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Does Europe need the gospel? No Christian would answer this question in the negative. But how much does Europe need the gospel? It is widely believed that the gospel has spread in Europe. Yet recent estimates suggest otherwise. According to Joshua Project, the evangelical population in Europe is very low. The figures for France (1.3 percent), Italy (1.7 percent), and Germany (2.1 percent) show that there is a very weak gospel presence in the three largest countries of the continent. The estimates demonstrate that even in Scotland and Switzerland, the centers of the Reformation, the evangelical population barely reaches 3 percent.
The picture is even more sobering in Eastern Europe: Poland is at 0.3 percent; the Czech Republic is at 0.7 percent; and even Hungary, with its long and rich Reformed heritage, hardly approaches 3 percent. Two percent is generally regarded as the threshold when countries are deemed to lack sufficient base to evangelize their own culture. And if you compare Europe’s situation with that of Africa (15.8 percent), South America (18.9 percent), or even Asia (3.1 percent), it becomes even clearer how desperately Europe, and especially Eastern Europe, needs the gospel.
The reasons for this spiritual drought are rooted in history. The story began more hopefully. We might think of the pre-Reformer Jan Hus, whose teachings and martyrdom laid the groundwork for the coming Reformation. In the sixteenth century, the doctrines of the Reformation gained rapid acceptance in the region. The Polish Reformer Jan Łaski (John à Lasco) served the wider church during his ministry in the so-called Strangers’ Church in London. After he was forced to flee England under Queen Mary I, he helped organize the Reformed church in Poland. Protestantism became a dominant faith in much of the region by the second half of the sixteenth century. In fact, it even spread to the most unexpected places. Cyril Lucaris, the “Protestant Patriarch” of Constantinople, not only sponsored the first translation of the New Testament in modern Greek but even attempted a Calvinist reform of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Everything changed after the Protestant defeat at the Battle of White Mountain (1620), a clash fought outside Prague as part of the Thirty Years’ War. With the support of the Holy Roman Empire, the Jesuit-led Counter-Reformation enforced a return to the Roman Catholic faith in the region of Bohemia in the battle’s aftermath. Protestant ministers were expelled, their churches were confiscated, noble families were forced to return to Roman Catholicism, and public education came under Roman Catholic control.
The experience of the Hungarian pastors illustrates the severity of the persecutions. In Hungary, three hundred Protestant ministers were accused of high treason and compelled to re-Catholicize. Forty-two refused. They were imprisoned, tortured, and sold as galley slaves. Only twenty-six of them survived to be rescued two years later by the Dutch Admiral Michiel de Ruyter. As might be expected under these circumstances, the Counter-Reformation was successful. It restored and consolidated the influence of Roman Catholicism in Eastern Europe.
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw renewals in the Reformed and Lutheran churches of the region. But the growing influence of German liberalism, and especially the four decades of communism, further undermined the cause of the gospel in Eastern Europe. Communism and Christianity were (rightly) seen as ideological and spiritual opposites. Church properties were confiscated, theological education was tightly controlled, and the secret police monitored church leaders. Persecution was severe; pastors were imprisoned, tortured, and often sent to the Gulag. In 1967, Albania declared itself the first officially atheist state in the world. Yet Christ’s grace is sufficient for the most severe hardships; His power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9). Remarkably, the persecutions often led to even more resilient underground churches. Gospel witness was not quenched even amid the darkest persecutions.
We might understand why Christianity has not been able to grow stronger in Eastern Europe. At the same time, we confess with the Apostle Paul that “the word of God is not bound!” (2 Tim. 2:9). The darker the night, the brighter the light appears. And now confessional Reformed churches are being planted throughout Eastern Europe—even in Poland, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine, where the Reformation had little or no historical presence. In the 2026 Reformed Colloquium (a yearly gathering of confessional ministers and theological educators in Europe), half of the attendants were from Eastern Europe.
Despite widespread secularism, a tangible sense of disillusionment in the materialistic worldview exists in the region. Liberal or prosperity-gospel churches cannot satisfy this spiritual hunger. Moreover, we see a concerted effort of church planting centered on the ordinary means of grace, theologically sound Christian publishing, and biblically grounded pastoral training in cities such as Kyiv, Krakow, Durrës, and Budapest. There is a new spark in Europe because these visible means are built on Christ, the only true foundation. He is the King of kings, the sovereign Ruler of history. He promised that His church will march forward and that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. This battle continues before our eyes, and we are witnessing the victory of Christ.
How should we respond? We are called to pray. Pray for the churches, for the faithful witness of Christians, for new conversions, and for new laborers in the harvest. Some readers might be called to take part in that work. But our chief response should be worship. The planting of churches and the advance of the gospel in this mission field is not natural; it is supernatural. It flows from the cross. Because our God has demonstrated His love for our fallen world, we preach Christ and Him crucified, the only hope for Eastern Europe.