This is a continuation of the series on religion in Slovakia. I’ve been trying to get underneath the statistics on religion in order to understand what they mean in terms of living and working as a missionary in Slovakia. In this post I compare two different ways of communicating the gospel in the context of the numbers I’ve been sharing in the previous posts.

Catholic, Lutheran, Evangelical, …. What we want to know is…how many believers are there in Slovakia? Or, better yet, to what degree is Slovakia a reached country?

As Mark Twain always used to say, “There are lies, [Read more…]

In the first post of this series I noted that according to the 2001 census in Slovakia, just 0.2% of the people in Slovakia claim to be a part of an evangelical denomination. That’s a really small number when you compare it to the 25-30% that claim to be evangelical in the United States. But when you just compare the numbers you only get part of the story. This whole series of posts is about getting at what those numbers mean and this post in particular is about what it means in terms of the cultural radar.

This is the first in a series of posts on religion in Slovakia. I’ll be looking at it from the perspective of statistics and what those statistics mean for everyday ministry on the ground.

Last week I was talking with a friend of mine who recently visited Estonia, where Lutheranism was officially established as the state religion in the 17th century. My friend told me that in Estonia people tend to view every protestant denomination that’s not Lutheran as Baptist. There are so few non-Lutheran protestants that for the average Estonian they all register as the same thing. He asked me if it was the same way in Slovakia.