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Christ pour les Français
Tooling around the villages and great cities of France, the spires and steeples topping cavernous cathedrals hardly escape a tourist’s eye. “A striking feature of even the most rapid tour of Paris is the quantity of beautiful Christian architecture,” says Stephen Johnston, chairman of Evangelical Greenhouse Ministries International. He and his wife Joy form the core of the Greenhouse ministry in Paris, responding to the spiritual needs of Parisians. But the great cathedrals of the old city are not where their work takes place.
“Most church buildings you see in France actually belong to the State and attract far greater crowds for classical concerts than for worship,” Johnston says. “Only one Parisian in 10,000 attends an evangelical church, while less than 50 in 1,000 regularly attend any other Christian church.”
Greenhouse has found a niche for evangelical outreach in small, neutral meeting spots where the gospel can be effectively communicated to Parisians, and calls it Espace Evangile (literally, a place for the gospel). “This personal and rather discrete approach is tailor-made for the typical Parisian who is unchurched and often anti-church,” Johnston says.
Chris Lorimer, field leader for Operation Mobilization (OM) in France, based in Nantes, says the average evangelical church in France has about 35 to 50 members.
Johnston says, “With 75 percent of the French never reading the Bible and less than one percent professing faith in Christ, France is close to the bottom of the world when it comes to faith in Christ.”
Consequently, due to their small numbers “it is difficult for many churches to have a full-time pastor and their own building,” says Charles Cross, a missionary with Greater Europe Mission, working in the Oise region north of Paris.
Lorimer says that although the individual churches lack quantity of members and square-footage when compared to the US, they maintain a quality of faith for the very reason that their numbers are small.
“Evangelical Christians are usually committed believers because they are living in a secular society that has not known the Protestant Reformation like the US and northern Europe,” Lorimer says. “When they come to church, they know why they come, because often they don’t meet other Christians during their work week.”
Steeping in friendship and the gospel
The church grows member by member as individuals profess faith in Jesus Christ. “Evangelicals are described as ‘Christians by conversion,’ as opposed to historical Catholicism and mainstream French Protestantism,” says Stéphane Lauzet, president of the French Evangelical Alliance.
Local churches have an opportunity for ministry in their communities in 2003, France’s Year of the Bible. Lauzet chairs the guiding committee for the Year of the Bible and oversees raising interest among local churches. “Two types of projects are popular with local congregations: a Bible festival weekend to be held on the second weekend of October; and a witnessing pack, containing a copy of the Jesus film, a New Testament and a Scripture Union booklet of explanations and testimonies. Seventy thousand copies of this pack have been distributed,” he says.
Conversion is often the result of repeated exposure to the truth of the gospel says Paul Keidel, Christian and Misionary Alliance director for France. “It takes a French person without Christ as much as five years to come to a point of decision to follow Christ, if he or she was steeped in the philosophical worldview of existentialism.”
Existential philosophy asserts that an individual has responsibility for his acts of free will in an absurd universe where there is no certainty of moral absolutes. The majority French population generally accepts this philosophy as the norm because of their educational system, Keidel says.
“Philosophy takes the place of religion in teaching on beliefs and convictions. All public schools teach courses in philosophy as a part of the curriculum,” Keidel explains. “Bringing the truth of Christ to this kind of mindset requires interpersonal relationships.”
“Evangelicals depend on friendships—neighborliness—as the means for first gaining the right to talk about faith. As time deepens the friendship, the truth about Truth becomes more evident, and the friend will trust Christ. Simply put, you have to win the right to share your faith, and that takes time,” Keidel says.
Cross agrees that it may take years for a French person to accept the claims of Christ, after hearing the gospel numerous times. “Once a French person does make a decision, they are generally committed. They have enthusiasm for their faith, are hungry for the Word and eager to share with others,” he says.
Greenhouse conducts intensive Bible training for Parisians who have received Christ. “Most often they are younger adults and single, and have very little knowledge of the Bible. It became essential for their spiritual growth for us to develop a substantive Bible training program adapted to the particular needs of busy Parisians,” Johnston explains. The weekend Bible courses each focus on a specific character of Scripture and their relationship with Christ, and are held at a beachside ministry center in Normandy, a popular getaway spot for Parisians.
Outreach within French borders, and beyond
Greenhouse ministers mainly to Parisians. The Christian and Missionary Alliance, Keidel says, “focuses primarily on the français de suche,” cultural French people who trace their ancestry to France and make up 80 percent of the population. But many other people in France also need the gospel.
OM is targeting the Muslim families of Paris by distributing 50,000 to 100,000 New Testaments via mailboxes in March through July of 2003. While this is a short-term project for the Year of the Bible, Lorimer says, OM has plans to start a team that will minister to the largely unreached Muslim community in the Montreuil district of Paris.
One million Muslims are concentrated in Paris and its suburbs, with immigrants drawn from North and West Africa, Turkey and the Middle East. In total, Muslims comprise 10 percent of the French population, making them the second-largest religious group after Roman Catholics and giving France the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, five million.
Muslim immigrants often represent countries that are largely inaccessible to Christian workers, thus making Paris a so-called gateway city for reaching those who can bring the gospel to their home countries. French evangelical leaders have developed an additional way to send the gospel to unreached lands.
Gospel Without Borders (GWB), or Evangile sans Frontières in French, was launched to minister to some half billion French speakers throughout the Arab world, by Greenhouse, leaders of the French Evangelical Alliance and the Federation of Evangelical Missions. French is a predominant language in 26 African countries and 16 mostly Muslim countries in the 10/40 window, making them natural mission fields for the French church.
This summer GWB is sending its first two missionaries, Elisabeth Miloud and Valérie Maillard, to N’Djamena, capitol city of Chad. Miloud will spend three weeks teaching a language and journalism workshop at the Centre de Culture Evangelique (Evangelical Cultural Center), a ministry of Chadian churches. Maillard will aid a local church’s youth leader and minister to Chadian teenage girls in a day camp in Muslim neighborhoods.
GWB envisions sending more French Christians as missionaries to the francophone world, to countries that might otherwise be closed to mission work.
Paul Appéré, pastor of the Central Paris Baptist Church, a prominent evangelical church, believes that sending missionaries from France will motivate the French church. “Our churches need to be encouraged to think in terms of missions. These projects can serve as an inspiration to others in our churches, young adults in particular.”
Greenhouse executive director Stephen Darling, based in Normandy, says “a French focus on missions might even be a pre-condition to revival in France, rather than a distant result of some future revival.”
As the French church grows outside the stone walls of cathedrals, it also has the potential to spread beyond the borders of its country. French Christians, long steeped in secular environs, are equipped to reach their French-speaking neighbors within France’s walls, and without.
Sara Joy Anderson is a freelance writer in Libertyville, Ill.
