Recently I returned from about 17 days on the Continent of Europe. No, I wasn't travelling or bumming around. I was there on a project.
The first ten days I spent in Vienna, teaching a university class and hanging out with various representatives of Projekt Geminde. Project Gemeinde, which literally means "Project Community" in German, is a unique example of "incarnational" ministry in the heart of that old imperial city that has always been Central Europe's cultural and artistic showcase outdistanced only by Paris. Projekt Gemeinde is run by Walter and Andrea Klimt (yes, Walter's actually a descendant of Vienna's most famous cultural icon (next to Mozart of course), turn-of-the-century painter Gustav Klimt. Walter is executive secretary of the Austrian Baptist Union, and Andrea is finishing her doctoral degree and doing teaching at the University of Vienna. Projekt Gemeinde is a student house donated years ago to the Austrian Baptist Union by a "Baptist nun". Yes, you heard me right. In Eastern Europe there really are "Baptist nuns". They're mainly aging widows who dedicate what's left of their lives to Christ and service to him.
Projekt Gemeinde is more than a "church." It's also a community center for students in the house and at the world-famous University of Music and the Performing Arts, which is right next door. The facility is also shared by a community of Middle Eastern Christians who had to flee their home countries because of persecution by Islamist governments. Projekt Gemeinde is also involved in what in German they call Herzwerk (literally, "heart work"). It's as much the hands as the heart, because one of their central initiatives involves working with street prostitutes who have streamed into Vienna from Eastern European countries, particularly those as far as the Ukraine which are not yet part of the EU. The prostitutes have been victims of human trafficking and are virtual slaves to their handlers. Many from the female leadership of Projekt Gemeinde spend once a week on the street with the ladies of the night. They do not "witness" in the sense most American evangelicals are used to. They get to know the prostitutes, cultivate relationships with them, then seek to entice them out of the street life into meaningful lines of work.
Andrea, however, had a powerful point about such Herzwerk for those in the US who mainly give lip-service to incarnational or relational ministry. Unless you are both humbled and changed by the relationship itself to someone, who is "in need" or on the "other side" of what would be considered a morally respectable Christian life, through sharing their world and their pain (in other words, if you look at the prostitute simply as the "poor dear" who needs to be "saved" in some formulaic sense), you are not prepared to do his work. In other words, God transforms both the "saved" and the one who is involved in the "saving." We can of course think of Jesus' example in the case of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11). That mutual transformation is ultimately the "good news" of salvation.
One of the big myths among American evangelicals about Europe in general, and Austria in particular, is that it is "spiritually dead" and that they "just don't respond" to evangelism. Only a very small percentage of Europeans actually go to church, at least in terms of what we would understand by the expression, but that well-known factoid, when you unpack it, may tell us more about ourselves than about the Europeans. Austria, for example, where Christianity is as old as the Roman empire, has acquired the undeserved reputation as "the missionary's graveyard."
Austria may be a cemetery for traditional "missionary" projects, but that's mainly because most American missionaries treat their efforts over there with a completely wrong mindset. Can you really expect highly cultured and cerebral people to buy into the Joel Osteen sort of approach, which is what the American evangelical establishment usually forks out the dollars for? It's like calling Silicon Valley a tech-salesman's "graveyard," especially if somebody's trying to get venture capitalistists to put up significant money for a company that would specialize in dial-up connections.
Right now, I am told, the prophets of "church growth" are peddling the following type of sales pitch in Central and Eastern Europe. "You're a small and beleagured group of Christians who don't know how to reach out to the big audiences. You just need money, marketing expertise, and more showbiz savvy. We can help you." It kind of reminds me of the siren song that the human traffickers give to poor farm girls from Rumania or Bulgaria. "Come with me to Vienna and I'll make you a supermodel." Yea, right. Unfortunately, like the poor farm girls, many small churches fall for it.
Central and Eastern Europe, however, does seem to be a fertile field for the new kind of missional Christanity. What do I say that? I say that because in the final analysis becoming "missional" is the opposite of undertaking some sort of "packaged" or preconceived program of "telling people about Jesus." Missionality is about imparting the message through the relationship. As Marshall McLuchan famously said, "the medium is the message." The Christ-relationship is the Christ-message. At the same time, missionality is not simply "hanging out" with somebody until you're ready to pop the question, "okay, you really need Him, don't you." A Christ-relationship involves discerning powerfully and acting intentionally to enable Christ to work through the relationship so that a true transformation takes place, not just the transformation of one's self but the transformation of the world. As Paul says, we must be "confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." (Philippians 1:6). To become missional we have to assume the Christ-posture, which is openness, humility, and confidence of the power of God to work in us and in the situation in which we find ourselves. To be Christians we must be "as Christs," Luther memoraby put it, to each other. The emphasis is on "each other."
Now all that is a roundabout way of pointing out that to be missional means we have to "assume the posture" in every set of circumstances into which we stumble, or into which we are led. If we don't live a life of relationality, we can't be Christ-followers and Christ-sharers. In Europe relationality is not something you have to work at. It's already there. People live in relationality, even if it's not a Christ-infused relationality, wherever you go. Consider the prevalence of pubs, or the beer-halls in Germany and the wine-cellars of Austria. Did you know that most Protestant hymns were originally drinking songs from pubs for which the lyrics were changed to words of praise and celebration of God's might and grace?
There's nothing inherently "Christian" or "non-Christian" about going into a pub. Because of America's own early social legacy of rampant alcholism on the frontier and in the working class slums, along with the temperance movement, many denominational movements began to identify alcohol as "demon rum" and the number one source of spiritual oppression, which they then codified into a theological position. That position, however, has no basis in Scripture, and like so many American obsessions is a cultural or "values" issue, not a spiritual or a Biblical one. If you're "sharing Christ," you always go where the people are. Europeans also tend to be more open to conversations at all levels, and that is where missionality can really begin. Missionality is not prepping the "mark" in order to deliver the punchline. It involves opening up a space of true authenticity between people so that God can work, sometimes amazingly and sometimes even miraculously.
To make a long story short, I experienced a lot of unexpected "Christ moments" in various situations among all those "pagan Europeans" supposedly wandering in spritual darkness. At Projekt Gemeinde I experienced "Christ community" in ways that one rarely experiences it in the United States. Maybe that is because if you're a marginalized minority in terms of the culture at large, you don't need to work at it. You're either the real deal or you're not. And if you're not, it's hard to pretend. While in Austria I had an unexpected personal sorrow take place with someone in the US I was once close to. Nobody tried to play the game of "saying the right Christian things to me" when they learned about my grief, or in one case seemed to know without me even saying anything. They were there for me in a soft-spoken but overwhelming fashion. That's all you can really expect from an "incarnational" situation. The words don't really matter; it's the unscripted mediation of God through that kind of fellowship.
The next post will discuss the last ten days of my trip in Amsterdam. Different people, different circumstances, different outcomes, but confirming of everything I've mentioned above.
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