The Unexpected Detour

Paris 1924. Eric Liddell crosses the finish line in the 400 meters grabbing Olympic gold in a race he wasn’t expected to win. Liddell also won bronze in the 200 meters. Radio programs broadcasting Olympic coverage for the first time ever declared the surprise victory of the Christian athlete in the Paris Games. Meanwhile, another project continued across town, the construction of the Grand Mosque of Paris. The Grand Mosque was built in the early 1920s to honor an estimated 100,000 Muslims who fought and died for France during World War I.

Many came from French colonies or protectorates in Northern Africa, including Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Today, the Grand Mosque takes up nearly an entire city block, and it points to something else that’s big, the number of Muslims in France. Muslims make up at least 10% of the country’s population, and that number is growing. Ongoing migration has been the biggest factor driving Muslim growth. Some come to Europe seeking jobs or education. Others come fleeing conflict and war in their home countries.

Migrants from Afghanistan made up the largest group of asylum seekers in France last year. These trends draw a lot of attention and often controversy, but there’s another kind of trend that’s less noticed, but still notable, Muslims becoming Christians. Not in big buildings like Grand Mosques, but in places like the basement of a Catholic Church or the back room of a coffee shop, places they didn’t expect to be, meeting a savior they didn’t expect to know. I’m Jamie Dean. And from the team at Radical, this is Glory Road.

The Grand Mosque

On a weekday afternoon, it’s quiet in the Parisian neighborhood surrounding the Grand Mosque. A Muslim bookstore across the street displays prayer rugs and children’s games with names like Quran Challenge. Soon, a handful of mosque-goers began filing in to the large white structure with a tall minaret for afternoon prayers. The mosque’s grounds are open to and a handful of tourists quietly linger in the courtyard just outside of a large room that’s open to Muslim men attending prayers.

The sounds drift outside. Downstairs, women and children gather in a separate room. A few steps away, there are rooms for ablution, the ritual washing before prayers. The mosque is built with open pathways and colorful mosaics and tiled courtyards with fountains and trees. In the spring, there’s purple wisteria and pink roses. The main courtyard is called Jardin de Dan, the Garden of Eden. But in many ways, paradise is far away.

Terrorists attacks by Islamic extremists on French soil have rocked the French nation more than once. In 2015, a series of attacks on a single night killed 130 people in Paris. In the wake of violence, subjects like immigration have remained a top issue in French politics. There are also debates over public displays of Islam like head coverings in some public places. It creates a strain for everyone, including Muslim migrants. But most migrants don’t end up in Paris first. They often travel through other countries and end up in cities on the French border.

And that’s where something really interesting is happening, at least for some of the new arrivals. So, that’s where I headed, on an evening train to Strasbourg, France.

Strasbourg

Take a stroll around Strasbourg and you might feel like you’re in Germany. At one point, you would’ve been. The town went back and forth between German and French control for centuries. Historic homes with timber framing stretch along the Rhine River. Pubs and restaurants serve German beer and sausage with sauerkraut.

But even during the city’s German past, there was always a French connection. The French reformer John Calvin once lived here when Strasbourg was in Germany. He fled France as opposition to the Reformation grew in the 1500s. Eventually he ended up in Strasbourg. This is where he met wife, and this is where he pastored a church for other French-speaking refugees. These days, most refugees in Strasbourg have fled the Middle East or Africa. Often they attend one of the city’s numerous mosques.

A local pastor tells me there are more mosques than evangelical churches in town. But some refugees and other migrants have also found their way to a little storefront that serves coffee and tea, and that also serves them.

Providential Detour

A short walk away from Strasbourg’s busy train station, the lights are on early at a cozy coffee shop in a multicultural neighborhood. Behind the counter, a missionary is making the morning brew.

Justin Dodson: So my name is Justin Dodson, and I live in Strasbourg, France. We’ve been here for seven years now.

Justin Dodson is from a rural town in Western Pennsylvania. He grew up going to church, but became a believer in college. One semester during a missions class, he found himself compelled by the reality of unreached people. He served on short-term mission trips to Iraq and Uganda. He got married. And after a series of steps, he and his wife agreed on a path. They would work to reach Muslims in Africa.

They headed to the Ivory Coast. They had spent two years in language school learning French. It’s the official language of the former French colony. Seasoned missionaries were mentoring them. Justin prepared to work in theological education. Things were clicking, and then their daughter got sick. They went through a medical evacuation. She recovered, but there was permanent damage. She would always need access to ongoing care. The message was clear, they couldn’t go back to the Ivory Coast. For some, that detour might’ve looked like the end of the road, but not for the Dodsons.

They started wondering, what about the Muslim diaspora? They started thinking about France. Folks back home were thinking maybe they should just hang it up and stay in the US. Did they consider it?

Justin Dodson: No, I couldn’t. Everybody was encouraging us. It was kind of like, “Hey, you did it. You tried it. It didn’t work out. It’s okay. You have the right to stay. It’s like you’ve done your due diligence.” And we just felt like that was not what we could do. Just because we’ve been given this capacity to speak French, and in the French-speaking world, it’s less than 1% evangelical Christian. How could we not go and to help bring the presence of Christ to the Muslim world that’s in this part of the world?

So yes, there’s tons of Muslims in the US, totally, but there’s also lot more Christians, whereas percentage-wise here, there’s still a lot of work to be done. And so we came here with the optics of our goal is not to reach Muslims. Our goal is to help the French people reach Muslims. And so our commitment to the French people getting this vision was greater than our personal commitment to reaching Muslims because we had seen how quick you can be taken out of an area and how quick and necessary it is to have locals who really capture the vision and live into it. So that’s what we’re after.

More than Just a Coffee Shop

It turns out they’re doing both. They’re equipping French Christians to reach Muslims and they’re reaching out themselves. Each Sunday, about 70 people gather in a room behind the coffee shop for worship. A handful of believers from a local French congregation helped plant the church. Now about 60% of the gathering is French. 40% are people from other nations, including people from Muslim backgrounds. But that didn’t just happen.

During the week, the same back room becomes a French class or actually French classes. This little space holds classes for 167 students from 27 different countries. The classes help migrants with a key transition in a new country, learning the local language. And it also offers a new opportunity, interacting with local Christians.

The effort is part of a community development project that’s technically a separate entity from the church, so teachers don’t evangelize during class, but they do offer to pair students with volunteer language partners. Those partners can help them practice their French and hopefully talk with him about the gospel. Justin has seen the fruit with his own language partner.

Justin Dodson: And so he’s from Afghanistan and his wife comes to our classes as well. And so we started last September, so a year and a half ago, working on just practicing French together. For six months we’d been meeting week in and week out every week for an hour and he would not want to push into any spiritual discussions. And I was just about at the end of my rope, just with so many engagements, I’m like, “You know what? I think this is my last meeting. I just don’t feel like this conversation’s going anywhere and that really feel like it’s productive.”

And that day he actually said, “Hey, I’ve just been wrestling with the question of hope, and I’m not sure if I have it and I want it and I’m looking for it.” And so then I was like, “Hey, the story of the Bible is actually a story of hope. We had hope. We lost it, and it was regained. And that’s the whole story.” And I was like, “Would you be interested in reading it with me?” And he is like, “That’d be great.” And so from that moment, we started reading through the Bible.

We did a discovery Bible study of all of the Old Testament, then went through the Book of John, and he just loved the Book of John. He’s a Sufi background. And so the mystic aspect of Jesus and the imagery that was there in the Book of John just hit him in a way that he had never seen before. And so then we began the Book of Acts and he said, “Justin, I think we need to be done meeting.” And I said, “Why is that?” I was hurt because it’s been 18 months.

And he’s like, “Because I think that you need to start meeting with other people who need to hear this information. And I’m going to start coming to church every Sunday and I want to come to small group.” And so he’s been there for the last three months, come to church. And he stood up in church just four weeks ago and shared a testimony with the church about his discovery of a new way. And he doesn’t know where it’s leading yet, but he’s so grateful for the chance to get to know this new God and the way of interacting with him.

Getting to know God has come through, getting to know God’s Word. And that came through getting to know God’s people. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Even when a Muslim becomes interested in the gospel, it can be difficult to integrate into a Christian Church. It takes a lot of time and effort. That makes this a long haul ministry, but Justin says it’s worth it.

Justin Dodson: We’ve seen fruit already, but it’s been beautiful to see Muslims come to Christ, but also to see French people come towards Muslims and to create a context where we can model Muslim-Christian dialogue in a way that allows them to not be afraid of Muslims, but also to be able to engage them in helpful ways and equip them to do that. So it’s been neat.

Justin hopes this congregation will be the first of several church plants as the ministry aims to expand to parts of the city with no gospel presence. It’s not what Justin expected to be doing when his family first headed to the Ivory Coast, but he sees how detours are part of God’s plan. So does his friend Mohammed.

Finding Freedom

I met with Mohammed on a rainy afternoon. He’s the pastor of another congregation in town, a group of around 35 people, mostly from Iran.

Almost all of them converts from Islam. Justin translated as Mohammed shared his story. It begins in Iran where Mohammed grew up as a Muslim. About a decade ago, his cousin gave him a Bible. He ignored it for two years. In 2016, he decided to read it. He opened to the Book of John. God opened Mohammed’s heart to the gospel even if his country was closed to it.

Mohammed: The religious authorities in Iran really suppressed severely religious freedom and rights. The Iranian Christians are often stopped, arrested, and put in prison or detained for certain periods of time, and they are sentenced to really worrisome trials and sentenced to really long stays in prison.

Mohammed says Christians in Iran are often insulted in public and treated harshly by security forces. They sometimes have their property confiscated and their businesses shut down. But there’s one thing the authorities can’t stop.

Mohammed: Despite all these difficulties, the good news of Jesus Christ continues to be preached. There’s actually hundreds of house churches in Iran. Any door can be closed, but no power is able to close the door of one’s heart to Jesus Christ.

Mohammed eventually fled Iran because of persecution. He ended up in France. He met Christians who helped him connect with theological training and start a church for Iranians here in Strasbourg. They meet in the basement of a nearby Catholic Church. People mostly find out about the group by word of mouth. Each year their numbers grow. In 2023, they baptized 13 people.

Last year they baptized their first member from Afghanistan. Now they’re doing outreach to Afghan migrants. It’s still hard work. Like all churches full of sinners, the Iranian Church is often messy. There are lots of issues to sort through and a lot of needs to be met. But Mohammed says that’s part of being a Christian family, and that’s what brings them joy, even when it’s hard.

Mohammed: In 2019, the church started with two people, and today we’re around 35 people. And every year we keep adding more and more. And in France, they get a chance to learn the Bible in their mother tongue so they can better understand who is Jesus Christ. The number of people that want to serve Christ in the church continues to grow.

Christ for the World

The slow and steady growth here in Strasbourg is just one example in a growing number of reports of Muslims turning to Christ in other parts of the world as well. As Mohammed learned, no power is able to close the door of the heart when Christ himself knocks. When Eric Liddell returned to Edinburgh after the Olympics, he was still set on walking through one particular door, missionary service in China. He did take a friend’s council to stay in Edinburgh for one more year to prepare for ministry.

Liddell studied theology and preached in local churches. He talked about his faith at public events. He even ran more races, but he was clear he was set on China. Some people didn’t understand. Liddell was at the pinnacle of his running career and his fame. There were so many opportunities right in front of him, including the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. Why not wait a few more years? China would still be there.

In a book about Liddell called For the Glory, author Duncan Hamilton says the same critics who thought it ludicrous for Liddell not to run on a Sunday now thought it was equally ludicrous for him to go to China after his studies were over. When people asked Liddell why he was willing to leave it all behind, little often replied, “Because I believe God made me for China.” At the train station, he told a crowd cheering him off, “Christ for the world, for the world needs Christ.”

That didn’t make leaving easy. Even though he would be reunited with his missionary parents in China, he had lived most of his life here. He had a lot of friends in Edinburgh, a lot of ministry, but he was ready to run a different race again. And as he stood at the starting line, there were already glimpses of how different that race would be. In China, unrest had been swelling as Chinese authorities grew increasingly angry over foreign involvement in China’s affairs.

That resentment turned on foreigners, including foreign missionaries. Duncan Hamilton says, “Missionaries had established churches and hospitals and served impoverished communities. But now to be pro-Christian was to be anti-Chinese.” Liddell was willingly walking into all of this. A century later, many things have changed in China, but one thing remains the same, being a believer is a difficult race to run. How difficult?

Well, as Liddell heads to China and faces his final lap, we’ll learn how Chinese believers today are running their own races too. That’s next time on the season finale of Glory Road.