When we meet them, we begin by showing them that there is a way of hope, because they all want to get out of their situation.

Part of our mission is house visits. We listen to them as they express concerns or worries, helping them to decipher letters, finances, doctor appointments. We often end by reading the Bible together, praying and singing to Jesus, which they love.

Churches and its Christians would do well to simply follow the example of Jesus Christ and his approach to power and to those isolated or excluded by it.

Our thinking, attitude, behavior with regard to Islam in Europe should be guided by God’s self-giving love manifested at the cross of Golgotha.

One of the main tasks of those involved in mission is to challenge the people to ask questions like “What does it mean to be a Christian?”

A recent EBF Mission Partnership conference in Georgia sought to ‘encourage, and inspire in ministry’ a group of indigenous church planters from Eastern Europe.

Are believers forming exclusively Romanian mono-cultural churches? Are they integrating into existing British churches? Are they joining in with multicultural churches that reflect Britain’s cultural and ethnic diversity?

There needs to be a radical and broad new level of commitment to common working.

Today’s multicultural European society seeks to integrate the foreigner yet often fails because of the differences that exist between cultures. We believe that this is a challenge that God is putting in front of the churches of today.

For the Muslim convert, the feeling of being at home includes the aspects of fellowship (“sharing things in common”), and growing into a sense of shared ownership as partners.

Putting to one side the hermeneutical questions around the identification of the EU with Bablyon, what is clear is that the demonization of the “other” inspires hatred not love.

If the current situation has encouraged mission agencies in Europe to ask questions again about their core business and the values of service, radical availability, and sacrifice, then God will continue to be glorified, even in the midst of political turmoil and uncertainty.

The extreme political right has simply developed a compelling narrative that weaves a dystopian mythology around the themes of ethnic dilution, conspiracy, migration, religious terrorism, and resource scarcity.

Some of the ways that evangelical organisations are taking up the global challenge of implementing creation care as a mission task.

The extreme political right has simply developed a compelling narrative that weaves a dystopian mythology around the themes of ethnic dilution, conspiracy, migration, religious terrorism, and resource scarcity.

“In the camp I started a prayer meeting, and preached the gospel – a kind of refugee church with a lot of young people began.” Vimal Vimalasekaran now serves among asylum seekers in Germany. 

One of the marks of the Reformation was the impulse to translate the Bible into the vernacular languages of Europe, so that the ploughboy could sing its words as he followed the plough.

This strategy does not seek out either receptive target groups, or the reproduction of a given church model or denomination; it does not try to impose a common methodology on the churches who adopt it.

Church planters must resist the temptation of assuming that growing churches provide generalizable models for growth elsewhere, and that the absence of ap­parent success in the present is a sign that God is not working. 

Do we demonstrate in our thinking, our words, and our actions that the formation of new communities of Jesus fol­lowers is God’s business in which we are privileged to participate, rather than something that we do on his behalf?

Too often church planters focus on the things that they can count easily, even when it blinds them to the more important transformative measures that correlate more closely with the biblical concepts of repentance and discipleship.