Question is, regarding the refugees who are sincere about converting, are those European churches still Christian enough to consider these to be authentic conversions?
It seems like the European churches are pretty solid in at least some major regions, like I’ve said before I’m always surprised when I head to Europe for business because it defies the picture a lot of I think had in mind for it as being secular, soft, relative and PC about everything. There’s been a surprisingly strong revival of evangelical churches in much of the continent, oddly enough with some of the major examples being in Scandinavia.
In fact one of the Christian revivals even got a special name, translated to something like “awakening on the Danube” or to that effect, and it’s probably one of the branches involved in the mass baptisms of the refugees. I’m a little fuzzy on all the details (my German wasn’t good enough to understand the article in full), but it was a joint effort of some local revivalists teaming with Mennonites who came over to Austria and Germany from Canada in the mid 1990’s, I think from Ontario or maybe Manitoba, and later joined by a growing team of preachers from the US and Australia. From the Danube area it then spread all over Europe, up into Scandinavia but even down into the Catholic countries like France and around the Mediterranean.
The story was that they started reaching out to the local population in small Austrian and German villages and towns, but then they began having a surprising influx of new members among the immigrant populations. Turns out a lot of the “Turks” in Germany were actually just Christian minorities from Turkey to begin with, but then even many of the Muslims there, not only out of Turkey but also Bosnians and Albanians, began flooding into the churches asking for baptism. That’s apparently what gave the pastors the idea to translate the Bibles and hymns into the languages of the formerly Muslim migrant populations, which had the double benefit of both winning more migrant converts, and also providing the new converts with the tools to even go and evangelize their neighbors back home in Turkey and other Middle Eastern countries, even with all the risks involved in that.
Also another point is that the churches with the main growth in Germany and Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Scandinavia, Belgium and Netherlands have been mainly the evangelical and Revival churches more than the traditional ones. There has been a big growth in Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity in Germany and France too, but that’s mainly because of all the millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs, Croatians and other Catholic and Orthodox eastern European immigrants coming in over past decade. (Even with all the attention on the refugees in 2015, far more east Europeans came, more than a million from the new EU countries alone before we even get into the ones from Russia or Ukraine outside EU, now they’re saying after Brexit since the Poles can’t come to UK anymore, they’re expecting upwards of 1.5 to 2 million into Germany and France next year and thus a big Catholic and Orthodox growth, though not as much from conversion apparently.)
Whereas, the refugees from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan and Iran overwhelmingly are converting to the more evangelical revival churches. Many of them have been founded in the last decade from what I’ve heard, so the “Danube Awakening” or whatever it’s called has already been a major success, and is providing something like an infrastructure to baptize and minister to the new arrivals coming in.