In extremity, opportunity

BRUSSELS—Adel, a Syrian Christian from Aleppo, made his way with his wife across Europe this summer as more than 1 million refugees have done in the past year. The daily trauma of bombings and attacks plus shortages of food, medicine, and other necessities had made life unbearable for the couple in Syria’s second-largest city, a center of manufacturing and commerce now reduced in nearly every sector to unnavigable heaps of rubble.

“We are paying the price for others fighting World War III on our land,” Adel said.

A spiraling death toll in that war—more than 470,000—has prompted nearly 5 million Syrians like Adel and his wife to flee. (WORLD is not using their last names in order to protect family members who remain in Syria.) Reports of harassment and other trouble in the crowded camps of Turkey and Jordan, especially for Christians, plus reports the UN was running out of money to supply food to those camps, helped provoke the mass exodus that took Syrian refugees and others to Europe one year ago.

Adel said he knew Europe would not be paradise. After all, it’s not their home, and he and other family members hung on in Aleppo through nearly five years of war because Aleppo was. What he was unprepared for was European cities to feel familiar: The prevalence of strict Islamic dress on the streets of Brussels and elsewhere took him back to where he’d come from.

“For more than 10 years in Aleppo we see the rise of radicalized Muslims, more men wearing beards and women in full burkas. Now we are seeing many like them here,” he said, waving his hands toward the streets of the Laeken neighborhood in northwest Brussels. “It makes you scared for the future of Europe. If they burn Syria, they will burn every place in the world. I know many good Muslims, but I am talking about the terrorist Muslims.”

‘We cannot solve this crisis, but they are in our town and now our neighbors, so we have a responsibility to show hospitality.’ —Janet Bac

Laeken is home to the Royal Palace, the official residence of the royal family, and also home to some of the city’s rapidly multiplying Muslim population. Hookah bars and halal restaurants front streets alongside traditional European cafés. The number of Muslims living in Brussels is approaching 1 million—or 25 percent of the population, a percentage that has doubled in the last decade. By 2030, some experts estimate, Brussels will become the first majority-Muslim city in Europe.

The latest wave of mostly Muslim migrants spiked in September 2015 between terrorist attacks—including January and November 2015 attacks in Paris and a March 2016 attack in Brussels. The perpetrators matched the profiles of the new migrants, typically male and in their 20s. They would turn out to be EU citizens and hardened jihadis with ties to ISIS, the children of previous immigrants, all leading to the logical question: What potential terrorists might be lurking among the latest arrivals?

A spate of July attacks in Germany confirmed those fears. A knife and hatchet assault on a train near Würzburg, injuring five people, a knife attack in Reutlingen killing a pregnant woman, and an attempted suicide bombing in Ansbach wounding 15 all were carried out by newly arrived Muslim asylum seekers. In Munich, an Iranian-German with dual nationality killed 10 in a mass shooting the same week.

The rise in terrorism has sparked a political revolt among many Europeans. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, cheered a year ago when she gave her first “Let’s welcome them” speech, now faces the most serious challenge to her 11-year tenure as head of the EU’s largest country. A year ago she drew comparisons to Mother Teresa, but now Merkel is mocked as Lügenkanzlerin, or “Chancellor of Lies.” Opposition within her own party puts her in danger of losing her long-standing and prevailing majority in Germany’s parliament, even ahead of 2017 elections.

Anti-refugee sentiments in Britain were a large factor in a June referendum vote to exit the EU, and polls show the initial welcome has turned to rejection across the continent. In Germany, according to an August analysis by Pew Research Center of data from Eurostat, 67 percent disapprove of the EU’s handling of the refugees.

THE POPULAR REVOLT against migrants stands in contrast to the welcome they are receiving in German churches. Many are playing crucial roles in assimilating asylum seekers—who numbered 442,000 in 2015 in Germany—finding along the way the migrants may spark revival in Europe’s stagnant Christian community.

American Stephen Beck has been a church planter with Greater Europe Mission for 11 years in Germany, seeing marginal church growth until he began to notice a rise in refugee arrivals in 2012. Beck grew up in Germany as the son of missionaries, and after time in the United States and Canada moved back with his wife. His plan was to teach at a seminary in Giessen and with students plant a church in the Frankfurt area. But a heart attack in 2010 gripped him with more urgency for church planting. His vision: “a church that is all-inclusive of other nations, not purely German.”

German congregations are “almost always monocultural,” Beck said, despite the country’s mosaic of immigrant groups. Most date back to a post-war wave of Turks, Greeks, Eastern Europeans, and Africans, all encouraged to come in the 1960s and ’70s to replace the ranks of male laborers depleted by Germany’s outsized death toll in World War II. Working with students and faculty from Giessen School of Theology near Frankfurt, Beck sought to start “mono-multicultural” churches—not churches seeking diversity for diversity’s sake but where nationals, or resident Germans, took on responsibility “for opening their hearts and the church’s doors to people of all nations,” said Beck. “This requires reconciliation through the power of the gospel.”

In 2012 one of the earliest of these church plants saw its first Afghan refugee, who arrived as a newly converted Christian. “He kept bringing more Afghans, one Muslim after another, then Iranians. Some took two-hour train rides to come,” Beck said.

Before long the German-language services were also translated into Farsi. Messages had to be explained for the refugees, who didn’t know German and weren’t familiar with the Bible. “The strange thing is, everything slowed down, and the Germans in the church lit up,” said Beck. “They loved what was happening.”

From that model grew 10 church bodies now operating under the name Mosaik in the Frankfurt region, the second-largest metro region in Germany, plus a network of 120 pastors across Germany looking to plant new “mono-multicultural” churches.

The influx of refugees last year, Beck said, was “a catalytic event.” Six of the 10 Mosaik projects have launched since 2015, some of them in difficult, Muslim-majority parts of the city and in areas near government-run refugee centers.

One, started six months ago, was called on to baptize new converts before it held its first formal meeting. The church plants likely begin informally, for example, with a lamb barbecue to welcome neighbors, a gathering where newcomers “ask all their religious questions,” said Beck. At one such event 70 newly arrived refugees showed up—Iranians, Afghans, and Iraqis, including a family who tried to convert to Christianity before fleeing ISIS in Mosul in 2014 but did not find a church home until arriving in Frankfurt.

From there Mosaik congregations are involved in refugee services, trauma counseling, language training (often using the Bible), and equipping young people to work with refugee teenagers in their schools.

“Where churches have a role to play, it really makes a major difference in the resettlement experience, even though the number of refugees to the number of church members sometimes is 10 to 1,” said Janet Bac, a researcher and teacher in the Netherlands who conducted surveys of area churches and refugee communities over the past year. In contrast to problems posed by asylum seekers reported in the daily headlines, she said her surveys indicate “refugees are a gift to the churches.”

While visiting church groups and organizations working in refugee centers, like Germany’s Church in Action, Bac said, she heard over and over, “We cannot solve this crisis, but they are in our town and now our neighbors, so we have a responsibility to show hospitality.” From that commitment grow opportunities for assimilation, evangelism, and perhaps even intervention to stop violence.

Church groups active among refugee communities are particularly alert to challenges faced by Christian asylum seekers. In Belgium, authorities placed an Iranian couple I spoke to, both recent converts to Christianity, in a refugee center in Lindbergh. Officers assigned them to live in the same rooming space with a Muslim family. The more numerous Muslims pressured and regularly taunted them, saying, “Only Allah is good.” One evening an Afghan in the center threatened to kill the husband if he spoke to others about their threats, until a church group helped relocate the couple (WORLD is not using their names at their request, due to the threats). “I know all Muslims are not bad,” the husband said, “but sometimes there are tensions in the centers.”

An Open Doors Germany survey of Christian refugees, most of whom were Muslim-background Christians who had converted in their home countries, found nearly a third had faced insults or bodily harm at the hands of fellow refugees in asylum centers, while 73 of 231 who filled out questionnaires said they had received death threats. The majority said Christians and Muslims needed separate accommodations and education in their religious rights under German law.

These are areas where churches can take action, said Duane Unruh, who serves with ReachGlobal in Ghent, Belgium. For churches taking on even one refugee family, he said, resettlement work is difficult and a challenge to “our routines” and “our affluence”: “God is giving us an opportunity to turn from our self-sufficiency because we need encouragement from each other to do this work.”

Stephen Beck agrees: “The issue of refugees might create wide rifts and fear in the wider culture, but in the church we are finding it is bringing us together.”