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IRVING—On Monday night at the 2025 Empower Conference, Southern Baptists of Texas Convention Executive Director Nathan Lorick interviewed Jacob Boss, vice president of global engagement for the International Mission Board. They spoke about the SBTC’s Reach Europe partnership with the IMB and an upcoming opportunity for pastors or strategic church leaders to travel to Europe on a vision trip in May. The following is an excerpt of their main stage conversation at Empower.
Nathan Lorick: Tell us about the lostness and the need for churches just like these to come alongside you guys at the IMB in Europe.
Jacob Boss: Europe is about 1.1% evangelical—820 million people. That means, in terms of percentage of evangelicals, it’s the most lost continent on earth.
My son, Philip, he’s 11. He plays football, or what we [Americans] would call soccer. I go to his practices and I talk with some of the dads. And there’s one dad who’s a 42-year-old British guy who works in Central London. He has a great job, drives a nice car, has a good family. If you look at him, he has everything the world would say you need to be happy and successful.
As I was engaging him in conversation, I found that actually he was miserable and beginning to realize that everything he had wasn’t giving him what he really needed. His marriage was falling apart. He felt shame as a dad. So, I just began to talk with him about the gospel and asked him if he had a Bible. He said no. The only experience he’d had with the Bible was when his grandma used to force him to go to mass in Ireland when he would go visit her when he was a kid.
I used this word “gospel” with him several times and he said, “What is the gospel?” This is a 42-year-old British guy who had never heard the gospel even though he drives by a church every day and lives in what used to be a Christian nation. I asked him if he had ever read the gospels. He didn’t know what the gospels were. He literally didn’t know who Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were. So, he downloaded a Bible on his phone and began to engage with the Scriptures for the first time.
That is the state of the gospel, the state of the church in Europe. It is in desperate need of the gospel, and that’s why we’re excited about this partnership.
Lorick: If churches go with us on this vision trip and they decide to partner together in Europe, how can they best serve you guys? What can churches do to help you advance the gospel in Europe?
Boss: The two primary ways are to help us mobilize and to help us catalyze.
There is an existing church in Europe, even though it’s fairly small, and they need to be and want to be mobilized on mission to take the gospel to their people. So as churches come, there’s one pathway to partner and help us equip and train existing European churches to be on mission. That could look like helping us with a marriage conference, with some theological training, some evangelism training, and getting out into the harvest with them.
We also need to catalyze a lot of work. There are way too many places in Europe today that don’t have a church, where there is no Bible-believing church to even give people meaningful access to the gospel. Catalyzing could look like walking alongside one of our missionaries and going places in Europe we’ve identified that do not have a church and beginning to take the gospel to those places to see disciples made who can become a church in that location.
What’s exciting is, while we talk about the lostness in Europe—over the last 20 years it’s been a really hard field—since the war in Ukraine and Russia, since COVID, we’ve seen a new hunger for the gospel. We’ve seen over 10,000 Ukrainians saved since the war and over 200 churches started. Now they’re in Europe because they scattered from Ukraine. We’re seeing a new hunger amongst young people in Western Europe who are saying, “All this education that I was told would solve my problems, they’re not solving my problems.”
That doesn’t mean they’re spiritually hungry for Jesus. We have to help them see that it’s Jesus who will answer their questions. There’s a window for us to get the gospel there. That’s why it’s really important that we mobilize churches from the SBTC and from around the world to help bring the gospel to Europe for this moment in time.
Lorick: What would be your appeal be to these pastors and church leaders out here about engaging in this new ministry opportunity with Europe?
Boss: We have a vision trip coming up May 1-9 where we’re going to be in London first where we will [share] our big vision for Europe and what we’re seeing, and then scatter into seven different places across Europe and the Mediterranean to see what the work looks like in those local places and how these churches can come alongside and serve these local teams. (Editor’s note: The seven cities are Leeds, England; Nantes, France; Copenhagen, Denmark; Budapest, Hungary; Bucharest, Romania; Ljubljana, Slovenia; and Athens, Greece.)
I think that would be a great way for [SBTC churches] to come and experience it and see it. But man, Southern Baptists need to come together around mission because the state of the church and the need for the gospel in the nations is critical, and now is the time.
The SBTC is offering a $1,000 scholarship for pastors or strategic church leaders to attend the Reach Europe vision trip. Space is limited. Visit the SBTC’s Reach Europe webpage or email crayburn@sbtexas.com for more information.
