As terror strikes France again killing
84—including ten children and two Americans—and wounding over two hundred
people, many fears and questions arise. As onlookers enjoyed Bastille Day
celebration fireworks on July 14th (similar to America’s
Independence Day), a van full of explosives and ammunition charged into the
crowds at the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France wreaking chaos.
This deadly massacre came just eight months
after the deadly terror attack at the Bataclan in Paris (see my article here: http://www.assistnews.net/index.php/component/k2/item/1225-paris-city-of-sadness) and was preceded by the deadly January 2015 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. Earlier this
year, Belgium was struck with terror, not to mention many other parts of the
world, including closer to home in Orlando at the gay Pulse nightclub last
month (and in San Bernadino, California in November 2015). The rapid escalation
of these massacres is alarming.
But what is it about France that particularly
allows such heinous acts to creep in? Let’s look more closely at what happened in
Nice and try to understand.
First take a look at the killer. Tunisian born Mohamed Lahouaiej
Bouhlel was a career criminal known to police. He was also a radicalized
Muslim. According to Col.
Allen West’s recent article, Bouhlel was heard shouting “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire on officers. France’s prime minister Hollande says that Bouhlel “was radicalized very quickly”. He was known as aggressive and a loner who became
depressed when his wife left him. But none of this suggests why someone to open
themselves up to radicalization so we need to look at it in its context.
France.
As a
former missionary ministering in France for 22 years, I will share my
experience. Many people we met were charming, but few knew God. And it was nonethless
not uncommon to meet people who were also agressive, lonely or depressed. No doubt, an education system which
propogates that God does not exist didn’t help; it offers no hope.
We
lived in a village between Nimes and Montpellier (where we founded a church and
the Nimes Theological Institute). Many of our neighbors were Muslims. Among them,
several were violent, and threatened to beat up kids in our church. In our 22
years there, few Muslims received the Lord in spite of our reaching out to them.
Only one girl in our Bible college, Naima, was a former Muslim. (She had
escaped from Algeria where her life was in danger because she had received
Christ via a radio broadcast.)
Our strategy
to reach the Muslims was no different than the way we hoped to reach everyone
else:: prayer, friendship (where possible), evangelism.
We
often rose early to walk around the village and pray for souls. Many people
from our church joined us. Then, every Saturday night, together with people
from our church, we would evangelize in Nimes, Montpellier or even Marseilles—a
port city about 1½ hours from where we lived, which is reportedly 40% Islamic. And, one of my favorite activities, on Saturday afternoons, we
held a Bible club for kids living in the Zup (aka project areas). Many of those
children came from Muslim families. We would ask the mothers (we rarely saw any
fathers) if we could take the kids for a few hours to play games, enjoy a yummy
snack and—wait for ii—teach the Bible. Perhaps the prospect of getting rid of
their kids for a few hours was too much to resist; many let the kids come.
But
here’s the cruncher. Contrary to French people who average one child per family,
sometimes two, Muslims have many
children. They are encouraged to proliferate and thereby take over nations. So
we typlically had, for example, Achbed, Rachid, Mohamed, Karim and Moustafa—all
from one family. This was between 1981 and 2004. Thus, all those children are
adults today. To my knowledge few are going on with Jesus today, but all of
them who attended regularly heard the Gospel. When things get rough, let us
hope they will remember who the real God is.
But
what about all the Muslims who never hear the Gospel? When we lived in France,
there were reportedly only ½% evangelical Christians in the nation. No wonder
we never came across another church or Christian evangelizing. Such absence of
the Gospel message leaves a vacuum. And together with a sense of hopelessness,
vacuums can open doors to dangerous ideology.
It is
worth noting that France, like the UK and Germany, has
opened her arms wide to refugees and particularly those from Muslim countries
for decades. Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the Front
National MP for Vaucluse sees this as a link to terrorism. In a video
posted on Facebook, she recognized that terrorism is the killers goal, but
suggests that it is fostered by excessive immigration. "Those also
responsible are those who each year allow a number of
immigrants equivalent to the size of the city of Bordeaux, to legally
enter France" states Maréchal-Le Pen. She also tweeted, “If we don’t
kill Islamism, it will kill us.”
Whether we agree with those statements of
not, it seems that France has reached a tipping point. And it came about
progressively, slowly, like boiling a frog. And while the influx may have begun
in part because France feels bad about colonizing Algeria in the 1800s, it is
now a way of life and will probably not be stopped. So what can we do? I do not
pretend to have all the answers but here a biblical response. Let’s pray for
laborers to go into the harvest, for churches to actively live and preach the
Gospel. Let’s pray for souls and evangelize.
Who knows. God might put someone on our
path who doesn’t yet know Jesus but who, like my husband and I, may end up
church-planting and evangelizing in France. Some sow, some water. Everyone has
a part to play. What is yours?
Janey DeMeo M.A.
Copyright © July 2016
