It was Christmas 2001 — just three months after the 9/11 attacks — when John McGuire got the call.
The university he and his wife, Pam, lived near in Alabama was closing for Christmas, and a Muslim student had nowhere to spend the holidays. So far, no one had responded to the need.
“I told him, by all means, come on, so we brought him to our house for Christmas,” John McGuire said.
The student was devout; every day in the McGuires’ Christmas-decorated home, he rolled out his carpet three times a day for prayer.
“I told [him], ‘I’ll make you a deal — you teach me how to be a Muslim, and I’ll teach you how to be a Christian,” John McGuire said.
He took the deal.
“[Our] friendship really took and lasted. That young man went with us for a long time to church without telling anyone that he wasn’t a Christian,” John McGuire said.
When the young man did start telling people there he was a Muslim, they loved him even so, John McGuire said.
And then, one day, he gave his life to Christ.
It wasn’t long after that that John McGuire got another call, with another request that no one else had taken.
“It was a job (as a Southern Baptist representative) serving the immigrant population of Paris, and it had been on the books for three years,” he said, noting that at that time, he and his wife were in the process of preparing for some sort of overseas work — they just didn’t know what yet.
“Someone must have told the leader in Paris, ‘Call that guy in Alabama; he’ll do anything.’”
He did.
The McGuires, members of The Church at Shelby Crossings, Calera, have been serving among Paris’ immigrant population for seven years now and don’t have any intentions of turning back.
“Since we’re older, we knew we were going to have to really work hard to learn the French language,” Pam McGuire said.
The couple befriended some French students who spent time in their home and spoke French to them often.
It worked, John McGuire said.
“By the second year, we could speak better, and by the third year, we noticed we were understanding the conversations around us,” he said.
Now the McGuires know it so well they sometimes can’t think of the English words for things they can describe in French.
But the pace of language learning actually helped them with relationship building, John McGuire said.
“We began going to cultural centers and cafés to meet people and hear their opinions and beliefs firsthand, and by the time we had enough language ability to explain to them that we were Christians, they already liked us,” he said with a laugh.
Now the couple spend their time having coffee with folks from one particular people group and answering questions they have about the New Testament.
They are hard to find, John McGuire said, but God helps them discover where they are in the city and where the highest concentrations are.
“Many of these people, looking at events in history, believe that Christians don’t like them. We are trying to break down those misconceptions through relationships and then share the gospel with them,” he said. “It’s tragic but we have heard many express the belief that Christians hate them.”
Dispelling that notion is vital, Pam McGuire said. “Love is much more attractive than fear.”
EDITOR’S NOTE — Names have been changed for security reasons.
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