From Kate Shellnutt: I sometimes hear people refer to “secular Europe” or “godless Europe.” Though the declining levels of belief and church membership show no signs of slowing, especially in the UK and Western Europe, the broad characterization can flatten our understanding of the continent.
 
Even in places where evangelicals are a shrinking minority, the landscape can look very different from one country to the next. It’s not just the religious climate but also politics, population, and economics that can shape missions in European nations.
 
Take religion scholar and journalist Ken Chitwood’s recent series for CT. Ken lives in Germany and serves as our European correspondent. His latest articles cover a range of projects, “from a jazz church in Berlin to a struggling satellite in the world’s richest country.”
 
“Where some see ambition as key to evangelism, others experiment with subtler ways of connecting to people who don’t think they need God. This is my long-form story from Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Austria and right in my own backyard in Eisenach,” he wrote on X. “And then to Berlin, where an Australian couple is trying out a jazz church in one of the city’s cosmopolitan, working-class neighborhoods. For Donald Miller fans out there, I call this one ‘Berlin Like Jazz.’