At the recent Train 1000 launch event I had the privilege of learning from the Malawian missiologist and church planter, Dr Harvey Kwiyani who spoke brilliantly on reaching Europe for Christ.

I took some notes from his message which I wanted to pass on to you. Be blessed and provoked as you read these words.

“Europe may be the hardest mission field on the world. Why? Because people have walked away from Jesus. It’s not like other places where they have never heard his name. We are trying to do something that has never been done before - to re-evangelise a previously evangelised continent.

Europeans have gone against human nature. Humans are by nature spiritual. But Europeans have walked away from this.

If we go back 500 years Europe was Christian. The Roman Catholic church ruled over Europe.

Then the reformation happens through Martin Luther and others. The Protestant part of the church now emerges. Immediately there is religious conflict in Europe. Actual physical conflict. This goes on for years. By 1619 this has grown to the 30-year war. Europeans fighting each other over doctrinal issues. Some scholars estimate that 30 percent of Europeans died in these wars.

People sat down “religion is killing us - let us build on science.” Anything that looked like religion was now relegated to the private space. Along with it you can’t talk about spiritual things, you can’t talk theology.

It’ll take 100 years for theology to re-emerge as ‘the queen of the sciences’.

400 years later we end up with a continent that is so scientific that religion does not make sense anymore. You even have Christians whose theology is science - completely disconnected from anything to do with the spirit.

That is where we find ourselves.

Europe needs a fresh encounter with the gospel. It’s actually a lot easier for non-Europeans to evangelise Europeans.

The shift of worldview to having no framework for the spiritual to having an ability to grasp things of the spirit does not happen overnight.

I am from Malawi. People will wake up in the morning and say ‘I had a dream last night - now I am a Christian.’ One young man I knew was the most notorious in the neighbourhood. One day he comes to me and says ‘I heard a voice last night that asked me ‘do you have a bible 3 times’. Each time I replied ‘no I don’t have a bible.’ Then the voice said ‘just kneel down and pray.’ The next day he came to find me ‘What does this mean?’ I led him to Christ - he’s now one of the key leaders in Malawi.

When you plant churches and make disciples in Europe you are wrestling with spiritual powers that have not been messed with in centuries. The churches have not been disturbing the spirits. When I planted a church in Minnesota I was dealing with spiritual warfare unlike anything I had encountered in Africa. The spirits had not been disturbed for years.

A pastor came back from years working in India said he was shocked that the country (England) had sent him had fallen so far while he was away. The sad thing is the British church doesn’t seem to have realised what had happened.

The most crucial thing is dealing with the spirits. It’s opening up the spiritual atmosphere in a place so that people can hear the gospel without anyone having to evangelise them.

Just because you don’t believe that spirits exist does not mean they don’t exist. It just makes it easier for the spirits to manipulate us.

One thing I do with my friends who visit from around the world is take them to the shrine of Enfield. There is something spiritual there. Yet Europeans have convinced themselves in large numbers ‘there is no spiritual.’

God will send people to Europe. Europe needs church plants. Possibly more than sub-Saharan Africa. It needs a fresh evangelisation.

God is moving people here. Why? Europe can’t be left behind with what God is doing on the earth. I come from Malawi. David Livingstone hung out with my great, great grandparents! God is bringing people from those lands to come back and re-evangelise Europe.

Europeans evangelised the world as they moved as economic migrants for a better life but they took their bibles with them. They went to Zimbabwe for the diamonds and South Africa for the gold and Argentina for the land. But God used it to evangelise the world.

There is now massive migration around the world - and 47% of those migrants are Christian. (In fact in the UK in 2022 it was 58% who were Christian). God is going to use it again. It’s these people that are already on the move that carry their bibles and prayers with them that will play a massive role in the re-evangelisation of Europe through church planting. Let us learn from them. What is the gift that they bring to us? Yes people are moving for economic purposes. But even Westerners do that. In Acts 11 people were migrants fleeing from persecution who planted the church in Antioch. What thrived under Roman peace? Migration.

The future for the European church is going to be its ability to work with diverse communities. Homogeneity is slow death. Life is in diversity. You need to mix the gene pool for species to survive. That’s why you don’t marry your brother or sister no matter how good they look. God is mixing the gene pool. The future is in how well we work together.

Questions

Dr Harvey, How should we then begin the conversation with people who have no belief in spiritual world?

You begin in prayer! It is through prayer that you break the stronghold so that the spirit can be felt.

This thing is about the Spirit. You have to get people to encounter with the Spirit. We cannot just depend on logic. We have to wrestle in the spirit.

Every revival starts with prayer. History has shown us this. Sometimes it takes hours to get your breakthrough. It’s my heart cry that we will see that happen again in the UK. We will gather to pray not to talk about prayer.

Most African churches start the year with 21 days of prayer and fasting. That is how you break the heavens. Let your spirit groan. Pray in the Spirit and see what God will do.

So, if we want to see things happen in Europe we need to get praying first. It’s this belief that the world is bringing back to Europe. That prayer changes things. For most of us from around the world prayer is wrestling with the spirit world so that God’s will can be done on earth as it is in heaven.

This is where the issue of worldview comes into focus. In other places in the world we know that when we pray we are wrestling with spiritual forces. In southern Africa you know that how you succeed in life depends on the spiritual power behind you. If your spiritual power is not strong enough you know that you will meet resistance that you won’t be able to overcome. When you come to Christ prayer is increasing the life force behind you to overcome those contrary forces. When God begins to move he begins by getting people to pray.

The Moravian revival - 1730’s they start a prayer meeting that goes on for 100 years. From that small church in Bavaria they sent some of the first missionaries around the world. We need to pray.

Dr Harvey, have you seen any difference in people from different social-economic backgrounds?

The better advantaged Europeans are able to listen to the gospel. You can reason with them about the gospel. The lower classes are difficult to reach. Western Christianity as a whole is a middle class religion. There will always be a lot of hunger in the lower classes. But the church does not know how to respond to it. So they turn to other spiritualities. Back in 2023 there was some research about the faith lives of young British people. The conclusion was that young people are very hungry spiritually but when young people think about spirituality they do not think about the church as part of the answer.

 

How does the European Church up our game on these things?

Spend more time praying. The prayer meetings here are a lot of talking and not enough praying. I laugh at my western friends. They just cannot pray. They have a 90-minute prayer meeting and spend 15 minutes praying. So I say to you, SPEND MORE TIME PRAYING.”

Wow! What a provocation Dr Harvey was to us.

Let’s be provoked and changed as we listen to Dr Harvey’s words.