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Why is sharing the gospel so hard in Europe today? I would frame the issue largely in terms of two categories: time and space. But before that, let us go to the subject facing it like the word-obsessed Christians we are (or, at least, we should be). Reality can become real for us not because we have our eyes open, but because we have our Bibles open: we need revelation to get real. As it is revealed to us in Scripture, sharing the gospel is always hard, independent of the century or the country we live in, because we love darkness (John 3:19)—we resist Jesus not so much because we lack crucial information about him (though that can be the case), but because we lack love for him. Being lost or found is always connected with love: in the first case, we choose to love other things in the place of Jesus; in the latter, we are given to love him above everything else. 

Another reason sharing the gospel here is difficult is that, as Tim Keller writes in How to Reach the West Again, we have been saving ourselves from the need of salvation. Without trusting the Bible’s message, our need for God becomes completely subjective: “If believing God does or doesn’t exist works for you, go for it!” I suspect that it would be helpful to understand what it means for so many people to not feel a need for God. We have to grasp the necessity of addressing something that people no longer see as necessary. How do we preach a message of salvation to those who have lost the ability of feeling lost?

Let’s try to go deeper using the two categories of time and space. Being in time and space is simply about being human. God became man in Jesus, coming to a specific time and a specific space. Appreciating the incarnation should always make us sensible to time and space. When Christians fall into the temptation of not caring enough about the season and location we live in, we make the details of Jesus’s coming in flesh and bone seem unimportant. And Jesus’s timing and location were not just details, but rather what made him able to do what no one before or after him could do.

When we examine the time and space of Europe, we find something interesting: it is hard to share the gospel there because it simultaneously sounds too old and too new. Let me try to explain.

For many in Europe, the good news of the gospel is seen as an old and oppressive structure of an ancient time. People feel lucky because they are no longer in a world where religion claims so much of their identity. So, a sort of cognitive dissonance happens: the good news that Christians share is seen as the old one that others congratulate themselves on abandoning. Europe may have once been Christian, but the fact that it no longer is tends to be celebrated by most. Christians strive to present Christianity as a lively, present festivity to a bunch of people who are confident its funeral has already taken place.

At the same time, the good news of the gospel is seen as too new, as well. In countries like Portugal, Christianity is now seen as something brought by immigrants from the Global South (Latin America and Brazil, in particular). In that sense, this fresh expression of faith looks recent, foreign, and even exotic—and though they may not admit it, many Portuguese allow these immigrants to feel excited about Christianity because they believe them to be inexperienced in it. They think these believers have yet to find out Christianity’s worst outcomes, and that only reinforces our cynicism, the unofficial companion we rely on. Europe believes they know Christianity all too well and that it’s not trustworthy in the long haul. They see it as a game they have been playing for two millennia.

So, Christianity can be rejected on the idea that it fits in too well with the wrongs of Europe’s past and the idea that Europeans do not fit within with this new future coming from outside our continent. Sometimes, in Europe time and history is all we have. While some other cultures tend to feel young and idealistic about the future (for better or worse), Western European culture tends to feel old and haunted by the past.

Then, there is the specific aspect of space in Europe. European History has layers of old animosities: the Portuguese hated the Spanish, the French hated the British, and everyone hated the Germans. Old hostilities make our territories complex cradles of resentment where no one is judged solely by the content they are preaching. Europe has a hard time listening to someone without chaining them to their place of origin.

Our difficulties with Americans are also especially deep because, in a way, the United States are a kind of European reboot that has surprisingly succeeded for several centuries already. To make things more complicated, evangelical Christianity is usually associated with the USA: Americans afford the luxury of practicing religion without the skeletons that fill our closets. So, Americans are not given a fair hearing when sharing the gospel in Europe. And no European is given a fair hearing if he sounds like an American evangelical. Places matter a lot in Europe, in different ways than they do elsewhere.

And then, there are the different types of Europe that Protestant Christians face. If you come from Northern European countries that were largely built by the Reformation, you may feel weak going against the grain in a society that is now more secularized. If you come from Southern European countries that were never influenced by the Reformation, you may tend to constantly go against the grain, not caring that much about your surrounding culture. Some will feel tempted only to conform while others only want to confront.

What is the masterplan, then, to share the gospel in Europe? To have such a plan would probably make me rich in America and simplistic in my own country of Portugal. Believing that things will work out fine sounds like a foreign language to the Portuguese. I get some consolation from the fact that Jesus came in a certain time and space, which makes me value my own culture as an important part of how I share the gospel. But I get an even bigger consolation from the fact that he called me to be someone who will exist in the Kingdom of Heaven when this time and space are no longer. The gospel is also about where Europeans will truly live once the current reality is over. Receiving Christ is our best way of finding the home we have beyond Europe, and the challenge of sharing that with people falls to us.