The Champs-Elysees

In the city of Paris, the avenue that runs along the Seine River is one of the most iconic roads in the world. Most days tour boats drift past the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and the city’s famous bridges. Olympic athletes floated past the same landmarks during this month’s opening ceremonies while thousands of spectators aligned the banks in the pouring rain for the hours-long show. When Eric Liddell arrived in Paris in July of 1924, the Olympic spectacle was far less spectacular. A few miles north of Central Paris athletes marched around a cinder track in simple uniforms, no brand logos or oversized Olympic rings, but the tension was still palpable. As Liddell circled the track with his teammates and athletes from 43 other nations, he must have pondered the race he would run on the same track in a few days.

He excelled at the 100 meters, but he had entered the 400 meters, an event that allowed him to avoid competing on Sunday, an event no one expected him to win. But as it so happens, Paris is filled with unexpected turns, even today. I’m Jamie Dean and from the team at Radical, this is Glory Road.

Unexpected Turns

One of the most iconic stops on the Seine River is the Cathedral of Notre Dame. A magnificent structure with plenty of its own unexpected turns. The building began rising in 1163, it endured the French Revolution until 1799, it hosted the coronation of Napoleon in 1804, and it suddenly caught fire in the spring of 2019.

It was April 15th when a fire alarm sounded inside the cathedral at 6:20 PM. By 07:15, flames ripped through 1,300 oak beams supporting the cathedral’s massive roof. At 7:57 PM the cathedral’s famous spire cracked, tipped, and collapsed into the building. That night as the crowds gathered outside the burning church, they didn’t just weep and watch, they sang and prayed.

It was a remarkable display in a country where less than 8% of Catholics regularly attend mass, and as few as 1% of the population are evangelical Christians. French journalist Agnes Poirier described the sight of Parisians falling on their knees. She wrote, “Those images related on TV stunned this staunchly secular country, this viscerally skeptical people and touched them to the core”. Awestruck, France realizes how profoundly Christian its history is, even if it is buried under a century or more of secularism.

The Deeply Rooted French

Francis’s secularism is famous and sometimes infamous. During the French Revolution, the Cathedral of Notre Dame was converted into a temple of reason. Christian teaching was rejected and human wisdom was literally enshrined. After years of violent revolution, Napoleon seized power in 1799 and later he signed an agreement that returned control of the cathedral to the Catholic Church. But secularism had taken deep root and it remains deeply rooted today. But on the evening the cathedral caught fire in April of 2019, a French pastor was holding choir practice nearby. The small group went outside and saw the smoke rising in the distance. It was four days before Good Friday. As Paris mourned the damage to the massive cathedral, Pastor Samuel Foucachon prepared to preach the gospel in a small theater.

Samuel Foucachon: I’m Samuel Foucachon, and I’m the pastor in Paris in a church plant in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The church was started in 2012, and it’s attached to the Evangelical Reform Church of France.

The location of Chapelle de Nesle in Central Paris is strategic. The Latin Quarters are not only in the middle of the city’s most famous landmarks, it’s also full of what Pastor Samuel describes as the deeply rooted French. A population he calls some of the most unreached in France today. In fact, in a city that sees many people move in and move on, the pastor says 75% of the population living in this community were born here. And as far as Samuel knows, this is the first Protestant church in this district of the Latin Quarter in 500 years. It’s amazing considering this was the epicenter for the very first Protestants in Paris.

Establishing a Gospel Presence

I met up with Samuel on a cloudy afternoon outside the small theater, his church rents on Sundays. Like many Parisians, he arrived on his bike and we set out on a tour.

Samuel Foucachon: This is the map of Paris old days, it’s from the 15th, 16th century, and actually north is there. So today we would make the map this way. So this is the island where the Notre-Dame is. So just to get the picture. And this is right where we are right now, on this little corner here.

A few streets over. Samuel shows me the area where the first Protestant church in Paris was established in the mid-1500s. French Protestants who embraced the teachings of French reformers like John Calvin became known as Huguenots. They also became targets. Huguenots struggled for the right to hold public worship. Political and religious tensions grew and they boiled over and what became known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, an estimated 3000 Huguenots were killed in just a few days. Many right here in these streets.

Over the years, many more fled persecution and those who remained in France often met in secret. Eventually, France recognized freedom of worship, but many Huguenots were already gone and their numbers were waning in France. Today, just 3% of the French population identifies as Protestant. An even smaller number would be considered evangelical Christians. So how does a French pastor try to reconnect this French neighborhood with its reformation roots and the gospel that once echoed down these streets? Well, he begins with worship. On Sunday mornings, show up early enough and you’ll find Pastor Samuel leading music practice.

By the time a few dozen people fill the folding chairs in the cozy Gallery downstairs, morning worship is robust.

Simple, robust worship, including biblical preaching, is central to the effort to reestablish a gospel presence in the Latin Quarter. The church also invites the community to other events during the year, including a Good Friday service that features sacred music about Christ’s passion, along with a simple explanation about the gospel meaning behind the well-known works.

Samuel Foucachon: People come out of this room, where you were yesterday, they go up the stairs really thinking about it. And then I would stand at the exit and people would come and shake my hand in a way, sometimes with tears, say thank you. We knew that music. We didn’t know the meaning of it. Well, that’s an amazing bridge.

Passing the Baton

In a city of beauty, Samuel hopes French neighbors will be compelled by the beauty of worship and the gospel. It would be an unexpected turn for the neighborhood. But Samuel’s own ministry in Paris came after an unexpected turn. He never wanted to live here. Samuel is from southern France and he had no desire to move to Paris. For all its beauty, the city is also filled with plenty of problems for the people who live here. But when he saw the need, and the potential, he agreed.

Samuel Foucachon: And I have to say, we have the privilege to minister to the best people ever. I mean, we have a most wonderful group of people here and I’m so happy now we’re here. But if I could leave the city tomorrow, I will. But the ministry here, the people we deal with, the dynamics going on, even if we have so many obstacles, there’s so many things that could be done. So that’s the fire in my heart for that.

There’s also another fire in Samuel’s heart, who will serve next. There are certainly more churches and church plants around Paris and France, but there are also more ministers retiring from the pastorate than starting out. Samuel wonders who will take the baton. That was one of the questions on the mind of another pastor in Paris not long before his own life took a really unexpected turn. Not far from Paris’s acclaimed Arc de Triomphe, Laura Nelson lives in an apartment at the top of a lot of stairs. The last stretch is spiral.

Laura’s lived here for more than two decades on the top floor of a building that’s been in her husband’s family for generations. Edward Nelson grew up in the United States, but spent summers in France where his mother was born. He met Laura in her home country of England and they decided to pursue ministry here in Paris. He planted a church. He also dove into helping others plant churches, mentoring young French men, making connections between French believers, and reading the Bible with unbelievers. Laura says Edward had an American ambition for getting things done and a French finesse for building relationships. But in August 2020, the Nelson’s lives took that unexpected turn. During a family vacation to the French Alps, Edwards suffered a hiking accident. He died the next day. He was 45 years old. He left behind his wife and their four children.

He also left behind a lot of ministry. Edward was in the middle of so many projects, that Laura says it was hard to see how his death made sense for the kingdom. She read the book of Ecclesiastes slowly and carefully and she realized she couldn’t make sense of his death, but she could press on.

Laura Nelson: Working through the way in which death colors all of life and the way in which we don’t understand the timings and the organization and the way in which things succeed or fail or how they succeed or fail, none of that is within our control. We are so small, our lives are so short and insignificant. And it is the Lord Jesus and in his sovereignty the way that he uses us in ways that we don’t control or understand, and that’s what actually gives us hope. I love the bit in chapter 11 when it talks about throwing your bread on the waters, you don’t know what will come back. And so sow your seed in the morning and evening, go out and do stuff. So the fact that you don’t know what God is going to do with what you invest shouldn’t stop us investing. [foreign language 00:14:37] The opposite because he’s so generous and so surprising in the way in which he brings fruit even where you think he isn’t going to.

That should motivate us to go liberally take risks, be ambitious, dream big. And so I think for me, the realization was Edward and I thought and prayed and dreamed about this particular project or these particular projects in Paris, in France, we thought we were building this. God has a completely different, well not completely different, but a way bigger and other building in progress that we don’t see the plans of in advance. We see the final picture, in the scriptures he’s given us the final picture. Everything is going to be brought together under Christ. But the fact that we don’t know what he’s going to do with our investment, and he chose to call Edward away in what seemed to be like the middle of the project in a sense, whether that project is our family or the church or everything, that doesn’t mean that that investment up to that point and then what happens afterwards isn’t going to be used in a much better way and a different way by the Lord to build his kingdom in France.

And so Laura kept with it. When people asked if she was thinking of moving back to England with her children, it hadn’t even crossed her mind. In fact, she was soon planning a funeral and exploring ways to honor Edward’s memory by continuing his work. It turns out the Lord used Edward’s death to help advance Edward’s hopes.

Laura Nelson: I think the last email he sent pretty much was sort of proposals to try and get the denominations to work together to be more serious and committed about investing in the next generation and their training. In France there’s a real barrier, the churches don’t have much in the way of resources. They struggle often to pay their pastor and their building and not much beyond that. And so the idea of saying to a young guy or a young woman, how about taking a year to train for Christian ministry, do an internship in the church and then theological study or whatever the particular sequence of studies would be. It’s very hard to do that when there’s no money there and where it’s such a big jump from the kind of job security, high unemployment in France, it’s very hard to get a secure job. So it’s a big deal to put that aside, to take a year to test out Christian ministry, or longer. And so the desire was to try and make that a bit easier, a bit more of a realistic option for people and for churches to see that this is crucial.

It’s now a ministry called 2 Timothy 22, pastors and other ministry workers mentor young French men for the pastorate and women for ministry roles in the kingdom. Paid internships help make it possible to explore the possibilities, and it also helps French churches prepare to train the next generation of church leaders now. Not only to replace pastors who are retiring, but to plant churches in villages and towns that have no faithful gospel witness even today. In the meantime, Laura also continues caring for her children, serving her church, and loving her neighbors, including those who don’t know Jesus. At least not yet. Though she says the ambient religion in France is cultural relativism, she also says people are more open to talking about the gospel than others might think, especially since many have never really heard it.

Laura Nelson: Oh, I’m so encouraged by the openness of French people to the gospel. And people will often say, “But it’s a missionary’s graveyard. It’s a really tough place to go because people don’t want to hear about Jesus”. They really do. There are a lot of superficial barriers, which means they won’t engage with you if you launch at them with the gospel in the street or the first time you meet them. But when you get to know people… And French culture is more like that anyway, they’re not going to invite you into their homes in the first two years, it takes a while. But then they’re real relationships. And so when you get to know people and you’re invited into each other’s homes and you start going to the kids’ birthday parties and hanging out on the park bench together and sharing everything that’s good and bad and difficult about life, then very quickly and very easily you can talk about the gospel.

She’s encouraged by the sometimes slow but steady growth in French churches. She’s praying for God’s kingdom to keep growing even in unexpected ways.

Laura Nelson: It might not look like God’s kingdom is great and glorious right now in France. But Jesus told the power of the mustard seed, the power of the seed growing secretly. And I’m going to trust that even if what it looks like is a few straggly branches that even one bird would struggle to sit on that actually what’s happening, I don’t see it, but at the end of time when the Lord Jesus returns, there is going to be an extraordinary harvest and the biggest tree that you can imagine with all the birds coming and perching in their branches. And I’m going to trust, as you see again and again in the Bible with the story of Jesus, most of all, but also in the history of missions and the history of our own lives, that God is doing so much more than we see and more than we ask or imagine.

God was doing more than many thought or imagined when Eric Liddell took his mark at Columbus Stadium, a venue a few miles north of the Arc de Triomphe. It’s the only venue from the 1924 games that will also be used in the Paris Games this summer, checkout field hockey. These days, the stadium is surrounded by apartment towers and industrial buildings. A few months ago, construction workers were giving it a facelift for the Olympics while a handful of kids played soccer on a nearby field. It wasn’t very glamorous, but as I stood there, it also wasn’t too hard to imagine what happened at this very spot 100 years ago.

On July 6th, 1924, Eric Liddell attended church in Paris and other athletes ran in the heat for Liddell’s best event, the 100 meters. On Friday, July 11th, Liddell crouched on the track ready to run the 400 meters. Many thought he couldn’t win a race not designed to be an all-out sprint. In fact, he almost didn’t make it to the semifinals. Others were baffled by his unusual running form, head thrown back, eyes almost to the heavens. At around 6:30 PM runners began to line up for the 400 meters, and Liddell drew the outside lane, perhaps the worst position in the race. But when the starting pistol fired, Liddell leapt out at a furious pace, a ridiculous pace, a pace he couldn’t maintain, except he did.

When Liddell crossed the finish line, 47.6 seconds later, he had not only finished first, he had set a world and an Olympic record. When someone later asked him his secret, he said, “I run the first 200 meters as hard as I can. Then for the second 200 meters, with God’s help, I run harder”. It was a philosophy Liddell would come to need more than he could ask or imagine in the years ahead. And it’s a philosophy that believers in France still need today because though secularism remains entrenched, another religion has sprinted out of the gate in France, Islam. France now has the largest Muslim population in Europe and it’s growing. But that’s only part of the story because there are still unexpected turns for France, and for Liddell too. That’s next time on Glory Road.