Christian Resurgence

"God is back in Europe's most notoriously liberal country. Or rather: The Dutch are moving back to God."

That's what Joshua Livestro wrote in The Weekly Standard’s "Holland's Post-Secular Future." According to the article:

When the "corporate prayer" movement first started in 1996, few people in Holland took any notice. Why should they have done so? After all, Holland's manifest destiny was to become a fully secularized country, in which prayer was considered at best an irrational but harmless pastime. That was then. Cue forward to 2006, when prayer in the workplace is fast becoming a universally accepted phenomenon. More than 100 companies participate. Government ministries, universities, multinational companies like Philips, KLM, and ABN AMRO--all allow groups of employees to organize regular prayer meetings at their premises. Trade unions have even started lobbying the government for recognition of workers' right to prayer in the workplace.

The idea that secularization is the irreversible wave of the future is still the conventional wisdom in intellectual circles here. They would be bemused, to say the least, at a Dutch relapse into religiosity. But as the authors of a recently published study called De Toekomst van God (The Future of God) point out . . . Holland is on the threshold of a new era--one we might call the age of "post-secularization." In their book, Adjiedj Bakas, a professional trend-watcher, and Minne Buwalda, a journalist, argue that Holland is experiencing a fundamental shift in religious orientation: "Throughout Western Europe, and also in Holland, liberal Protestantism is in its death throes. It will be replaced by a new orthodoxy."

I've been reading several articles like this recently--articles pointing out a resurgence in Christian faith in secular Europe.

In the Weekly Standard article, the author states several reasons why Christianity is returning to Holland, but he points especially to the phenomenon of The Alpha Course. This course was designed by Nickey Gumbel, a minister in the Anglican Church in England, and has become a worldwide phenomenon. Evangelical churches in the U.S. aren't familiar with it, but it's a hit in mainline churches (at least in the ones that still preach the gospel).

Gumbel's approach to interacting with seekers is the approach I intend to take with my study course, The Anchor Course (a happy accident that the names sound so similar!). I introduced the book by giving it away during a 9-week sermon series at Hillcrest in the Fall, but all along it was written to be a textbook for small-group study. I am planning to lead a couple of small-group studies this Spring. Want to be a part of one? Contact me!