Nice, France. The Sunday morning service in the French Reformed Church on Boulevard Victor Hugo, just across from the Holiday Inn, was brief and pithy: an introductory prayer read aloud by the bow-tied young pastor, a few sung psalms, some hymns by 16th-century French Protestants and a brief, well-judged sermon from John 15. The sparse, largely elderly audience seemed attentive and appreciative.

At the door on the way out I shook the pastor's hand warmly. He certainly seemed a committed Christian believer. I wanted to ask, but didn't have the opportunity: Did he have any hope for the re-Christianization of Europe?

The Old World has never needed it more. On the beaches of the Promenade des Anglais, just five blocks from the church, topless women sunned themselves, oblivious to the thick pedestrian traffic above them. And why not? they must have thought. There is hardly a beach in the entire Mediterranean that is not routinely topless. Public nudity-full-scale for men and women-appears often enough in mainstream newspapers and magazines not to even evoke a stare.

Europeans often like to gloat that despite the influence of American Christian "puritanism," America's crime rate is higher than theirs (true) and more people are murdered in our country (also true). But that's not the whole story. It was the German poet Heinrich Heine who predicted what would happen to Europe if the gods of paganism ever made a comeback. "Should ever that taming talisman break-the cross-then will come roaring back the wild madness of the ancient warriors," he wrote l00 years before the rise of Hitler. "Then," he added, "the old stone gods will rise from their long forgotten wreckage and rub from their eyes the dust of a thousand years' sleep...Thor with his giant hammer will crush the Gothic cathedrals."

Heine was right. We all know about Hitler, but how many Christians are aware that in Norway today historical wooden churches are being burned down in the night by neo- and Satanists enraged at the gospel's interference in Scandinavia? Some Norwegian churches now mount an around-the-clock guard to prevent more attacks.

We tend to take Europe so much for granted as the rather quaint place of origin for many Americans that we forget what a fierce battle it was to Christianize the continent in the first place. The Roman Emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Empire in A.D. 325, but it took another 6oo years of martyr-filled evangelism by courageous missionaries before the fierce tribes of Germany and Scandinavia were tamed by the cross.

Each peaceful church spire in a rural European village "How picturesque! How quaint! Where's the nearest McDonald's say the kids in the car was planted by the courage and blood of our Christian forebears in the Old World.

One historian of Europe wrote: "If there had been no preaching of the gospel, Europe would have remained an insignificant peninsula of the continent of Asia." And not just insignificant barbaric. The Christian gospel introduced monogamy, broke the cyclical pattern of tribal vendettas, spread literacy and education, and laid down standards for a culture of Christian restraint across a hundred borders.

Even today, the legacy of that heritage has not vanished. But the legacy is under attack-and not just in the form of Norwegian church burnings The Netherlands is leading the way in dismantling the traditional Christian-based protections for the unborn, the handicapped and the aged with legislation that simplifies the process of euthanasia, or "merry killing."

Is God finished with Europe? Does He love Europeans any less than he loves Chinese or Africans or Americans? Of course not. For all the well-known wrongs (the Crusades, the Inquisition, anti-Semitism), it was Europe that for centuries diligently tried to take the gospel around the world. Two hundred years ago, some of its intellectuals decided arrogantly they could do without the gospel. Now God wants Europe back. Please start praying for it.