At 18 months old, Arthur Bailly was too young to understand why his family’s small 10th-floor apartment in the north central French city of Orléans baked in late June. During France’s hottest summer on record, the building’s cement construction absorbed accumulating heat. The lack of double-paned windows in the living room intensified the oven effect as the heat wave—the first of three in the country this summer—dragged on for 14 days.
Arthur didn’t understand why he had to play indoors when he arrived home from daycare, and he had a harder time falling asleep at night as the apartment refused to cool much from its daytime temperature near 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
When Arthur’s mom, Clémence Bailly, shared their predicament with their close church friends Jérémie and Mélodie Corbeau, the Corbeaus invited the Baillys to sleep in their air-conditioned home—an uncommon gesture in a culture that prizes its privacy. The house had one air conditioning unit in the living room plus one in the upstairs hallway, so they left the five bedroom doors open all night to let in cool air.
The Corbeaus have two young boys, so all four parents worried the children would wake each other. But everyone slept well, and the children treated the time together like a sleepover. After a couple of nights, the temperatures broke enough for the Bailly family to return to their apartment.
“We were really touched by the friendship of Jérémie and Mélodie during this time,” said Bailly, who attended Eglise Evangélique Libre d’Orléans (Evangelical Free Church of Orléans) at the time. “They truly welcomed us with open arms. It was very convivial.”
As Europe heats up faster than any other continent, French evangelicals seemed mostly unprepared for the service opportunities created by the record-breaking heat. Stories like that of the Corbeaus are rare. But evangelicals—who comprise 1 percent of the French population—are slowly exploring ways to care for those in their churches and communities who have limited means for respite from the dangerous heat.
Meanwhile, the French branch of the Christian environmental group A Rocha is seeking to educate believers and help them avoid the extremes of either anxiety or resignation about climate challenges.
“Today, there is no organized, concerted, national effort” by Christians to help those affected by the heat waves, said Alexis Guerit, secretary general of Eglise Verte (“Green Church”), which brings together Catholic and Protestant churches and organizations to work on creation care. But Guerit said Eglise Verte is “working to have resources and media materials ready for next summer in order to facilitate the actions of Christian communities in this area.”
In response to the summer’s heat, the Paris city government published a map of îlots de fraîcheur (“cooling islands”) around the city that included numerous Catholic churches as well as a few mainline Protestant churches that offer a cool escape inside the thick walls of their historic structures. But many evangelical churches meet in newer buildings that aren’t any cooler than the apartments and houses around them, said Rachel Calvert, board president of A Rocha France who serves at a Paris-area church.
The Salvation Army increased its outreach to the homeless in Paris and Lyon with extra meals and street teams that checked on people while distributing hats, sunscreen, misters, body wipes, and deodorant. A church in southwest France opened its air-conditioned fellowship space for a pause fraîcheur (cooling break). A couple in a Paris-area church loaned fans to another couple whose home was suffocatingly hot. At least one church discussed how to help but ultimately found little interest in action.
Calvert said evangelical churches have begun informal internal conversations about roles they can play. At a minimum, she said they could provide “practical help for vulnerable church members, including helping fit window protections to reduce overheating and regular visits to elderly members.”
Espoir, a food pantry that also combats social isolation in Lormont, a northeastern suburb of Bordeaux, didn’t expand its care to heat-related needs this summer. Established nearly 20 years ago in the southwestern French city by Momentum Church, Espoir hadn’t prepared by stocking up on fans or recruiting an additional volunteer team available for home visits, said director Gihen Ouled-Saïd.
But such preparation, she said, will be important for the future: “We know generally that we are heading into more and more of these types of situations, that the heat may be more and more violent.”
France’s health agency reported 7,919 excess deaths during the summer’s three heat waves plus a late May heat spike. (The French government defines a heat wave as elevated temperatures for at least three consecutive days.) The numbers so far are way below the nearly 15,000 deaths during a 22-day heat wave in August 2023 and cannot be definitively attributed to extreme heat until final calculations and analysis are released in October.
Mainstream media and scientists blame France’s record-breaking summer on a high-pressure heat dome that pulled hot air north from the Sahara Desert. However, the French meteorological agency, Météo-France, in a September 3 climate report, declared the unprecedented heat “would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”
Richard Kemp, a pastor in the Réseau Nouvelles Connexions (New Connections Network) denomination in Montpellier in southern France, said the few Christians he spoke to over the summer about climate challenges seemed “rather resigned to it all, unless they were already activists.”
Kemp, who is an A Rocha ambassador, has preached in local evangelical churches on creation care and faith and has “found people open and interested, especially when I’ve been able to anchor this in the Bible.”
A 2023 survey found that 87 percent of French Protestants think the environment and climate change should be more present in the life of their church community, with more than half wanting the church to speak out about the issues. Jean-François Mouhot, A Rocha France’s director, said French Christians are closer to the general population’s view on climate issues compared with American believers.
A new problem Mouhot is seeing among locals is a pendulum swing from “not being interested or in denial [about climate change] to suddenly becoming very anxious about the problem.” Using the term “eco-anxiety,” he described Christians who don’t want to have children because they view the future as bleak and fear the planet can’t support a growing population. While he’s warning some to pay attention to climate change, to others he’s “trying to also give hope … in Jesus, and that he holds the whole world in his hands.”
Mouhot believes that the Bible’s teachings on justice, stewarding creation, and loving one’s neighbor are easy to apply to climate change actions.But environmental issues, he said, are political because they require collective action. These issues have been largely claimed in political spheres by those who group it in “ideological packages” with other values evangelical Christians reject.
Yet he believes being “pro-life” should also mean addressing climate change’s effects, “because this is a huge problem for a lot of people, including the poor and the least of these.”
An Oxfam report released this summer found that excessive heat was 31 percent more deadly in France’s 10 poorest départements (administrative districts similar to counties) in 2025 than in its 10 richest. Citing multiple studies, Maire Info, a media source for local officials, reported that the lack of green spaces in poorer urban districts contributes to higher temperatures. Interior temperatures rise in homes when more inhabitants live in them—as is often the case in poorer communities—and noisy, polluted environments make it harder to leave windows open for air circulation.
Scientists linked climate change to the hot and dry conditions that contributed to the spread of a massive fire outside Bordeaux this summer that displaced about 220,000 people and burned nearly 104,000 acres. The Conseil National des Evangéliques de France (National Council of Evangelicals in France), or CNEF, responded to the disaster by offering prayer topics and practical ways to help the displaced through Bordeaux-area churches and nonprofits, including the food pantry Espoir.
Working closely with the Lormont town hall to track needs, Espoir became a collection point for clothing, food, and financial donations. Separately, in coordination with local church networks, it rapidly organized—largely through word of mouth—to connect evacuees needing emergency housing with Christians willing to open their homes.
In a country where much assistance starts with the government, Ouled-Saïd said Christians could provide housing in future crises by maintaining an active list of people willing to share their homes.
In general, whether responding to large-scale disasters or day-to-day needs, she said Christians can offer a unique ministry of presence: “The needs aren’t only for food and clothing—there’s also an emotional aspect, and it’s here that we Christians can make a difference, bringing them comfort, love, being like Christ was with us, taking time for them and listening to them.”
As the temperatures drop in fall, Mouhot worries that people will move on from grappling with climate change.
“I think if we follow the Bible, if we follow Jesus’ teaching, we should … consider the way we live today,” he said, given the material simplicity Jesus exemplified. “And if we’re talking about the impact of the way we live, even without climate change, we should maybe reconsider and live more lightly.”
But living lightly—reducing usage of fossil fuels or refusing to buy into cultural norms that measure success through accumulation and consumption—isn’t popular. “This is where [France’s] similarities with the US would be striking,” Mouhot said. “It’s very unpopular to ask people to reduce their leisure, food, heating, comfort.”
He thinks a lot of churches could do more to provide relief, large-scale and small: helping better insulate homes, planting trees for shade, helping people buy a fan—or even installing air conditioning in their own facilities so they can serve the community as îlots de fraîcheur.
“The first Christians were noticed in the Roman Empire because they took care of the people who were sick. They took care of the poor; they took care of abandoned children, that kind of stuff,” Mouhot said. “So, I think there’s room for Christians to again be the ones bearing some of the suffering of the world around us.”
