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By Chris Lewis, February 2007
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French students marched against riot police in Toulouse last year, as protests escalated nationwide over a new labor law.
PHOTO: AP/REMY GABALDA
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In the spring of 1945, U.S. infantryman H. Curt Ball rode the first assault wave that crashed ashore on Okinawa during World War II. Entrenched in a rice patty during the South Pacific's bloodiest battle, the enemy engaged Ball in an explosive "game of catch" - until one hand grenade landed next to him.
A year earlier, on the faraway shores of occupied France, the capture of another famous beachhead had turned the tide for the Allies. Today, the D-Day invasion at Normandy is marked by scrolling rows of silent white crosses, staked into 172 acres entombing 10,000 of Ball's comrades.
Not that Ball ever visited this memorial. Decades later, on business trips to France, the veteran avoided reminiscing about a war prolonged, in his eyes, by spineless Vichy French collaborators and obstinate French resistance leaders. Ball still has souvenir shrapnel in his shoulder. And in his mind, the French haven't changed - from General de Gaulle's 1966 NATO pullout (his ordering American troops to leave French soil prompted U.S. President Johnson to ask, "Does that include those in it?") to President Chirac's anti-war stance on Iraq.
"The French are not my favorite people," says Ball, in his stern Texas drawl. "God loves ‘em - I don't know why."
All this to say: heaven help the poor missionary who approaches Ball about funding a church-planting team ... to France. With a mission that borrows its name from a French word, to boot. As Avant forwards its avant-garde church-planting strategy to France, you'd expect Ball to say, "You're not getting a single ‘freedom fry' of my support."
That didn't faze Avant missionary Ken Witcher, who's leading a Short-Cycle Church-Planting team to France this year. Emboldened by their "Aggie connection" as Texas A&M alums, Witcher asked Ball for a monthly donation ... and he said "yes."
"I feel like the French had their chance," said Ball from his Houston-area home. "But the Great Commission doesn't say we can pick and choose which country to go to. They all need to hear the Good News."
Mission strategists and demographers are forecasting a faith renaissance in secular Europe, positioning France for what Witcher calls a gospel "reclamation." Less than 1 percent of France's 60 million are evangelical Christian.
"We're about to see a big move in Europe. I believe God is going to reach hundreds of thousands of French in the next decade," Witcher says - through a grass-roots stirring of new French believers.
This is the heart of Avant's Short-Cycle Church Planting: equipping young nationals to rapidly launch reproducing churches. Short-Cycle is a focused, five-year strategy employed by synergized teams - three of which are preparing to deploy to France.
The question is whether a spiritual "French revolution" will marshal supporters like Ball, who still resents that France didn't protect its Christian heritage any better than defending its Maginot Line against Hitler's advancing Third Reich.
The new battle line: It's on the home front, where a "10/40"-focused North American Church is still recalibrating its worldview to see France as "unreached."
"France is at a turning point. There's a ripening here," said David Rowley, president of France Mission in Paris. "The older generation, steeped in Catholicism and institutional tradition, is moving off the scene. Now is the time to present the gospel to the younger generation. It's a powerful moment to be in Europe."
So, is the Church ready for France? Is France ready for Short-Cycle?
Breaking windows
For almost a generation now, the 10/40 missions limelight has shone from West Africa to East Asia, where 90 percent of the world's unreached "people groups" reside. It illuminates much of Spain but fades away at the Pyrenees Mountains, before reaching the nation that de Gaulle once proclaimed as the lumière du monde - "light of the world."
Within this 10/40 window, Witcher believes, the challenge of penetrating closed Muslim countries generated "creative-access" missions - but with little creative energy left over for postmodern Europe.
Indeed, the 10/40 "closed-country" label is also a European one, says church history professor Ed Smither of Liberty University in Virginia. A former Campus Crusade missionary to France, Smither mused that a suitcase full of Bibles smuggled into Morocco would be gone in two hours. But distributing them in "open" France might take two years.
"France has religious freedom," said Smither, who left in 2002. "But spiritually, it's very closed. I've found it easier working with Muslims than the very reserved French. That someone like George Bush would talk openly about his faith is seen as ridiculous."
Evangelism is so foreign a concept in most French churches that it makes strategic missions an unwitting cause célèbre. Evangelicals are sometimes labeled a cult - cursed by commoners and hassled by government officials.
"We're losing ground in Europe, the Mother of our faith, because missions there is so traditional," says Witcher, 38, of Youngsville, N.C. "We're not doing anything new - just repeating the same mistakes. We've settled for the status quo."
During a trip to the Czech Republic in 1999, Witcher's church group stuffed mailboxes with "Jesus Film" flyers and handed out sophisticated tracts - which passersby used to decorate city streets. "Follow-up" amounted to a return trip six months later; this time, another gospel-tract blitzkrieg drew all of nine people to a three-day outreach. Three were saved - if you include the "repeat" Witcher had prayed with during the initial trip.
Thought Witcher: "There has to be a better way ..."
Vogue missions
The Avant way - using "Short-Cycle" teams to aggressively launch multiple church plants in five-year stints - is dramatically baroque compared to France's methodical missions culture. In a society hostile to religion, the traditional creed was this: you can't plant a church until you "become French." Ministry goals were burdened by decades of assimilation efforts, to ensure a missionary's "longevity."
However, Short-Cycle is geared not for longevity, but legacy. "Our goal is to develop churches that reproduce and change the culture - leaving a legacy of French churches that reach their own countrymen," said Scott Harris, Avant's vice-president of field ministries. "Our expectation is that God can work more quickly than current assumptions allow."
In France, the church-planting mentality is, "You're there for the long-haul," said former Avant missionary John Newlin, who left France last summer after 16 years. "But France is changing. Short-Cycle will have its place as the wave of the future."
Early on, Newlin says, Short-Cycle's results-oriented strategy may ruffle a few French feathers. And others as well, said Reynald Kozycki, outreach director of France's Evangelical Brethren mission (CAEF). "When I spoke about Avant's plans with our national committee, the most skeptical attitude was from English-speaking missionaries," he said.
To help build a bridge, Avant has aligned with the Evangelical Federation of France (FEF), alongside CAEF and France Mission. Kozycki said some outsiders still make the "dangerous" mistake of bypassing this credibility earned by legal French association - and so they come across as high on "American free-enterprise attitude," as Rowley puts it. Many post-WWII missionaries carried American idealism to France, Rowley says, and then wore down from the "gruesome," groundbreaking work. But the large, old-guard missions have largely vacated France, he says, and the emerging French evangelical movement is more collaborative and far less provincial.
"That's the old way. There's a real cooperation among evangelicals, with new thinking and networking," Rowley said. "It's a new game today."
A little naiveté might be healthy, Rowley laughs. Witcher agrees. "I'm excited about having a bunch of rookies on my team - including me," Witcher says. "We don't have any preconceived notions about France or missions. Short-Cycle dares us to dream and take risks."
A little too risky, thought Witcher's teammate Vanessa Vannoy, when she first heard of Short-Cycle. After spending nine months as a missions intern in France before coming to Avant in 2005, she'd brought back some dire stereotypes of missions there. "Sometimes we put up obstacles and cripple ourselves," said Vannoy, now 26. "But with Short-Cycle, the focus isn't on us, it's on equipping nationals. That's the way to reach France - through the French."
It helps that today's under-35 French crowd is far more global - and less cynical - than their parents, who were shaken by the collapsing worldviews of Catholicism, Soviet socialism and existentialism. New Age postmodernism, the new vogue, made having a "worldview" an un-hip liability; instead, people adopted a "whatever works for you is truth" motto, said Rowley, the France Mission president.
Then came the "wake-up calls." Globalism. The 9/11 attacks. The Iraq War. Train bombings in England and Spain. Last year, the bullhorn of the disenfranchised sounded, as Muslim immigrant riots swept France and young-adult labor protestors took to Paris streets: visible reminders that the vaunted French social system is vulnerable. Today, Bible societies and bookstores report record Bible sales; a 2003 France Mission poll found that 32 percent of "Christians" have recently rededicated themselves to the faith, compared to 13 percent in 1994.
"There's an entire generation wondering, ‘Who is now pointing us to salvation?'" Rowley said.
It's a daunting question: Within the next five years, Rowley acknowledged, most of the estimated 700 foreign missionaries in France will be retiring or leaving the mission field. Not to the mention the 1,900 aging French nationals working in full-time evangelical ministry - a dim number among a populace of 60 million.
While Paris is revered as the "City of Light," France's biggest beacon is still secularism. Chirac lauds secularity as one of the Republic's "great conquests," in the name of "national cohesion." But France is also the world's leading consumer of antidepressants.
The need, Kozycki says, is glaring: "We have about 1,850 evangelical churches now in France. We need 4,200 churches just to have one for every 10,000 inhabitants."
Relevant church
For French 20-somethings, the first generation raised without religious education, this church void has been filled by hand-me-down clichés - such as, ‘churches cause wars and division.' Realizing that ignorance is inflammatory, even the French minister of education is now pushing to mandate religion classes in high schools, Rowley says.
"It's the greatest struggle facing a mission or church-planting organization - how to make the church meaningful to a generation that has just a few clichés about what church really is," Rowley said.
Witcher has seen these clichés up close - even at the Raleigh airport last year, before embarking on an Avant survey trip to France. A young French woman in front of him posed the golden question:
"So, what are you going to do in France?" she nonchalantly asked.
"We're going to plant churches!" Witcher exclaimed.
"Oh ... really?" she replied, feigning interest and rolling her eyes.
"No, really - we're going to plant a church for people just like you," he said. "It's not going to be your mom's church. God is not just your parents' God."
Witcher shared his vision for starting churches in movie theaters and art houses at subway stops - which appeals to the urbane artistique sentiment of Parisians and their reluctance to make long church commutes. By the time they'd checked their bags, Witcher had converted her - to the idea that church is relevant. "Wow, I wish you were coming to Lyon [in southern France]. Do you think you ever would?" she asked.
Whether on trains or buses or in Parisian restaurants, the Witchers have struck up the same bold conversations with young Europeans; they've built a list of more than 12 non-Christians who are eagerly anticipating their arrival later this year. Witcher's seven-member team - France.One - is landing in Paris this year opposite a France.Two team. A third Short-Cycle team is expected to reach the southern part of France in 2008.
Sixty percent of French people said they attend church "practically never" - the highest among 14 major Western nations polled in a Swedish-based World Values Survey in 2000. But as one Parisian pastor told Witcher: "The primary reason is because the French see church as boring and irrelevant. Not because they don't believe in God."
France Mission reports that 350,000 now frequent evangelical churches, compared to the estimated 50,000 in 1950 - a growth spurred in more recent years by Pentecostals. In the last 35 years, a new evangelical church has started once every 11 days. Even so, there's still only one evangelical church per 32,000 people in France, and most range from 25-50 people. It's a fledgling minority compared to France's 40 million Catholics, only 5 million of whom are monthly churchgoers.
As they share Short-Cycle in American churches, Witcher and his wife, Gina, field comments like, "Do they all hate Americans?" Or, "I'd go anywhere but France."
That sums up Witcher's feeling, too, at first: France? Missions? "No way. I wanted to be a pastor of First Baptist fill-in-the-blank. I've come a long way," laughs Witcher, who met Gina in 1996 at Southeastern Baptist Seminary in North Carolina. While in school, Gina took a short-term mission trip to France, while Ken studied France's medieval church history. Neither sensed a French connection. A logic-driven IT specialist, Witcher figured his conservative politics weren't quite European chic. And yet, as they immersed themselves in local church plants and conferences, experiential postmodernism suddenly seemed like "the best missions opportunity in 2,000 years," Witcher says.
Tensions? Touché!
There was a time in America, starting with France's support during the Revolutionary War, when friendly Francophilia was all the rage. Not long after the rallying cry, "Give me liberty or give me death," rang through American Colonies, the French Revolution's own mantra - "Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death!" - reverberated with Patrick Henry-like fervor.
France marked America’s centennial celebrations in 1886 by bequeathing the Statue of Liberty, designed by an engineer of the Eiffel Tower, which was erected three years later. Together, the two beacons became icons of the free world (although it took years for many French to warm up to a tower they first bitterly lampooned as an iron eyesore.)
But WWII gave off a Francophobic vibe. The feel-good atmosphere of post-Liberation France wore off so quickly that the U.S. military published a diplomatic primer - 112 Gripes About the French - to ease tensions between GIs and locals. A republished version was a hit in France several years ago, under the more tactful title Our Friends, the French.
Think politics as a pop-culture pacesetter is passé? Just remember the bandwagon clamor for politically-correct "freedom fries," which a congressional vote briefly "de-Frenched" from Capitol Hill cafeterias after France opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion. The same un-French etiquette is as American laissez-faire as a recent Burger King TV commercial: the one where an office worker derided as "le Ethan" says, "I don't like French things." All for the sake of selling croissant sandwiches.
Hmmm. Is the issue simply that the French are as ethnocentric ... as Americans? If it's not French politics sticking in someone's Camembert, then it's the grab-bag of stereotypes within all-too-easy reach: "Those ___ French." Elitist. Atheist. Humanist. Socialist. Materialist. And the French have their own fill-in-the blanks for les Américains: those imprudent, imperialist, moralistic, unsophisticated bruts.
So when Avant missionary Jeremy Wedel says he's grateful for his Canadian permanent residence card, he's only half-joking.
Now 28, Wedel was raised as an Avant "missionary kid" in France and later French Quebec. A 2006 graduate of Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, he's returning to his birth country this year - as a member of Avant's France.Two team to Paris.
Not everyone on Wedel's team is such a French-speaking connaisseur, but Short-Cycle strategy is big on "simultaneous activity" - team members acquire language and culture, while at the same time boldly witnessing and mentoring young leaders to lead new church plants.
"With the changing times, missions also needs to change," Wedel says. "A team has the ability to get things moving much quicker, with everyone's gifts interacting to accelerate the church-planting process."
Wedel spent the 2002 summer interning with Avant's Newlin in France, where he noticed a warmer spiritual climate for sharing his faith. "A lot of young people were saying, ‘That's really cool that you stand for something,'" Wedel recalls. "They're looking for spiritual identity."
Jim Shoberg, one of Wedel's teammates, has learned to leverage the cultural criticism. One of his supporters groused, "The French turned their back on God, and he gave them over to their own futility." Shoberg empathized, but then he called to mind Jonah of the Old Testament.
"Jonah had every reason to hate the brutal Assyrians. But God sent him anyway, saying, ‘Don't they matter?'" Shoberg says. "I can't base where I go, and my missiology, on my country's politics."
Dollars and sense
France is a tough sell for more than just geo-political reasons.
Paris? That sounds like Hollywood lights,” said one generous Midwest donor, who’s known for writing Avant hefty checks. He declined to support Avant in France, saying he’ll get more Kingdom bang for his buck on a mission field where the cost of ministry isn’t so high. Indeed, Paris ranks as the 15th most expensive city in the world – 14 spots higher than Los Angeles – according to the 2006 Mercer cost-of-living survey.
“In recent years, the [missions] focus has shifted to the Muslim world. Central Asia and Eastern Europe are hot topics,” said Dean Callison, Avant’s vice president of development. “Our job is not to pass judgment on donors with a different passion – but not to back down, either.”
For charitable foundations looking to maximize their “stewardship dollar” in the short run, Avant’s Short-Cycle teams to the Czech Republic and Muslim Asia have more marketing moxie. But for the legacy-minded investor, France is a diamond in the rough. “Yes, it’s expensive. But what is the cost of not doing missions in France?” Callison asks. “What if we started a church-planting movement that tipped the scales?”
That’s the vision captivating Witcher: France as a spiritual linchpin. He envisions the Paris metro area – the most densely populated in the developed world – resembling the Rome of the Apostle Paul’s day: a strategic hub for quickly disseminating the gospel. The naysayers may no longer consider France a prom court queen. But she is still the cultural barometer of Europe, and she still holds sway as one of only five U.N. nations with “veto power.”
“France is very strategic for missions because of its influence, whether or not people want to admit it,” Witcher says. “The stronger faith becomes in France, the easier it will be for other countries to open up.”
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