illustrate that we make things because God is a maker, and we are made in God's image. But our creating is like making sandcastles—we make things that are temporary. They pass away, yet there's a promise at the end of Revelation that those good things that we make come back. Even so, we don't make them because we want them to last. We just make them, and then God in his sovereignty can bring certain things about or not. There's an interesting connection there in that metaphor.
SP: I like that image very much. And I would add that we don't even really know which things God will keep and which ones he won't. But I like the example you gave of this artist because I think the language of art is important to explore when it comes to mission. Art is about what has beauty and goodness in itself, rather than being functional towards some purpose that we have like growing the church or changing the world. There is beauty and goodness in doing mission, in serving people and witnessing about Christ and helping the poor, working for justice.
For me, it’s about doxology—glorifying God. That's a very reformed motive, which has always been helpful, personally. It sounds massive, dominant, and old-fashioned, but to me, it's actually the most liberating thing there is. If Christians worship God—if they doxologize, so to speak—what they say is basically nothing more or less than this: There is One who is just good. He’s not just good for something. He’s just good, period. And I think the same is true for everything that belongs to God or that reflects his being, everything that witnesses about him; it has goodness in it without being functional, without being subjected to all sorts of purposes that we have thought of like conquest or building up institutions.
There is One who is just good. He’s not JUST GOOD FOR SOMETHING. He’s just good, period. And I think the same is true for everything that belongs to God or that reflects his being.
So, the language of mission is very important. Throughout the 20th century, we saw a lot of military language. Even Donald McGavran, for example, in the middle of the 20th century, or even the 1980s, still used a lot of language about conquering, armies of missionaries, occupying. And then there's a lot of heroic language like shedding blood for Christ and dying and a sort of persecution complex at times. I'm quite critical about that because this kind of language also brings in pictures of enemies and of fighting battles. Not to mention there's the language of business, too, as of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, especially in North America. This sort of business language influences mission—setting targets, mission goals, et cetera. I think the language of art is a very important one to explore because art expresses exactly this, that some things have value in themselves.
Two biblical texts capture this well. One is Luke 15, which says there's joy in heaven about one sinner who converts (Luke 15:7). And the other one is Galatians 6:9, "Never grow weary in doing good." If we're evangelizing, running food banks, or working for justice in some way, I can guarantee you one thing: if you only have the goal of church growth in the back of your mind, you can't be happy about just one person coming to Christ. Heaven resounds with joy about them, but you can't. And the same is true for food banks and justice movements. You will grow weary very, very soon if you want to transform the entire world by it.
BJO: I believe you use the language of signs and foretastes in your book. Does that move us toward an alternative ministry model that doesn't rely on Christendom? If the solution isn’t a familiar conception of what the church is and what the church's relation to culture is, what's the fruitful alternative?
SP: I call it an exercise in spirituality rather than building a new model, so there is a missionary spirituality behind it. I already explained some building blocks of that, like talking about signs rather than setting big goals that need to be fulfilled. I mentioned doxology—doing things because they're good and beautiful in themselves. Learning to be joyful about the one convert. I also explore the metaphor of priesthood. And the last item, which for me has always been the most important one spiritually, is I explain that God is active in secularization.
What you learn is that God is much greater than you thought. He is God to the ends of the earth. You can know that mentally, but to really discover it and really spiritually experience it, it might be that you first must be brought into a situation of weakness and foolishness like the apostle Paul.
When I went to Amsterdam, I felt spiritually abandoned. I couldn't find God until I realized that, for me, he had been part of my former culture to an extent. Not only that, but God was so interwoven with the whole social dynamic of the Bible belt, when I was uprooted and the institutional presence of Christianity was weak, it was difficult for me to find God. So what I learned in a city was a deep spiritual awareness, partly by praying, partly by studying. And what I learned from the Bible—the books of exile like Daniel and Isaiah—is that it's not just that God is present in exile. No, it's even more.
Israel discovered that God is much greater than they had ever thought. If God is simply the God of your fathers or institutions, that can produce strong religion and strong identities. And I'm not saying that it is wrong in itself—but this often means your god is not greater than that particular environment. So outside of that environment, it's just darkness or enemy culture or persecutors. And then when you start living in exile, you lose a lot of those certainties, perhaps, but what you learn is that God is much greater than you thought. He is God to the ends of the earth. You can know that mentally, but to really discover it and really spiritually experience it, it might be that you first must be brought into a situation of weakness and foolishness like the apostle Paul.
BJO: You make the claim that our contemporary situation is probably closer to the biblical context of exile than to our parents' or grandparents' situation of Christendom.
As I started to reflect on that, I realized that the vast majority of the old Testament is exilic. Most of Israel’s timeline isn’t thriving and flourishing in their own land under faithful leadership—it's making sense of why they lost that and if they can get it back. You describe exile as something that isn’t monolithic; people experience it differently. There's the trauma of being taken, and there's the reflection on what that means both in the moment and for following generations. Tell us about that theme of exile and why it feels fruitful not just as a metaphor, but as a reality for Christians in the secular West.
SP: Two very conservative reform pastors in the Netherlands each separately wrote a book on judgment. They say secularization is a judgment from God. Modern Christians, they claimed, see secularization as a sort of problem to be solved, that it's a crisis in the original sense of the word “judgment.” They propose we need to pray and repent. Now, I'm an old Testament scholar, so I was thinking this sounded very much like Jeremiah or the book of Kings. Yes, God has punished us for our sins of the past via exile; I see that as a good, biblical sense-making narrative. And I do think the Western church has a lot to repent for—even looking back, we constantly rediscover new things to be sorry about.
But there's more to exilic tradition than a purely biblical, theological observation. Pastorally, when I did lectures or preached in churches in the country, I often received questions afterward from older people who had seen their children leave the church and were heartbroken about that. In situations like these, I don't really help these people if I tell them that God is punishing them. It is a story that's important to tell, for example, to self-confident establishments or perhaps church leaders who are in denial, but these poor people just need comfort. They need hope, not an extra slap in the face.
I started to look again at exile in the Bible, thinking from both perspectives. There is the punishment for sins and sins of ancestors, but there are also accounts of exiled people who truly did not know what they had done wrong. Take Psalm 74, for example, when they say, "God, you have abandoned us. What have we done? We've always served you. And now this?" These kinds of angry or hurt voices are also heard.
But Isaiah brings the great perspective that in exile, we rediscover who God really is. He's not just the God of our fathers; he's the God of the world. He's the God of Babylon. All these things together: the trauma, the reflection on history, the sort of anger against God, the rediscovery of who God is, the new horizons of faith, are all ingredients of the exilic experience, I think. And today you see exactly the same questions and discoveries among Christians.
The trauma, the reflection on history, the sort of anger against God, the rediscovery of who God is, the new horizons of faith, are all ingredients of the exilic experience, i think.
There may be a difference between generations, though. We see this in the book of Ezra when the new temple is built. The older people cry because they have seen the old temple and know that this new one is nothing compared to the old one. But the young people cheer. There's a nice observation in the text that says from a distance, you couldn’t distinguish the sound of cheering and the sound of crying (Ezra 3:13). So in a way, when you listen to the church in the West now, you hear a lot of crying, a lot of cheering, and we try to make sense of it. I'm not saying that I'm very good at it, but we can read the Bible and try.
BJO: It's interesting to use the language of exile because we have not been geographically removed from the places that we grew up. A lot of evangelicals feel is that we woke up as strangers in our own homes. What do we do now? Do the callings of pilgrim and priest give us a way to engage that proactively?
SP: We've talked quite a bit now about the pilgrims part of it—being a stranger, becoming alien, losing power. In the Bible, when you are a stranger like Joseph or Daniel or Queen Esther, it's not necessarily that you're discriminated against and persecuted all the time; you can become a minister or a queen or a viceroy. You can have quite a good career, actually, but it's vulnerable. It's fragile. It can be taken away from you at any time, so you're depending on the goodwill of others. You no longer run the show as Christians.
What I think is an important thing for me as a missiologist and as a practitioner is to rediscover a mission. What's our mission if we are no longer in control—if we do not have any realistic option of reconquering the West? I don't think that is our mission, so what does it mean to have a faithful missionary presence as a minority? That's where the priest metaphor comes in.
Building on the first letter of Peter in the New Testament where he tells his churches they are strangers and they are a priesthood, I think the priesthood is an excellent metaphor to explore a minority mission. By definition, priests are a minority. They're called out of the people to represent the people to God and represent God before the people. There's a sort of mediating function there.
What I can do here and now is accomplish my work as a priest and remain hopeful that God will bless it and use it and give some eternity to it.
It's helpful to think of what it means when you're the only one in your street, family, or neighborhood who serves the Lord and worships him. You're not just doing it for yourself; you're doing it as priests. And, of course, you invite other people to become priests with you. But even if they say no, which most of them do, then you still have this mission.
If you look in the Old Testament when the priests represent the people before God, they worship—they bring all of life before God: the sad things, the good things, the anger, the joy, all of it. And when we do this with our relationships with the neighborhood and our friends and our colleagues, when we listen to their stories and ask them, “Can I pray for you?” we bring it all to God. But priests don’t just worship. They also come to God to sacrifice. If you translate it to today’s context, I would say we are to bring the best of our culture before God.
And then there’s the other way around: representing God before the people. The priests teach the Torah in the Old Testament and they bless others. There are wonderful things to explore about what it means to practice mission by teaching and blessing people.
When I think about this mediating function of the priesthood, I think of those things. There's a whole network of activities that connect people to God and God to people through those called to be priests. To me, that's a hopeful and identity-giving metaphor as a Christian. When I teach people or give lectures in churches, I often meet people who are the only Christian in their family or street. So when I share ideas about growing churches or transforming society, these people just look at me and don't understand one word I’m saying. They don’t understand my situation. But when I’m speaking to those who are a bit hopeless or have lost courage and I say, “You're not just a single person who happens to be Christian. You’re not just the one fool in the family. You're a priest, and you're a priest for them as well,” it has a much greater impact.
BJO: I sense you have low anxiety about the situation we’re in, rather than a heightened anxiety of feeling like we’ve lost territory. Do you have a final word of encouragement regarding the anxiousness many practitioners feel?
SP: I would say there's a big difference between optimism and hope. When most people say they're hopeful, they mean they're optimistic. Some look at statistics and think, “If we all share forces or join together, we will do great things for the kingdom.” I'm not optimistic in that sense, but I'm hopeful. Lesslie Newbigin was asked once in his old age, "Do you have any optimistic ideas about the future of the West?" He responded by saying, "Well, I'm hopeful. Christ has risen."
In the end, that's the only answer I can give as a Christian. I'm extremely hopeful because Christ is risen. I'm not sure what the result of this hope will be, but I'm still expectant, curious, and full of hope about what God will do. He will probably surprise all of us, but that's not up to me. What I can do here and now is accomplish my work as a priest and remain hopeful that God will bless it and use it and give some eternity to it.
About the Author
Stefan Paas holds the J. H. Bavinck Chair for Missiology and Intercultural Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam, and he is an experienced evangelist and church planter in the secular context of Western Europe. He is the author of books such as Pilgrims and Priests: Christian Mission in a Post-Christian Society and Church Planting in the Secular West: Learning from the European Experience.