The wider picture

We’ve been posted to Athens to help develop a sustainable and effective witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ among students here, but with an eye to the rest of Greece. If you’re interested (and why wouldn’t you be? It’s a map!), you could take a look at this take a look at this which shows the locations of all the universities in Greece. Not included (yet, at least) are the technical colleges, of which there are a further 20 or so. These institutions represent a student population of something like 400000 students (give or take several thousand – it’s a fluid picture in a fluid nation!).

Let me give you a thumbnail sketch of the scene, as far as we understand it, at present, from the perspective of the gospel. (You may already have read or heard a version of this in other contexts.)

In Athens there are roughly 250000 students. Among this huge population, there are somewhere in the region of 50 who are involved in one way or another with the IFES movement. For many of them that involvement is limited to attending the annual conference. Perhaps 20 regularly-ish attend a weekly Bible study, and most of those 20 come along to monthly central gatherings.

(There are, we are told, many more believing students in the city, but most are part of churches with whom we have little contact. The word ‘evangelical’ here is a slightly blurred term. It most clearly refers to two denominations which both have the word ‘evangelical’ in their title, but therefore leaves out perhaps a larger number of believers in Pentecostal churches. Some of those are quite isolationist and are suspicious of para-church work, but some others are more open to cooperation. More effort needs to be made to encourage students from those churches to stand together with ‘evangelical’ students on campuses, but that’s another story, for another year or decade!)

From these numbers alone you can get a sense of the task facing the students! In every IFES movement students who follow the Lord are of course in the minority, and we can expect that to be the case until the end of the age. When I was a student in Birmingham we had between 200-300 regularly involved students, there were probably another 100-200 believers who were NOT involved in the Christian Union, and this was out of a student population of around 20000. That’s still a tiny minority, but at least we knew there were faithful people in each hall of residence, in every faculty. The 20 or so we regularly count on here are spread among nine different institutions, and perhaps 20 different sites.

They share a significant sense of isolation as believers, which partly explains the readiness among young Christians in Greece to down tools and head off to the many conferences and youth gatherings that are held. But evangelistically it’s extremely challenging!

That’s just Athens. If you’ve seen the map you’ll see the other locations. I don’t know details about most of them, especially in the far north (Thessaloniki, for example, does historically have a larger believing population, though statistically not by much). We do know, however, that in Volos where there have been Christian students in the past, there are now apparently none. We also know that in Patras, which again historically has had a more active IFES group, has a group of around 10 students who long for more support and input (we’re thinking of ways that we can try to meet that need from here, but anything we can do from here is going to be a drop in the ocean of need). And then there’s Ioannina, about which more in another post.

Some conclusions – first, this is Europe! Most people who read this are in the British Isles, where (if you believe the press) the church is rapidly shrinking. I’m not aware that God’s faithful people are really decreasing in number that much – actually we are encouraged by what we hear from friends around the country who see progress and growth, albeit slow. Thousands may be leaving mainline Protestant churches each week, but that’s probably not a terrible thing to happen, seeing as the gospel departed decades ago!

But across mainland Europe, the evangelical church is in a different situation altogether from the UK. We used to speak about east Birmingham as a bit of a desert, with vast estates completely unreached with the good news. We were aware of large areas of rural East Midlands with little or no witness to Christ in the form of local churches growing there, and families living in those areas would travel in to Nottingham or Leicester or Lincoln to meet believers there. Here in Greece, and I believe in almost every southern European country one can travel for hundreds of kilometres, including large towns, and not find a single evangelical church. It’s this Greece, this Europe, that we’re encouraging students to learn to take the gospel to, starting with campuses but with ever-increasing horizons.

Second, as a young person growing up in such a climate, it is humanly-speaking extremely unsurprising that there are so few with robust confidence to live boldly, publicly, faithfully as an ambassador for Christ. The ‘social fringe’ of the evangelical community is significant here. Many if not most of our students are more willing to consider attending a conference in another country, spending hundreds of euros and several days, than to invest a couple of hours in serious Bible study in a student group. But this is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.

We hope and pray and work for a radical change among the young people here, from subsistence as Christians to true discipleship, serious devotion to the Word, joyful obedience, and a gritty, long-term commitment to sowing the seeds that alone will lead to a harvest in this barren nation, and thinking as widely as the gospel requires, to the ends of the earth.