We are Chris and Joanna Frizelle. We moved to France from Bromley, South-East London, in the United Kingdom, in late December 2015 to spend a year living in Massy, on the South-West outskirts of Paris, where we studied French at a Christian language school called Les Cèdres.
We now live in Clermont, in the Oise départment of northern France. If you would like to find out how God called us to France and what has happened since then, you can start at the beginning by clicking here.
In terms of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, France is an unreached country: only around 1% of the population are Evangelical Christians (we think that it could be a lot less than that).
God has called us to the rural areas, which actually account for at least 50% of the population of France. At the moment there is much less activity in these areas aimed at sharing the Good News of Jesus with the people: we can say they are the least-reached parts of France, to a great extent unengaged even.
Our experience has led us to Disciple Making Movements (DMM) as the approach that we believe God wants to use to reach the people of the rural areas of France, especially those who are far from God, who do not have Christian family or friends and have no way of discovering the Good News of Jesus. In fact, we believe DMM is the only way to effectively reach these people with the love of Jesus.
We are therefore working with other Christians in the area to launch a Disciple Making Movement, en français un Mouvement de faiseurs de disciples (MFD), on the Plateau Picard, the area between Clermont and Amiens, which is the place God has especially laid on our hearts.
We also enjoy teaching English in Clermont, through the library. We never realised English was so complicated, or that English grammar was such fun, until we began teaching it…
God has called us to the least-reached people of the unreached country of France. We want to see the Kingdom of God move forwards dramatically in this country. We love the French people and we love France. The title of this blog expresses the desire of our hearts: to see a spiritual breakthrough here.
The aim of this blog is to share news about our journey to France and about our work here. As well as this, we want to share with you stuff that God talks to us about and things that we learn from Him along the way.
Usually it’s Chris who updates this blog, so when you see “I” in a post, it’ll be Chris Frizelle writing unless otherwise noted.
GETTING IN TOUCH
If you’d like to contact us, just put your name and email address into a comment on one of the posts. I won’t publish your comment (so spammers won’t get hold of your email address!), but I will email you so we can start talking!
Breakthrough France 