The American-Parisian partnership is as old as our republic. In 1776, we sent across Benjamin Franklin as the founding father of our friendship. A half century later, Paris sent us Alexis de Tocqueville, who became a keen observer of American life.
This was on my mind in spring when I boarded Air France in Denver. I was traveling with a group of American pastors to visit church planters in Paris. Witnessing gospel ministry in different cultures always gives me new insight into my own place and problems. So in the spirit of Franklin and Tocqueville, I hoped observing life “over there” would enhance my ministry “over here.” And it did. My time with church planters in Paris helped me see how the noise of ministry in America can command too much of my attention.
Similar and Different
Paris’s cultural climate is similar in many ways to my American one—with a notable difference. By seeing both the likeness and the difference, I gained clarity for my ministry at home.
One similarity is that modernity has eroded the West’s cultural heritage rooted in Christianity. Society no longer shares assumptions about what’s true and good. Both countries retain their skinny national creeds: “liberty and justice for all,” “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” But deeper questions abound: What is freedom? Does it have limits or should it be ever-expanding? What’s the basis of our brotherhood? There’s no consensus worldview to referee these debates.
As a result, any sense of shared identity is thinning out in both societies. This summer, Hollywood gave us the dystopian Civil War, where a menacing man in red sunglasses pointed a gun and asked, “What kind of American are you?” A few months later, Paris gave us the Olympic opening ceremony, which waded into a long-running argument about what constitutes “French” culture.
Any sense of shared identity is thinning out in both societies.
This cultural fracturing affects pastoral ministry. We can no longer assume everyone who lives in our city or walks through the doors of our church shares the same worldview. Discipleship has to start further back, with basic building blocks: Who is God? What is a human? What is freedom? Why are we not free? How will justice be done on earth?
Yet despite this similarity, there’s a notable difference—one that’s easy to sense but hard to pin down. You expect to hear certain explanations: Paris is more secular, more unchurched, more progressive. These all ring true but don’t quite capture how pastoral ministry is different there. It’s less noisy.
Ministry in a Less Noisy Environment
By “less noisy,” I mean something like the difference between an SEC football game vs. an SEC football game during COVID-19. On a normal fall Saturday, a Southeastern Conference stadium is a spectacle that almost consumes the game itself. Tailgate parties, colorful characters and costumes, bands, cheerleaders, and mascots all make for a noisy pageant. But for one season during the pandemic, crowds were limited to a small fraction of capacity. The games went on but most of the spectacle went away.
Pastoral ministry in Paris is like pandemic football. The game is essentially the same—to make disciples of Jesus in a modern culture that no longer shares the Christian worldview. But the surrounding spectacle isn’t as spectacular, and the crowd noise is lowered.
What’s the crowd noise in this analogy? It’s American evangelicalism, broadly rendered. For good historical reasons, America has a much bigger “evangelicalism”—our constellation of conferences, celebrities, publishers, pundits, denominations, networks and all the commentary and debate they gin up. Tocqueville described the American proclivity for “voluntary association.” Historian Nathan Hatch called it “the democratization of American Christianity.” It’s an unavoidable fact of life, but it also creates a cauldron of noise that surrounds pastoral ministry, the “stadium” in which the normal pastor plays out his ministry.
In Paris, I glimpsed what the game would look like with the crowd noise turned down. It looks like my friend Philip moving his family into an apartment by the Sorbonne to plant a church among university students. He spends most of his time meeting students and neighbors, talking about their faith, discipling young leaders, and teaching the Bible to the uninitiated. It looks like Paul, a pastor at Sèvres 72, one of the most established evangelical churches in the city, positioning his church to plant other churches like Philip’s. It looks like Jason, an American who has made Paris home, pastoring a church full of young adults from across the Paris region. After a decade of worshiping and cultivating a network of small groups, his church has grown to the point of needing a permanent building.
For good historical reasons, America has a much bigger constellation of conferences, celebrities, publishers, pundits, denominations, and networks.
Pastoral ministry in Paris looks basic and normal. How refreshing! I came home planning to be more “Parisian” in my ministry focus. This means not assuming that tending to intramural evangelical debates is the same as doing pastoral ministry. While these debates are interesting and important, they’re more like a precondition to pastoral ministry, not ministry itself.
Ministry is prayer, evangelism, gospel preaching, leadership development, pastoral counseling, and community formation. I want to set my goals, make my plans, and fill out my calendar with more of these activities. This is the real action, down on the field. In Paris, there wasn’t much else to see.
The Gospel Coalition