From the Margins, a Movement

As Piet Brinksma describes it, within living memory the vast majority of Amsterdam's population was baptised — Protestant or Catholic — with Christianity taught in schools and the church at the centre of civic life. Today, as Piet estimates, fewer than 4% attend church even monthly. The question is not whether the church lost ground. The question is what the church does next.

Piet Brinksma has been sitting with that question for years — in Amsterdam Southeast, in conversations with city officials, in rooms full of migrant church leaders who arrived from the Global South and found themselves in a city that had nearly forgotten God. His answer is not a lament. It is a thesis: the church that has been pushed to the margins is better positioned for mission than the church that sat at the centre.

That is not a comfortable thesis. But the evidence from Amsterdam is beginning to make the case.

Why we listened this way

These field notes come from a listening journey, not a fixed framework. We were looking for two things: common practices God seems to be using across very different city contexts, and unique contextual practices other leaders might adapt for their own settings.

Read more about the listening posture

These deep dives were not designed to confirm a pre-existing model. The invitation was simpler and more patient: to slow down and genuinely listen — to regional leaders describing what God seems to be doing in their own contexts, in their own words.

The TRUST language had begun to take shape through earlier conversations and was being tested and refined through each subsequent one. Europe brought a kind of complexity the emerging language had not yet fully grappled with: a post-Christendom context, deep theological and cultural fragmentation, waves of migration reshaping city churches, and a church learning to witness from the margins rather than the centre.

What we heard from Europe did not confirm the pathway. It stretched it. And that stretching, it turned out, was exactly what the emerging language needed.

What we heard from Europe

Europe is not a category. Its religious landscape is fractured across five broad regions, each with its own history, its own wounds, and its own relationship to the church.

Western Europe — including the Netherlands, France, and Germany — has experienced the deepest secularization: postmodernism, institutional church decline, and a generation for whom Christianity is simply irrelevant. Northern Europe retains state church structures, while the Anglican tradition in England still embeds clergy in public life through the parish system. Southern Europe remains culturally Catholic — Spain and Italy carry the memory of Christendom even as active participation wanes. Greece holds widespread nominal affiliation with Orthodoxy. In the Balkans, public expressions of new or missional movements still face significant resistance.

Across all these settings, both Protestant and Catholic institutions have lost what they once had: social "dominion." The church that once built hospitals, universities, and orphanages was gradually displaced by a professionalised state. What remained was an institution increasingly confined to the "spiritual" sphere — and, in time, to the private one.

"The pendulum swung too far. From dominion to irrelevance — and the church bears some responsibility for both."

The theological tradition Piet draws on is deep: Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian and later prime minister who articulated a vision of biblical faith influencing every sphere of life — education, journalism, science, civic governance. Kuyper's framework is being rediscovered now, in a neo-Calvinist revival, precisely because it names what was lost: an integrated vision of the kingdom that does not privatise faith or spiritualise mission.

Piet adds a pastoral dimension to that diagnostic: the grief cycle. European churches have been moving through denial, anger, disillusionment, and apathy. The invitation to honest city work — what Piet calls "exegesis of the city" — can only begin when a church has honestly passed through what was lost and reached something like acceptance. Rushing from grief to strategy produces action without roots. Honest diagnosis has to come first.

Where the emerging pathway was tested

By the time the Europe conversation took place, the emerging TRUST language had been shaped through several other continental deep dives. But Europe presented a test the earlier conversations had not fully prepared it for — not the vibrant diversity of the Global South, but the specific difficulty of a context where Christianity was once dominant and is now largely absent from public life.

In that context, Piet introduced a concept he calls "exegesis of the city." Just as faithful biblical interpretation requires careful, patient attention to the text, faithful city mission requires careful, patient attention to the place: its history, its wounds, its invisible communities, its relationship to the church. You cannot serve a city you have not learned to read. And in post-Christendom Europe, reading the city honestly means grappling with the church's own complicated legacy in it.

The idea stretched the emerging pathway in a specific way. Trace — the step of understanding the city — cannot be done quickly in a context where the church itself is part of what needs to be understood. The institutional memory, the grief, the latent assumptions about Christendom: these have to be read and processed, not just bypassed. Honest diagnosis takes longer in Europe. And it is non-negotiable.

Each subsequent step felt the same weight. Relate meant bridging not just theological difference, but the chasm between established traditions and newly arrived migrant churches — communities from the Global South who brought deep faith and missionary conviction into a city that was, religiously, largely empty. Unite meant making churches visible to civic authorities who had genuinely forgotten the church was there. Structure meant building stage-appropriate pathways in communities that were, in many cases, still at the very beginning. Transfer, most unexpectedly of all, meant not sending resources outward but earning back a voice in rooms from which the church had long been absent.

None of this broke the pathway. But it made the pathway more honest — and more useful to leaders working in hard soil.

Common practices that seemed transferable

As we listened to Piet and his colleagues describe their work across multiple European cities, certain patterns began to emerge — practices that seemed like they might describe what faithful city mission looks like across many different settings, including contexts far outside Europe.

The diagnostic work of Trace in Europe begins with a grief cycle. Piet describes it as a movement through denial, anger, disillusionment, apathy, and finally acceptance — stages that individuals, churches, and whole regional movements have to pass through before they can see their city clearly and act faithfully within it.

What follows from honest diagnosis is the work of "exegesis of the city" — reading the city's history, its social wounds, its invisible communities, its relationship to the church. In Amsterdam Southeast, that work uncovered migrant churches doing significant social good in a district the wider city had largely overlooked. The gaps and the gifts only became visible when someone stopped to look carefully.

Something unexpected has happened as European churches have lost their cultural dominance: they have begun to find each other.

When the church had social position to protect, the differences between Evangelical, Catholic, and mainline Protestant communities were worth defending. When none of them has a seat at the table, those differences feel less important than the shared conviction that the kingdom of God matters for the city's life. Marginalization, Piet observes, has catalysed unity in ways that strength never did.

"In Amsterdam, the ecosystem began as a prayer movement — cultivating relational cohesion before any programme or strategy."

In Amsterdam Southeast, that relational foundation was not accidental. The migrant churches that anchor the movement there came from cultures with deep traditions of prayer and communal life. They brought those traditions into the city's margins and, instead of replicating their home communities, reframed their presence as missionary service. Pastors functioned partly as social workers. Churches experimented with outreach that addressed real-world pain. They began to build partnerships — including, eventually, with the AMC, Amsterdam's academic medical hospital.

What made collaboration possible was not common doctrine. It was a shared commitment to the city's good, built through sustained relational investment before any formal programme was launched.

After roughly ten years of social engagement in Amsterdam Southeast, something remarkable was attempted: fifty migrant churches were surveyed to quantify their combined social contribution to the city.

The findings were striking.

• The average church operated around 10 social-domain projects
• Collectively, the churches contributed 320,000 volunteer hours outside church services
• Their work addressed 14 identified areas of social pain
• Monetised at minimum wage, the total social contribution came to €7.5 million

When this data was presented to the Amsterdam city district council, local officials were astonished. They had encountered individual church initiatives. But they had never seen the whole. Aggregated, the data showed something they had not imagined: that the churches they had considered largely irrelevant were, in fact, one of the largest social infrastructure networks in the district.

"The data clarified the scope. City officials who had grouped the church with 'diversity interests' suddenly saw a counterpart worth talking to."

A parallel study in the secular-leaning North of Amsterdam produced similar results — boosting church self-understanding, inspiring cross-church collaboration, and opening a new conversation with city government about shared social aims. The churches, scattered and fragmented, had only gained access by uniting. Appearing as 140 separate voices, they were a curiosity. Appearing as a coordinated network, they became a civic partner.

Drawing on Tim Keller's "Center Church" framework and adapting it for the European context, Piet and his colleagues developed what they call the Four-Level Ecosystem Pathway — a scalable model for guiding city church networks from fragmentation toward holistic transformation:

• Connecting — foundational trust, relationships, and prayer among churches and ministries
• Collaborating — joint projects and shared initiatives, leveraging collective capacity
• Strategic — shared goals, focused research, consultations, and aligned efforts
• Holistic — engaging marketplace leaders, professionals, and all societal spheres for broad-based city renewal

The model is used across the Netherlands to assess where a given city's church ecosystem currently stands — and to apply the right tools for that stage. In early stages, the emphasis is on fellowship, vision-sharing, and prayer. Not programmes. Not research. Not strategic plans. Simply: knowing each other, and learning to love the city together.

Later stages — Strategic and Holistic — warrant data studies, consultations, and exposure visits that bring leaders to more advanced city expressions to see what is possible. The framework moves at the pace that trust allows. You do not rush a city to Stage 4 strategy when it has not yet done the Stage 1 work of relationship.

The most significant outcome of the Amsterdam Southeast journey is not the €7.5 million figure. It is the new conversation it opened.

For a generation, the church in Amsterdam was considered largely irrelevant by civic officials — grouped, if mentioned at all, among the city's "diversity interests." The aggregated data study changed that. It gave church leaders a language that city officials could hear: concrete, quantified, demonstrable. And it gave city officials a reason to reach back. Regular dialogue on the city's welfare and the church's constructive role is now possible in ways it was not before.

In Europe, Transfer looks different than in contexts where the church is a growing or majority institution. Here, Transfer is not primarily about sending resources from strong churches to weaker ones. It is about earning back a place in civic conversation — demonstrating, through accumulated service and patient relationship, that the church is a trustworthy partner in the city's future.

"Small waves combining into a meaningful current of change and hope." — Piet Brinksma on what is beginning to happen in European cities.

Contextual practices from Europe

Some of what we heard from Europe seemed shaped less by universal patterns and more by the specific conditions of post-Christendom — the grief, the complexity, the particular opportunity of churches operating at the cultural margins. These practices may offer questions for leaders in other contexts, but they should not be imported without attention to what made them necessary here.

The grief cycle as a diagnostic tool

Piet's use of the grief cycle — denial, anger, disillusionment, apathy, acceptance — as a framework for understanding where a church or movement stands is distinctly post-Christendom in its origin. In contexts where the church has not experienced significant institutional loss, this framework may need significant adaptation. But the underlying idea — that a church which has not honestly processed its past cannot clearly see its present — seems to travel further than Europe alone.

The Four-Level Ecosystem Pathway

Developed in a Dutch context and adapted from Tim Keller's framework, the four-level model (Connecting, Collaborating, Strategic, Holistic) is a structured tool for assessing where a church network stands and what kind of investment is appropriate for that stage. It was developed for a European context but has been used across the Netherlands in very different city types. Leaders in other regions might find the underlying logic — you cannot do Stage 4 work without Stage 1 foundations — applicable even if the specific framework does not translate directly.

Data aggregation as civic language

The €7.5 million data study was a specific response to a specific problem: that European civic officials did not know what the churches were doing, and that churches themselves had no shared language for describing their collective contribution. Other contexts where churches are invisible to civic infrastructure — or where leadership is fragmented and self-referential — might ask whether a similar aggregation could change the conversation.

Migrant churches as missional pioneers

The role of migrant churches in Amsterdam Southeast is a distinctly post-Christendom phenomenon: communities from the Global South, arriving into a post-Christian Western European city, reframing their presence as missionary rather than ethnic. Their missional energy, their traditions of communal prayer, and their willingness to serve neighbourhoods rather than simply gather congregations made them something the majority church had largely stopped being. This is not a transferable model so much as a question worth asking: who in your city carries missional vitality that the majority church may have overlooked?

Prayer before programme

The Amsterdam Southeast ecosystem began not with a social impact study or a strategic plan but with prayer — a sustained, intentional cultivation of relational trust and shared spiritual practice before any formal initiative was launched. In a context where programme-first thinking is deeply embedded, the deliberate choice to begin with prayer and relationship is countercultural and specific. But the principle — relational foundations before strategic superstructure — may be more universal than its European expression.

What Europe contributed to the emerging pathway

Europe's contribution to the listening series was less a set of easily transferable techniques and more a set of honest questions. It raised the difficulty level — and in doing so, it made the emerging pathway more truthful.

The concept of "exegesis of the city" that Piet articulated — patient, careful, text-like reading of the city's history, wounds, and communities — sharpened what the TRUST language was trying to say about Trace. It is not merely about gathering data or mapping church presence. It is about the kind of sustained, humble attention that genuine understanding requires. That contribution belongs to all six continents, not just Europe.

Specifically, Europe contributed:

• "Exegesis of the city." Piet's concept sharpened Trace beyond data-gathering to a posture of patient, text-like attention — including attention to the church's own complicated presence in the city.
• Marginalization as a unity catalyst. The observation that the loss of cultural position can create the relational conditions that strength never did — churches finding each other precisely because they no longer have position to protect — is an insight that may apply wherever the church is under pressure.
• Collective visibility as civic entry. The aggregated data approach to Unite — making the church's combined social contribution visible to civic authorities who had literally not seen it — named a dynamic that other fragmented contexts might recognize.
• Stage-sensitive structure. The insistence that you cannot do Stage 4 work without Stage 1 foundations gave the emerging pathway a more explicit caution against rushing — an antidote to the temptation to build strategy on relational sand.
• Transfer redefined. In Europe, Transfer does not mean sending resources outward. It means earning back a voice in civic spaces from which the church had long been absent. That is a genuinely different kind of Transfer, and a harder one — and naming it made the category more honest.

Lessons for city leaders

1. Honest diagnosis begins with honest grief. Post-Christendom churches often try to leap from loss to strategy without passing through genuine processing. Piet's grief cycle is a reminder: the stages are real, and shortcutting them produces action without roots.
2. Marginalization can catalyse unity that strength never did. When churches have nothing to protect, they can discover a shared commitment to the city's good that doctrinal difference had previously obscured. Loss is not only loss.
3. Individual voices get overlooked; collective data changes the conversation. Fifty churches speaking separately were considered a curiosity. Fifty churches speaking with aggregated, quantified evidence became a civic partner. The gathering of the whole matters.
4. Match the tool to the stage. Programmes, data studies, and strategic partnerships all have their place — but not before the relational foundations of Stage 1 have been genuinely laid. Rushing a community to strategic action before it has learned to pray together produces fragile results.
5. Ask who in your city is already carrying missional energy. The migrant churches of Amsterdam Southeast were doing extraordinary work before anyone noticed. In many cities, the most faithful witnesses are the least visible. The first move of exegesis is to look.

Questions for your city

1. What has your city's church lost in the last generation — and has it been honestly grieved, or bypassed in the rush to recover?
2. Who are the migrant, minority, or marginal communities in your city doing mission that the majority church may not have noticed?
3. If you aggregated the social contribution of churches in your district, what story would the data tell — and to whom?
4. What stage is your church network at? Are you trying to run strategic programmes before you have built the relational foundations?
5. What does your city's civic leadership currently think of the church — and what kind of patient service would it take to change that perception?

These field notes draw from the Lausanne Cities Europe Deep Dive, part of the 2025–2026 continental listening series. Stories, reflections, and practices are reported as shared by participating leaders and have not been independently verified by Lausanne Cities.