Moslem Minarets Replacing Christian Steeples
Christianity is vanishing from the landscape of Europe like a giant iceberg on a tropical sea. Like colossus falling to the ground you wonder if it will ever rise again. Once the corner stone of European civilization now the whole edifice is teetering. Like a drunken man uncertain of its next step Europe’s secularist philosophers know a lot about politics but nothing about the spiritually that made it great.
As the Bible says, “Ever learning, but never coming to a knowledge of the truth”
With their birth rate plummeting and the Muslim birthrate risinging the handwriting on the wall is clear and irrefutable. This is especially true in France, Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands where there is a very aggressive Muslim population. By 2050, the U.N. estimates that more than 40% of the people in Italy will be 60 or older. By 2050 population decline in 25 European nations will be lower than they are now. In Russia over 30 million people will die off, in Italy 7.2 million, in Poland 6.6 million and in Germany 3.9 million. Europe is on a collision course of its own making.
“God is not mocked,” for you reap what you sow and usually more than you sow.
Churches have become mausoleums for tourists to visit; sermons have become socialistic lullabies telling congregants that they can pull themselves up by their own boot straps. The Bible is considered to be spiritually disconnected from the intellectually free modern European man. A Christophobic pestilence is sweeping through the land commensurate with its dissolution of moral standards. It’s much the same intellectual claptrap that brought 19th Century France and 20th century Germany to destruction and shame.
In the meantime many imams in their mosques preach rabble rousing sermons about holy war, about being a Muslim first and foremost and that tolerance is a weakness. The reason for their rise in influence is not their message of bondage to 6th century sharia law. That has little appeal to freedom loving thinkers. The reason for its growth is the dead pan Christianity of Europe, which is as cold and lifeless as a painted fire. A self improvement religion that is as weak as a flickering candle in the wind and is about to be blown out by the secular winds that are trumpeting down and out through the hallways of its seminaries and universities.
While Europe’s spiritual framework is literally melting around them the European Union in 2004 notoriously declined entreaties from religious leaders to include in its 70,000-word constitution some acknowledgement of the continent’s Christian heritage. They just don’t know what to do with God.
On average, only 41 percent of Europeans claim belief in a personal God. In Catholic France, less than 5% attend weekly services — and the figure is just 3% in the Czech Republic. . In Ireland—Ireland!—just half the population reportedly goes to Mass now, compared with 84 percent in the early 1990s
Germany the land of Luther and Bach , and the Netherlands, one the cradles of the Protestant Reformation, are now neglecting the very gospel that made them great. In Sweden, 85 percent of the population are church members yet only eleven percent of women and seven percent of men attend church services. In Norway more than half of the children are born to unmarried mothers.
I am convinced that if Europe does not return to its Christian faith, it like the Christian civilizations once so strong in Asia Minor and North Africa will perish.
Perhaps you have read about the armies of Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours (732) and the great naval battle at Lepanto (1571) and the Battle of Vienna (1683) where the Muslims were defeated in Battle by Christian forces. These three battles in particular saved Europe from become a Muslim peninsula. Mohammed over Christ must not repeat itself.
A spiritual revival of Pentecostal proportions is what is needed. Only such a force can replace the evils of Marxism, Freudianism, and Darwinism which almost destroyed Christianity in the 20th century, and now violent Islam in the 21st.
While this realistic commentary may be somewhat discouraging, for you as a Christian, don’t become discouraged; let me remind you that while the Church may be dying in Europe it is growing like in other parts of the world. Especially in China! Like a trees planted by rivers of living waters, it million branches are stretching out towards the Sun of Righteousness and it’s becoming a forest Like a coral reef that you cannot see from the surface it is growing from a million different angles.
“I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
Be Blessed
Pastor Bob