COPENHAGEN – The “Amens!” flew like popcorn in hot oil as 120 Christian worshipers clapped and danced and praised Jesus as if he’d just walked into the room. In a country where about 2 percent of the population attend church regularly and many churches can barely fill a single pew, the Sunday morning service at this old mission hall was one rocking celebration.
Amid all the keyboards, drums and hallelujahs, Stendor Johansen, a blond Danish sea captain built like a 180-pound ice cube, sang and danced, as he said, like a Dane – without moving.
“The Danish church is boring,” said Johansen, 45, who left the state-run Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church three years ago and joined this high-octane interdenominational church run by a missionary pastor from Singapore. “I feel energized when I leave one of these services.”
The International Christian Community is one of about 150 churches in Denmark that are run by foreigners, many from Africa, Asia and Latin America, part of a growing trend of preachers from developing nations coming to Western Europe to set up new churches or to try to reinvigorate old ones.
For centuries, when Europe was the global center of Christianity, millions of European missionaries traveled to other continents to spread their faith by establishing schools and churches. Now, with European church attendance at all-time lows and a dearth of preachers in the pulpits, thousands of “reverse missionaries” are flocking back, migrating from poor countries to rich ones to preach the Gospel where it has fallen out of fashion.
The phenomenon signals a fundamental shift in the power, style and geography of the world’s largest religion. Most of Christianity’s more than 2 billion adherents now live in the developing world. And as vast numbers of them migrate to Europe, they are filling pews and changing worship styles.
Thousands of missionaries from countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, South Korea and the Philippines have come to Europe to set up churches in homes, office buildings and storefronts. Officials from the Redeemed Christian Church of God, a Pentecostal church based in Nigeria, said they have 250 churches in Britain now and plan to create 100 more this year. Britain’s largest church, run by a Nigerian pastor in London, attracts up to 12,000 people over three services every Sunday.
The trend is vivid in Denmark, where charismatic preachers from Africa, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, India, Iran and Latin America have set up vibrant Protestant and Catholic churches.
“When we became Christians in the East, we read the Bible and it said, ‘Go out into the world and spread the Gospel,’” Pastor Ravi Chandran told the congregation at the ICC’s hall here one recent Sunday. “And guess what? We came back to the West!”
Chandran, a youthful 42, grinned broadly as he looked out at the rainbow of worshipers.
“Can you say ‘Amen’ to that?” he asked, and Johansen, his wife and children joined the rest of the congregation in a thunderous “Amen!”
Back home after church, tucking into a lunch of traditional Danish open-faced sandwiches, Johansen said that for most of his life he hadn’t bothered going to services at the “state church,” as the Lutheran Church is known here.
“As kids, we were not allowed to make any noise on Sundays,” he said. The church seemed to him to place a higher value on order and ancient traditions than on tending to the concerns of parishioners. “The church didn’t add any value to me. It gave me nothing I could use in my day-to-day life.”
Danes joke that almost everyone in Denmark is Lutheran but almost no one is religious. On a typical Sunday morning, most of Denmark’s 2,100 parish churches are lucky to attract 20 worshipers each.
Karsten Nissen, one of the country’s 10 Lutheran bishops, said that a quarter to a third of all people in church in Copenhagen any given Sunday morning are attending a foreign-run service. “These churches are a gift to our Danish Lutheran Church,” Nissen said. “They open our eyes to a more human way of being Christians. It’s the way we were Christians 100 years ago – a very simple way, a good way, a more pious way, and a more open and happy way of worship.”
Denmark’s ambivalence on matters of faith spurred a national debate in 2003 after a Danish Lutheran priest admitted publicly that he didn’t believe in God. Church officials suspended him for a month, but hundreds of sympathetic parishioners rallied to his defense, saying that a priest didn’t have to believe in God to promote Christian values.
“This is a Christian country, but the population has forgotten what that means,” said Bess Serner-Pedersen, who runs Alpha Denmark, a private group that offers adult courses in the basics of Christianity.
Serner-Pedersen said that since the 18th century Enlightenment, which stressed reason and science as means of understanding the divine, European religious teaching has focused more on the intellectual than on the spiritual.
“We have a country where the churches are talking to the mind, but we’ve forgotten that spirituality is about the heart as well,” she said. “Our population is looking for churches that are more alive. We need these immigrant churches because they are bringing a message that we have forgotten.”
Denmark, a wealthy nation of 5.5 million people, always scores near the top of surveys of the world’s happiest nations. “We’re just too well-off in Europe,” said Johansen, who earns a good salary skippering high-powered tugboats for the Danish shipping giant Maersk. He and his wife, Lene, a lawyer and teacher, have children ages 12, 10 and 7 months, with a minivan and bikes parked in the carport of their sleekly designed home in an orderly suburb.
Johansen’s work takes him all over the world, he said, and he has noticed much stronger religious faith in poorer societies. “What we call a crisis here is nothing compared to what people have to cope with in other parts of the world,” he said. “We’re basically rich and spoiled.”
Over coffee and cakes, his friend Ib Johansen said European government leaders were partly to blame for the Continent’s waning religious life. Governments have zealously promoted the secular while regarding religious faith as a bit backward, he said. “We’re told, ‘Grow up, man. Leave that behind. We are doing well now, we don’t need God anymore.’”
Johansen said he had all but given up on religion before he heard about Chandran three years ago. Johansen and his wife attended one Sunday service and were thrilled. Chandran, with his sheer enthusiasm for God, seemed completely different from staid Lutheran ministers.
The room was filled to capacity with Africans, Asians, Europeans, Americans and Danes, listening to Chandran preach in his engaging style on topics ranging from current events such as the Iraq war to the meaning of Valentine’s Day, Johansen recalled.
“There was no judging, no doomsday talk,” Johansen said. “Ravi made it fun and practical. He was preaching ordinary stuff that everybody needs, not things that happened 2,000 years ago. He brought the Gospel to a level where it fit my life.”
On a recent Sunday morning, Chandran faced his congregation: children wearing baseball caps turned backward, men in ties, women in colorful African dresses, teenagers in jeans and sneakers. His 120-strong congregation that day hailed from 33 countries, including 17 in Africa, six in Europe, six in Asia and four in the Americas. Eighteen blond Danes were mixed in among the rest.
“Heaven is going to be very, very colorful,” Chandran said, to laughter and “Amens!”
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