Ask The McMurrays (by Thom)

Every once in a while it seems we get the same question from several people. It seems this would be a good place to answer those questions. Therefore, we’re starting a new feature here called “Ask The McMurrays” (I know, not very creative).

Church: People have asked us about church here in France. What’s it like? What’s different? What’s similar? As we wrote before, we have been attending two different churches every Sunday. For the morning, we go to a French-speaking church. Sunday evening, we take the train into Paris and attend an English-speaking church. The two churches are fairly similar in style. Both use contemporary Praise and Worship music, with a rare hymn. At the French church, many of the songs are ones that were written in English, and then translated. Church tends to last 1 ½ hours at both services. Really, the differences aren’t great. Probably the biggest difference is in the leadership. The French church tends to have a different speaker every week. The Pastor preaches about every other week, and other people from the congregation fill the other Sundays. At the English church the leadership is missionaries from the States or Canada. The English-speaking church is probably the most Evangelical church we’ve ever attended. An amazing amount of people are making first-time commitments to Christ! Every week, it seems the kingdom is growing!

What else would you like to know about Paris, France, or what we’re doing? We’ll use this forum as we get them. If you have a question, use the feedback on this page, or email us at mcmali(at)gmail(dot)com.

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Another Update (by Thom)

It's been a couple of weeks since we've updated here, but what a busy couple of weeks it has been! Our school term ended (Thom did a little better on the final test, but Amanda got better end-of-term grades - not that we're competitive!) and we had two weeks of vacation. We moved out of our very small room on-campus, to a larger studio apartment off-campus. This is very good for several reasons, most notably that we now have room to move around! If you want to know how small our old room was, email me!
On Tuesday April 26th, my (Thom's) parents arrived for a 10-day visit. It seems we walked all over Paris! We visited all the normal tourist spots (Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Arc de Triumph, Versailles, etc) but the best part was just spending time together.
Most missionaries describe language studies as the most difficult time of their lives. I can agree with this, and I'm beginning to understand why better. We know we've been called to a purpose. For Amanda and I, that purpose is in West Africa. While we are working now to be able to better serve that purpose, it is challenging in our fallen nature to say "not yet." I would appreciate prayers for the patience I need to be able to say, "soon, but not yet."
On an encouraging note, vacation from school-work can often be a time of forgetting things. During this vacation, Amanda and I both feel we made some dramatic progress in our French studies. Amanda will probably write more about this later, but she had a phone conversation after we had some problems with a machine in our apartment. That's not easy to do, and she said it was stressful, but she did wonderful. Both of us are understanding spoken French much better than we did two weeks ago.
As always, we would love to here from you! Please drop an email and tell us what is going on. Our email address is mcmali (at) gmail (dot) com.

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