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Finally, the double-edged sword of prosperity boosted living standards throughout the region, but also enabled consumerism to flourish. Christians could be easily distracted from ministry by the new economic opportunities, and the comforts of new wealth dampened people's interest in seeking God.

By 2000, it was clear that the church boom had failed to arrive as some expected. Religion journalist Jonathan Luxmoore, whose research we're using throughout this article, reported in the Religion, State, and Society journal that church attendance in the region saw a 15 percent drop during the last decade. Wladyslaw Dwulat, general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance in Poland, sums up the post-communist years this way: "It's not the growth we had prayed for."

It's a sobering story, but it's not the only one. Like the mustard seed of Jesus' parable, a small section of the church here is growing against the odds. While most established churches see only a steady decline, evangelical congregations have grown in every country in the region. This is all the more remarkable when you consider how different these countries are. We take a look at two: the Czech Republic, one of the most secular in the world, and Poland, one of the most religious. In both, evangelicals are the only group that, though small, is gaining members.

Common wisdom has it that the Czechs are a nation of atheists, with alcoholics outnumbering evangelicals and more believers in ufos than in God—and this isn't far from the truth. Census data from 1991 and 2001 show that in the decade after communism, the percentage of Czechs who identified as atheist surged from 40 to 60 percent, and a June 2005 Eurobarometer survey from the European Union shows that only 19 percent of Czechs believe in God.

Though priests of all denominations in the Czech Republic still get modest salaries from the government, their churches are increasingly empty. This is in part due to bad press from the most contentious property restitution process in the region. The issue has especially harmed the Roman Catholic Church, which lost a third of its members during the 1990s. Today it continues to press the government for a return of more fields, farms, cloisters, and hospitals, but the increasing perception in society is that the church is greedy.

Karel Taschner, director of the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Prague, says that when Czechs speak about the church, they say, "Ah, ah, we know. They want the property."

But decline is not inevitable. Small evangelical and Pentecostal denominations here have seen steady growth even as belief in God has plummeted. The biggest traditional Protestant church—the Protestant Church of the Czech Brethren—lost nearly half its members in the 1990s, but the Apostolic Church (Pentecostal) tripled its number in that same time, as did the evangelical Brethren Church. The renewal movements within Catholicism are growing as well.

According to the Czech Evangelical Alliance, in 2000 there were 545 evangelical congregations in the Czech Republic. The number of Czechs who claimed affiliation with an evangelical church in the 2001 census is 31,299, which means that an average of about 60 people attend each congregation. Though small, these churches have a sense of excitement about the future. Jiri Unger heads the Czech Evangelical Alliance, a group established at the encouragement of John Stott in 1991, and he calls it a privilege to serve in such an atheistic society. "You can influence so much," he says. "So many things are beginning."

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October 2005, Vol. 49, No. 10