Europe's Christian Exodus Our World

has turned up in a morgue. Now it is time for our world. As they have

almost 600 years Roman Catholics in Germany carried the body of Christ

through the streets of their cities. The Church Road Villas Brent

blessed by priests as the real body of Jesus. -- bread. The power of

Christianity is waning. The paradors and a redemption is waning.

The 2000 your church which guards its sacred mystery is threatened.

The whole idea of outsourcing relationship with God to the church

is ridiculous. Of course I am sad. I think it is a disaster for

society. The word of God is not here. The ranks of the faithful are

thinning. More than 180,000 German Catholics left the church last year.

It is estimated in the last 50 years the Protestant Church has

lost half its membership. The same stories being told across Europe as

Christendom gives way to questioning, doubt and frank

disbelief. What will be the face of this ancient face and its once-

On Sundays, this father takes to the wrote. -- Road. Once he had one

parish in Mannheim, now there are six. The German church is short of

priests. The last race was forced to adopt one parish after another,

left in despair. His father now has 20,000 Catholics in his care and

feels isolated from them. Few young people would commit their lives to

this job. I had the problem to to my girlfriends that I wanted to

become a priest. Two years ago she started to talk to me again. That

is OK now. If you come here as a young man in the parish, they think

that they should become a priest. No, you do not. Don't do this. 20

of 30 years ago people really wanted to join. Congregations are

dwindling and they are getting older. The Church has been slowed

to adapt its message to a changing society. I think it will be a

disaster for society if the words of God are not heard. We need in

our society a sense of orientation. People run around and it's not know

what is right so wrong. As a town fete, a local clergy take on the

village team. After a dirty game, the clergy a defeat said 3-1. --

de de And the far reaching change can bring back support for

Catholicism. Powerful voices in the Ge Geh I calling for radical

reform, which was seen as unthinkable. This man was among 144

an open letter to the church. It took the Church. It's said that it

must ordain women and allow priests to marry. A problem is that the

Church has not found a way or a real answer to the question. How

can you leave your faith in a modern society which is very rich

and concentrated on the results of science? It has a high expectation

of personal freedom and liberal norms of sexual behaviour. In this

environment, we have no answer how to live in a convincing manner as a

Catholic woman or man. To think it will not survive if the changes are

not made? Yes, it is a real danger. Many people lose the church. It

does not interest them any longer. This is a real danger. If the

Church does not see how great the danger is, I have beefier that in

20 or 30 years in Germany you were not see many parishes which I up

centres of by its allies Christianity. -- white sliced.

While the Pope celebrated Mass before 60,000 people in Berlin,

10,000 others protested outside. The Church has expressed its sorrow

and regret about sexual abuse, but the scandal is costing it Dili.

Every year Germans automatically pay 8% of income tax to churches.

More and more of them are using their right to opt out. The Church

says that those who do not pay should no longer share in the

ritual of Holy Communion, be signed up for membership. It has

excommunicate said in a sense one million Germans. To think that is a

hard decision? For the people, it gives the impression that it does.

You must be in the dialogue with it people, but at the end when he says

I want, disease consequence and not harsh. -- this is consequence.

in Germany, Protestant Scandinavia to has societies once found in

Christianity, had now or for sake and the face. The Church still

loans large in Finland. Spins are swapping religion for recreation.

The Church still confirms more than eight in 10 teenagers as member.

Winsor confirmation camps are a rite of passage here. Few knew

remained members for long. Things are resigning from their membership

as a rate of 1,000 per week. Church's intolerance and too

conservative. It does not take into account the concerns of people

these days. It is true and we have to listen to these. Finns also pay

a church tax of 2% of their income. Even this huge income cannot by

congregations. Beautiful churches and soaring music are not enough.

The Church's traditional services no longer capture the public

imagination. They seek the rituals as irrelevant to their everyday

lives. To increasingly liberal society, the Church seems

alienating, with its stance against homosexuality. 40,000 people resign

their membership last year in the space of a few days after retell a

poll last year. This man has made opting out a matter of a few

keystrokes online. We're simply demanding that the state does not

force people to join a church. The more people leave the church, the

more successful we are because we think that when the resignation of

rate is lower it enough for the church, then we can have a

political support to change A group of people in their early

twenties meet for pasta and prayer. To them, church services are dull.

They have lost trust in institutions and no longer want to

be told what or how to believe. The whole idea of outsourcing your

relationship with God to the church, the institutionalised church, I

find it ridiculous. Breaking that mentality of coming to the church

and receiving and making people feel part of that, including them

in the service and making them discuss things with each other is

This camp is about the faith of children. An estimated 40% of

Finnish people have their own concept of God. It is a vaguely

defined higher power with little resemblance to the god of the

Lutheran church. This man, a Lutheran theologian, has watched as

churches across northern Europe have seen the same faltering belief

in God and weakening cultural links with Christianity. Churches all

over Europe are at the historical crossroads. The situation is quite

unstable. We see that some churches take one option and may take the

other option. None of them so far have succeeded in turning the tide

With German clergy excommunicating those who do not pay church taxes

and the Finns finding God increasingly irrelevant, what does

the future hold in store for Europe's most progressive

societies? Holland might have some of the answers as to how the Church

Christian leaders here are flowing with the shifting tide and, for

some, that means abandoning beliefs once considered essential. Faced

with a Dutch public which is no longer prepared to believe in

traditional church teaching about God or the after life, progressive

clergy are reinventing Christianity, addressing questions about life and

death rather than pre-ordained answers and explaining God in terms

of powerful human experiences, such as love. They say only with a

radical new understanding can Christianity compete in this very

This minister is among the most radical of all. His service

contains hymns, readings and the Lord's Prayer. He says Jesus

probably never existed and does not believe in God as a supernatural

being, but only as part of human experience. When it happens, it

happens down to earth between you and me, between people. What is

God? It is a word for experience, for human experience. But it is a

central feature of Christianity, that Jesus did exist, that he was

the son of God. That is a central tenet. You're saying that is not

true? Yes. It is a misunderstanding. More surprisingly, he does not

belong to an obscure sect on the religious fringe but to the

mainstream Dutch Protestant Church. A recent study by the University of

Amsterdam suggests one in six clergy of the Dutch Protestant

Church were described as either agnostic or atheist. That makes you

no longer a Christian, surely? you ask me, are you a Christian? I

say, I am a Reverend in the Christian church. The Christian

cult is too narrow for me. I am Christian because I am in the

European tradition and culture. After he published a book about a

non-existent God, an attempt was made to expel him. It failed

because his views were already widespread among its members.

uses the Bible in a metaphorical way and I think it's very important

that we can use it in that way because I can understand it then

and I can live it out in daily life. Here, you can believe what you want

to believe yourself. What you really feel and think that is true.

Such revision is anathema in Holland's Bible Belt. In this town,

about a quarter of the population attends church on Sundays. The town

even has a law against swearing. Christians belonging to the Dutch

Reformed Church are beginning to reach out to the secular public but

not if that means changing their understanding of the traditional

faith. When we get people into the church by throwing Jesus Christ out

of the Church, we lose the core of Christianity. Then we are not

reforming the institutions, the attitudes but the core of our

message, and namely Jesus Christ and we should never, never end up

But for many liberal Christians, even experiences such as love are

at the core of Christianity. At an open evening in Amsterdam, a speed

dating session invites the curious to discuss love with strangers.

Dutch churches are countering the loss of orthodox belief and its

replacement with a far vaguer concept. In our society, we call it

something-ism. Something between heaven and earth. But to call it

God, for the majority of the Dutch population, is a bridge too far.

Christian churches are in a certain situation. They can offer their

ideas and practices to a large part of the population which is

interested in some kind of spirituality, some kind of religion.

But the churches have to offer and can offer more to these people than

This is one Church's experiment in something-ism. It was set up to

reach young people. Replacing Church buildings with halls. Here,

they contemplate the concept of eternity by spacing individual

grains of rice across the floor. The Church's leader believes

traditional Christianity is defined too literally and now people have

lost their belief in certainty and it is time to take God out of the

box. It has to be alert to what is going on in society and rethink

what Christianity means. But, in a way, that means changing to serve

the community it is in. It is serving but also rethinking what it

means. You cannot preach heaven in the same way 2,000 years ago as

today. It means something different and we have to think again what it

is. We can use the same words but say totally different things.

you do believe Jesus was the son of God and was resurrected? That is a

difficult question. Not necessarily. I'm not sure what it means. People

have strict ideas about what it means. Some ideas I might agree

For me, it is who I am living my life with and I think I would be

fascinated in following him for the rest of my life. Even if he is not

the Son of God? We have to question his divinity. What does that mean?

That is not a question we asked in my youth. But we have to think

again what it means and if we can explain this to people who have no

idea, yes. Across Europe, Christianity is waning as part of

culture as a younger generation no longer defer to institutions like

the church. People are increasingly unwilling to pay taxes towards it

or sit in queues to be taught a message they feel has no relevance

If the Church is to survive in countries like Germany and Finland

and Holland, it must find a balance between tailoring its core values

and adapting to changing culture. Meanwhile, groups like these are