oasis1jim

The traditional dominance of the Roman Catholic church in France has led many Anglophone Christians moving here to think that there are no optional places of worship. However, they should be aware that there has been a network of small Bible-based Protestant churches steadily spreading across the country for many years. The rate of planting these churches is increasing and they represent the only area of growth in Christianity in France, bucking the general trend towards secularism. Anyone interested can visit the C.N.E.F. website for more information

Chatter Static

Cant say it's an issue thats come up in this section before But welcome to the forum.

dmu

Hi, and welcome to the Forum! As C-S says, we don't get many Evangelists on the Forum....
With all due respect, the CNEF isn't the exclusive Protestant organisation in France! I think you'll find there are also several CofE churches dotted around the country, within the Diocese of Europe, not to mention the Eglise Réformée de France which has a "Temple" in many towns, and even villages, esp. in the South, where French-speaking Protestants can worship.
But I'm not here to argue!

oasis1jim

Thanks DMU for your response. Yes, we are aware of other Protestant churches in France and that not all have (yet?) signed up to CNEF. In fact, a close friend from our old UK CoE church was recently licensed as a reader at the Anglican cathedral in Pau and we were there to celebrate the occasion with him. However, the point I was hoping to make is that the strategic plan of CNEF is to accelerate the spread of new evangelical church plants across metropolitan France with the aim of making one available to every 10,000 people of the population. At present there is one roughly to every 30,000, and it is only at that average thanks to a few areas where Protestants are well represented, such as the south, as you mentioned. Elsewhere the country has many spiritual deserts. CNEF's plan is ambitious and it will be interesting to see how it progresses.

Novocastrian

I looked up CNEF on Wikipedia.fr

Is there a semantic difference between evangelicals and other non-Catholic Protestants in your mind? If so, what?

<I think I already know the answer>

oasis1jim

Hello Novocastrian. I deliberately didn't use the name "evangelical" in my original post because it causes so much confusion with the name "evangelist". I am guessing that you, as a born again atheist, know the difference already but for the sake of others who might read this thread, evangelicals are those who base their faith on the teachings of the Bible, while evangelists are those who seek to convince others that their Christian faith is valid by preaching the gospel message, etc. Of course, many Christian evangelicals are also evangelists, but the two do not mean the same thing. CNEF, meaning in English, the National Council of Evangelicals in France, is a new'ish umbrella organisation representing Protestant evangelical churches here. However, not all Protestant churches base their faith entirely on the Bible, therefore do not subscribe to CNEF. Hope that answers your question. As a relative late-comer to the Christian faith, I get a bit frustrated by some the outdated words and expressions used that IMO cause confusion, but maybe that's just me. I get equally frustrated by the techie language of IT geeks.

scot47

The Huguenots have been around for a long time - long before those "evangelicals" descended on France from the New World !

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89g...%A9e_de_France