An Unlikely Place of Solace
Hundreds of French evangelicals gather in an abandoned warehouse complex every weekend to worship and find a sense of place.
VILLENEUVE-LE-ROI, FRANCE — ”Jesus is King” the choir members sang, alternating between French and Swahili as the audience danced in their pews to the rousing melody.
Over the course of a nearly four hour church service, the congregates of the Eglise de Reconstruction (Church of Reconstruction) run the gamut of emotions. During that time the small room of worshippers sang, shouted, spoke in tongues, entered into trances, and sang some more.
“Sound is normal. It’s a part of our lives and of the world,” said Bobo Massaki, the Church of Reconstruction’s pastor. “Children make sound when they play, so we make sound when we worship.”
The exaltations of worship are a routine part of every Sunday in the Parisian suburb of Villeneuve-le-Roi, where hundreds of evangelicals gather every weekend to worship in the abandoned offices and storerooms of a warehouse complex that substitutes for a megachurch. The Church of Reconstruction is just one of more than 20 churches that gather there. The congregates are part of the rising tide of evangelicalism in France, which has grown from 50,000 followers in the 1950s, to nearly 650,000 today.
For many of Villeneuve-le-Roi’s evangelicals, despite frictions with their neighbors, the gatherings are a haven against the troubles of the world, especially for recently-arrived immigrants in search of a community.
“We come here to pray to God, to eat, and to enjoy each others company,” said Kash Kanyinda, a congregate who has been attending the classroom services for more than a year.
“After the service, we talk to each other and listen to the problems that people in our community have, to offer support,” he added.
The importance of the church as a healing community space is reiterated by Pastor Massaki.
“The evangelical church is like a psychiatrist,” he said. “You talk, sing, shout and get everything off your chest.”
For Romain Coisnet, a spokesperson for the National Council of Evangelicals (CNET) in France, the church’s role as a place of comfort and diverse community is what makes it so appealing. So much so, that today a new evangelical church opens its doors every 10 days, he said.
Coisnet also noted that while France’s Evangelical churches attract followers from a wide variety of demographics, the church is especially appealing to immigrants.
“Immigration is a very important dynamic in this development in France,” he said. “Many of the evangelical churches that are growing are ethnic churches around big cities like Lyon and Marseilles.”
This is true in Villeneuve-le-Roi, where the majority of congregates are African immigrants from countries like Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, many of them women. Gwladys Muene, the lead choir singer at the Church of Reconstruction, said that because women are the primary family caretakers and problem-solvers in many African societies, they are more often the ones coming to seek guidance and support from the church community. In the Church of Reconstruction’s 30 person audience, most of the men aside from Pastor Massaki are young boys.
Despite the Evangelical church’s role in fostering a sense of community for its congregants, the warehouse complex in Villeneuve-le-Roi has become a source of contention within the city.
In July, 50 local Villeneuve residents signed a petition complaining about the levels of noise emitted from the churches every weekend, asking city hall to intervene.
Maria Goncalves, a resident who has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years, said that the traffic and noise from the churches posed an “enormous problem” for the surrounding inhabitants, adding that the noise levels remain high throughout the evenings on both Saturdays and Sundays.
In mid-October city representatives will meet with residents to discuss what can be done.
“The city wants to put an end to these nuisances,” said Rémy Jourdan, the chief-of-staff for Villeneuve-le-Roi’s mayor Didier Gonzales.
Many congregates agreed that the current situation is not ideal and would like to see the church move to a space that could accommodate a bigger congregation in one room.
“We pray for another place to have our services, and we are looking for a new place,” said Kanyinda.
The problem, of course, is money. According to Coisnet, while France’s Evangelical churches get some support from national church unions and evangelical organizations in the United States and Canada, it is still primarily up to the individual communities to mobilize their own resources.
It is also a question of power. Villeneuve-le-Roi’s small evangelical community contrasts sharply with the evangelical communities in the United States, which are largely white, and in Brazil, which are large in numbers.
“We do not have the same visibility or the same political or social leverage as we can see in the United States or Brazil, which can have an electoral weight when it comes to social decisions,” Coisnet noted.
Despite the problems facing their community, for Pastor Massaki the warehouse classrooms full of worshippers continue to offer a reprieve from the troubles of daily life.
“I’ve been in France for 38 years and I’m still don’t have a house of my own!” he shouted during his sermon. “Thirty-eight years in France and I’m still poor — but today I own the key to eternal life!”
