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KEN CHITWOOD

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“The person who knows only one religion, knows none”
— Max Müller

That Europe May Know

September 16, 2024

The goal is audacious. But as far as James Davis, founder of the Global Church Network, is concerned, Christians need deadlines. Otherwise, they will never do what they need to do to fulfill the Great Commission.

His group gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, last September with 400 ministry leaders from across Europe who committed to raising up and equipping more than 100,000 new pastors in the next decade. The network plans to establish 39 hubs in Europe, with a goal of 442 more in the years to come, for training church planters, evangelists, and pastors to proclaim the gospel.

“A vision becomes a goal when it has a deadline,” Davis said at the event.

“So many Christian leaders today doubt their beliefs and believe their doubts. It is time for us to doubt our doubts and believe our beliefs. We will claim, climb, and conquer our Mount Everest, the Great Commission.”

Davis has a number of very motivated partners in this project, including the Assemblies of God, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), and the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. The network also counts The Wesleyan Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Foursquare Church, the Church of God in Christ, and OMF International (formerly Overseas Missionary Fellowship) as members of a broader coalition working to complete the Great Commission in the near future. If it turns out their European goal is a bit beyond reach, they will still undoubtedly do a lot between now and their deadline.

And the Global Church Network is not alone. In Germany, the Bund Freikirchlicher Pfingstgemeinden (Association of Free Church Pentecostals) has announced plans to plant 500 new churches by 2033. The group, celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2024, told CT it is currently planting new congregations at a rate of about seven per year. Raising up new pastors is key to its growth strategy. 

And the Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland (Association of Free Evangelical Churches in Germany) has planted 200 churches in the past decade. It has grown to about 500 congregations with 42,000 members. The Free Evangelicals also have plans to launch 70 new churches by 2030, at a rate of 15 per year, and then start another 200 by 2040. 

“Goal setting is a bit of a thing in Europe,” said Stefan Paas, the J. H. Bavinck Chair for Missiology and Intercultural Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam and the author of Church Planting in the Secular West.

He’s not convinced it’s a good thing for Christian missions, though. In fact, he doesn’t think ambition, verve, and goal setting actually work.

Paas’s research shows that supply-side approaches—the idea that if you plant it, they will come—seem promising and often demonstrate early success, but the results mostly evaporate. While it is widely believed that planting new churches causes growth, he said, that’s not what the evidence shows.

“Yes, newer churches tend to draw in more people and more converts, but they also lose more,” Paas told CT. “There’s a backdoor dynamic where people come into newer churches but then leave.”

He examined the Free Evangelicals’ membership statistics from 2003 to 2017 and found that church plants often correlated with quick growth but then slow decline. 

“It’s one thing to draw people, and another thing to keep them,” he said. 

Read the full story
In Church Ministry, Missiology, Religion, Religion and Culture, Religion News, Travel Tags Christianity Today, Eisenach, StartUp Kirche Eisenach, Liechtenstein, Austria, Switzerland, Buchs, Church planting, Church planting in Euro[e, Church planting in Europe, Europe, European evangelicals, Evangelicals, Stefan Paas, Van de Poll, FeG, Free evangelicals, Federation of Free Evangelical Churches, Germany, Vaduz, Mike Clark, Paul Clark
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Students take part in diversity and language training in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. (PHOTO: Ken Chitwood)

Students take part in diversity and language training in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. (PHOTO: Ken Chitwood)

Dealing with Diversity in Europe’s Classrooms

March 16, 2021

Across Europe, teachers are coming to terms with increasingly diverse classrooms.

While diversity has long been a feature on the continent, a growing medley of religious, cultural, and linguistic influences — brought on by international and intra-Europe migration — has created both opportunities and challenges across Europe’s educational landscape.

According to a 2017 European Union report, increased numbers of refugee, asylum seeker, and migrant children — as of January 2019, 4.9% (21.8 million) of the European Union’s (EU) 446.8 million residents, were non-EU-27 citizens — have placed pressure on schools and teachers to “re-consider their everyday practices and strategies to meet” a range of diverse learning needs.

As teachers aspire for full participation from all pupils, recent studies suggest that public issues of intolerance and social exclusion are showing up in schools as well.

Taking these challenges into consideration, a group of experts at a December 2017 workshop on Interreligious Education in Europe in Vienna, Austria, co-hosted by KAICIID, decided to establish the Network for Dialogue.

Djuríc Milovanović: "Active Policies For Newcomers In Host Society Are Required"

Made up of members of top religious groups, civil society organizations, and higher education institutions, the Network for Dialogue is a Europe-wide, KAICIID-supported platform engaging a range of policy issues related to refugee integration and interreligious dialogue.

KAICIID's lead representative with the Network for Dialogue, Dr. Aleksandra Djurić Milovanović, said migration statistics and worrying reports about social inclusion, “require active policies for newcomers in a host society.”

Formal education, she said, is a crucial component of this process. “Gaps exist at many levels, but we are aware of particular shortcomings and current challenges in formal education settings,” said Djurić Milovanović Already, there are grassroots dialogue efforts that are aiming to fill those gaps, said Djuríc Milovanović. “However, not all of them are linked to the formal education structures or able to bring change at the policy level,” she said.

The Network for Dialogue is working with these groups and individuals, supporting their initiatives and helping them collaborate with policymakers.

“In order to bring about substantial change, these voices from the ground need to provide recommendations and advise policymakers in creating schemes and implementing strategies at institutional levels,” said Djurić Milovanović.

There are a variety of challenges that policymakers and practitioners need to face, she said.

“Despite increasing diversity in European classrooms, teaching and other educational professions tend to be fairly homogenous and teachers often lack training in intercultural and interreligious awareness and skills,” she said.

Because of this, Djurić Milovanović said, “migrant students lack sufficient support to cater to their needs and often display lower academic resilience and are at higher-risk for anxiety and struggling with psychological wellbeing.”

In a draft policy brief, the Network for Dialogue recommended several next steps to address such obstacles. These included proposing that educational leaders should engage parents of migrant children in school activities as equal partners and not only as beneficiaries, fast-track qualification and accreditation schemes for teachers with migrant and refugee backgrounds, and the creation of curriculum and training programmes on cultural diversity, religious literacy, social inclusion, intercultural education, and interreligious dialogue.

Waseem Haddad, KAICIID Programme Manager for Iraq and Syria, is encouraged by the Network for Dialogue’s work in Europe and recommendations for the future.

Education, he said, constitutes a primary space for the formation of identity.

“Critical thinking skills, awareness of diversity, and the practice of informed decision making, and civic participation can be acquired and practiced at this level,” he said, “If these skills and values are not transmitted in education, adults and children will face major challenges in accepting difference and celebrating ethnic, religious and cultural commonalties.”

Haddad also emphasised the importance of religious education in developing a generation’s recognition and acceptance of “the other” regardless of differences in religion, language, or culture.

To that end, both Djuríc Milovanović and Haddad might be encouraged by a new initiative in Austria.

Austrian Pilot Project Supports Christian-Islamic Team Teaching In Schools

Funded by the Austrian Scientific Fund (FWF) for a period of three years, the “Christian-Islamic Religious Education in Team Teaching” pilot project was developed to support Christian and Muslim teachers teaching their religious education classes together, at the same time, in the same classroom.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Weirer, theology professor at the University of Graz and leader of the project team, said that while there are no “typical lesson plans” — as each lesson is planned by the teachers themselves — both similarities and differences between Christianity and Islam are addressed.

“In this context, it is important for us that the pupils experience in class that religion can be discussed in an appreciative way and that differences do not have to be faded out,” he said.

The aim of this mutual encounter, Weirer said, is “to question prejudices through the encounter with people from different religious backgrounds and, if necessary, to reduce existing fears and discrimination.”

In addition to supporting the project’s teachers, Weirer and his team analyse additional aspects of interreligious education, including legal opportunities and frameworks to conduct interreligious cooperation initiatives between different schools, competencies and attitudes of teaching personnel, and learning conditions that must exist in order to encourage encounters between students of different religious backgrounds.

“Education does not necessarily promote social inclusion, but can also contribute to segregation”, Weirer said.

To encourage the former and prevent the latter, “it is a matter of developing targeted educational programs that promote pupils in their respective strengths and contribute to equal opportunities,” he said. “School can thus become a place where peaceful and constructive coexistence in a plural society can be experienced.”

For her part, Djurić Milovanović believes such experiences not only enrich the classroom, but society at large. She believes efforts like that of the Network for Dialogue or the pilot project in Austria can create a “chain of positive change.” “All these small micro changes in the classroom of one teacher may seem irrelevant or very small or invisible,” said Djuríc Milovanović, “but we need to empower teachers to feel like they're a crucial element in bringing about positive change in society.”

“Teachers need to have the perspective that encounters with diversity in the classroom can open up a space for dialogue” she said, “and they play a vital role in teaching dialogue to not only their classroom, but to the continent as a whole.”

Read the original piece at KAICIID.org
In Religion and Culture, Religion News Tags Diversity, Social inclusion, Europe, KAICIID, Austria, Djuríc Milovanović, Christian-Islamic Religious Education in Team Teaching, Wolfgang Weirer
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