World Cup Churches: 13. France

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

'La Porte Ouverte Chrétienne de Mulhouse' is a reminder that France is not quite as Roman Catholic - or, following the Revolution - so secularised as might be assumed.  Unlikely though it may seem, the Open Door Church qualifies - at least by European standards - as a Megachurch, the more so because Mulhouse is not a very big city.

Why choose this church for my France blog?

Partly because it revises some views of France; partly because it briefly became one of the best known churches in Europe.

For anyone familiar with the spiritual geography of France it will come as no surprise that Mulhouse is the site of this type of church.  Mulhouse is deeply connected with the Protestant Reformation and as part of Alsace - and adjacent to Germany (today) and Switzerland - it belongs in a different relationship with Protestantism than most of France (Click here to read about it).

For anyone familiar with Covid-19 (that's all of us isn't it?) this church is also known as a super-spreader.  Until the pandemic, being a super-spreader was somewhat the intention of every church, and certainly every evangelical/Pentecostal megachurch.  Regrettably an enormous church conference week yielded an enormous spread of Covid 19 in its earliest known arrival in France and the church suffered national notoriety for a while.

It did illustrate the strange reality that even apparently innovative churches find it very hard to change direction quickly - a criticism more easily aimed at traditional churches.  By the time of the event the wisdom of cramming singing, coughing people into an airless room for hours was established as unwise.  But canceling a Conference or (as we all later experienced) stopping the singing is an innovation beyond innovators.

Covid taught as all a lot about ourselves.