By Nate and Leah Seppanen Anderson

Czechs are famously agnostic. When we asked Jirí, a middle-aged Czech, if there would be any celebrations associated with a recent saint's day, his reply was, "Of course not. There are no Christians in the Czech Republic."

Common wisdom has it that alcoholics outnumber practicing Christians and that more Czechs believe in UFOs than in God — and common wisdom may be correct. Census data from 1991 and 2001 show that in the decade after communism, the number of self-professed atheists rose from 40 percent to 60 percent, one of the highest percentages in the world. A recent European Union survey shows that only 19 percent of Czechs believe that God exists. But the story is more complicated than these numbers suggest.

Magda, a twentysomething Czech friend, expressed frustration with comments like Jirí's. "Just because we Christians are small in numbers doesn't mean we don't exist," she said. There's more than Magda's own personal experience to back this up. During the process of researching a magazine article on Christianity in post-communist Europe, we stumbled on a surprising fact. Even as church attendance and belief in God have plummeted in the Czech Republic, small evangelical congregations across the country are not just holding steady but are actually gaining members. And these members tend to be young Czechs, members of the first generation now coming of age that never knew life under socialism.

The number of evangelicals — who take the Bible's authority seriously, focus on the person of Jesus, stress outreach and service and often point to a distinct conversion experience — grew throughout the 1990s. The Apostolic Church (Apostolská církev) and the Brethren Church (Církev bratrská) tripled their numbers, for instance, while most other evangelical churches grew at a slower rate.

This is even more remarkable when you compare evangelical groups to the more established churches. During the 1990s, census data showed that the Catholic Church lost one-third of its members. Accusations and revelations about StB involvement didn't help matters. Neither did battles over property restitution, only now showing signs of potential resolution. And it wasn't just the Catholics: the Czech Brethren (Ceskobratrská církev evangelická), the Czech Hussites (Církev ceskoslovenská husitská) and the Silesian Lutherans (Slezská evangelickaá církev a.v.) all saw drops of nearly 50 percent. Only the evangelicals continued to grow.

We tracked down evangelical leaders and attended Sunday services here in Prague to gauge the strength of the movement. What we found was a powerful sense of optimism. Though Czech society has become post-Christian, evangelicals see this lack of belief as an opportunity. Jirí Unger heads the Evangelical Alliance in the Czech Republic. He calls it a "privilege" to serve in such an atheistic society. "It's a real nice challenge because you can influence so much," he told us. "So many things are beginning."

James Krikava, an American Lutheran missionary, finished his 15 years of service in the country in June and has fully turned operations over to the local congregations he helped to found. Looking back on his work in Prague and Plzen, Krikava radiated the same excitement. "[At] my church in Plzen, I think there's one adult that I didn't baptize," he said. "These are all people who came from atheism into the faith and that is real mission work."

Membership remains small at about 1 percent of the population. Like all churches, evangelical congregations hoped for greater results in the heady days after 1989, but the smaller numbers have proven to be a strange kind of blessing. Communist repression had turned evangelical churches inward and they became incapable of receiving an influx of new Christians right away. Unger calls this a "ghetto mentality" that took time to overcome. "We were a ghetto that had to preserve Christianity," he says, "but we lost a vision for society, how to equip Christians outside the congregation or its meetings. A major goal is to enlarge the vision of the church, because the church is still suspicious of everything public."

So the 1990s became a decade of experimentation and development as evangelicals expanded their mission and church structures and tried to reach out in new ways. Rudolf Brancovsky is a 24-year old painter and sculptor here in Prague, and one of the new generation of Christian artists and students who are influencing the church. He moonlights as the lead singer and songwriter for the band Veselá Zubatá (The Merry Grim Reaper). The group sings honestly about faith and the church, and is often critical of the Christian subculture that has developed in the country. "Jesus changed water into wine; Christians tend to turn it back into water," Brancovsky told us one afternoon in his studio. This attitude has fueled experimentation and a willingness to try new things.

Churches now partner with congregations in Ireland, the UK and the United States to put on summer English camps with an evangelistic focus. They have adopted praise choruses in addition to time-tested hymns. They have launched youth groups and started counseling programs.

The results can be seen in the pews; young believers and families now fill 545 evangelical congregations. Through organizations like the Evangelical Alliance, cooperation among denominations is up. Higher-quality Christian presses now publish more resources for Christians and churches, books including Czech Bibles and translations of well-known Western authors such as Philip Yancey. Support organizations such as the new counseling ministry Parakletos are up and running.

Christianity, long assumed to be dying here, lives on — but much of that life takes place away from the obvious medieval churches and baroque monasteries that saturate Prague. And Czech culture, it turns out, is not as hostile to religious messages as is often claimed. The same Eurobarometer survey that put belief in God at 19 percent showed that half of all Czechs harbor a belief in "some sort of spirit or life force," often referred to as necismus (somethingism). Though disillusioned with traditional religioun, Czechs are open to a new way forward, and a growing number of evangelicals are trying to show it to them.