VILVOORDE and ANTWERP, Belgium—The streets of Vilvoorde leading to the church are quiet on Sunday morning, the Belgian pastry shops shuttered. Churchgoers pass beneath a 16th-century bricked archway on an otherwise modern street of apartments, a cell phone store, and a corner grocery. Inside the courtyard is a sign marking the Arab Evangelical Church of Vilvoorde and another beneath it reading in Dutch, In Jezus geloven wij, or “In Jesus we believe.”

Through the doorway the sounds of children and adult conversation bounce around a room of dark wood paneling and bright chandeliers. As families settle into chairs arranged in rows, a young man steps to a front platform and begins to read Psalm 40. He prays, and the worshippers stand to sing. The setting may be rusticated European, but the Scripture reading, prayer, and singing are in Arabic. Musical accompaniment comes from a Persian drum and an oud, a short-necked stringed instrument from the Middle East similar to a lute.

Vilvoorde is a storied town, a suburb north of Brussels where authorities burned at the stake British scholar William Tyndale in 1536. The Reformation history written here, as in much of what was then part of the Netherlands, was overtaken by the Catholic resurgence of the Counter-Reformation. While the Dutch Reformed Church fueled the spread of Calvinist teaching and church life, real growth among Protestants in many parts of Western Europe today rises from other quarters—from Europe’s immigrant communities, primarily those where Islam dominates.

Middle Eastern and African congregations across Europe, their numbers buoyed by a record 1.3 million migrants in 2015, outstrip in size and vitality more traditional Protestant churches. In Amsterdam, the majority of the city’s 350 churches are immigrant-led. In Vilvoorde the Arab congregation, though small, has larger gatherings than its Protestant counterparts. While Arab and African congregations in Belgium and the Netherlands are growing, the Dutch Reformed churches are becoming museums and concert halls, their teaching far removed from Biblical orthodoxy and their numbers dwindled.

Europe in many ways is becoming “Eurabia,” with recent migration swelling the number of Muslims in Amsterdam and other cities. But while immigration is giving Islam a beachhead, some immigrants are reviving churches that had turned to sandcastles before a high tide of atheism. “We hope for revival, but mostly it comes from the immigrant communities and their charismatic churches,” says Klaas Van der Zwaag, a Dutch journalist and author of the two-volume Reformation Today (deBanier, 2017).

The Arab Evangelical congregation at Vilvoorde, at about 40 people on the Sunday morning I visited, rivals the size of the Protestant Church in Vilvoorde, an ecumenical congregation that meets less than a mile away on the site where Tyndale was burned as a heretic. It adjoins a museum dedicated to the Reformer.

The Arab congregation’s building is shabbier, adjoining what was a grain warehouse in Tyndale’s day, close to water mills. By the 19th century a Protestant church named to honor Tyndale began meeting on the site. Today’s congregation meets in what was the banquet hall. Worshippers sit in pairs or family clusters, their infants in strollers at the end of a row or napping on a father’s shoulder. One family escaped upheaval during the Arab Spring protests in Cairo; another fled Syria’s civil war. Families from Iraq and other parts of the Middle East have been in Belgium longer, a decade or more, and the Middle Easterners sometimes are joined by a handful of expat workers who know Arabic from Holland, Belgium, and the United States.

“We come from old faith communities ourselves,” explained Samir, an Egyptian who asked that only his first name be used in print. “We believe our faith in Jesus Christ can reawaken European churches built before on faith in Jesus Christ alone.”

The import of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses—posted 500 years ago this month on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in Germany—reached Vilvoorde in 1520. That also was the year Luther published further works, tracts that were written in German (not the Latin acceptable to church fathers), and disseminated via Flemish printers throughout the Low Countries. They included: To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On the Freedom of a Christian. The first laid out the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, undermining papal authority and drawing wrath from church authorities and the Holy Roman Empire.