Abstract
Church Planting in Europe is an edited volume comprised of papers that were presented at the Mission in Europe Symposium that was held in Belgium in July, 2014. The authors are all based in Europe and are scholars and practitioners from academic, mission, pastoral, and research backgrounds. Lastly, they are all Evangelicals.
The volume consists of 19 chapters that are organized under four general headings: biblical reflections, the church in Europe, the process of church planting, and church planting case studies. Evert Van de Poll, one of the editors, lays out the central foci of the book in the introduction, which include missionary (missional) church planting and the importance of the sending organization in supporting and receiving reports from missionaries who have been sent out by them.
Following the introduction are three chapters focused on the importance of Scripture in the missionary enterprise. The next eight chapters focus on the social, cultural, and spiritual factors that affect the church and missionary work in Europe, such as the characteristics of modern Europeans, postmodernism, and the role of the church in a multicultural and religiously diverse Europe. Four chapters focus on church planting and how to measure the effectiveness of church planting and other practical issues. Finally, part IV offers three well-chosen case studies of actual church-planting programs.
Overall, Church Planting in Europe is a successful volume. It is hard to achieve a great deal of coherence in edited volumes, but the introductory framework and organization of the chapters provide much help along this line. A helpful addition would have been a summary chapter that gleaned the insights from the chapters and presented a lessons-learned section. This book would be useful for practitioners focused on Europe and undergraduate classes which address missions, cross-cultural Christianity, and the church in modern society.