Monday, December 04, 2006

Welcome to Genoa


Mark Bruner, Avant director of Short Cycle Church Planting, recently spent a week with us here in Italy. The purpose of the trip was to identify a location for Team Italy that we will lead in the fall of 2007.

Milan? Turin? Bologna? Genoa? Pescara? How do you decide where to go in a country with 30,000 towns and villages absent even one evangelical church?

Rewind to early June of this year. Adele Johnson, another Avant colleague, spent nearly a month doing survey work in the "beautiful country."

Among her many questions she frequently asked, "If you would come to Italy with a team of 7 or 8 missionaries to evangelize and start new churches where would you go?"

There were many, many different answers. And after a bit of investigating we would discover from another source that in fact the said city was already adequately being reached (at least to an extent that it tumbled on our order of importance) or didn’t meet some of the set criteria.

But one place that was mentioned repeatedly by a variety of Italian leaders was the province of Liguria, provincial capital, Genoa.

So when Mark came we traveled three hours north through the Apennine Mountains and talked to folks on the ground there.

And we found what we were looking for.

Genoa is a port city of more than 700,000 people, famous for being Christopher Columbus' hometown. There is a university with 45,000 students. And tons of international traffic, many headed to Africa.

Yet, there is no foreign missionary activity. There are a handful of evangelical churches ranging from 30 to 100 people but none that appear to be growing or with a vision to reach their city.

According to the Alliance for Saturation Church Planting a fully discipled nation is one in which there is a local church in every neighborhood, village and community (a church for every 1000 people).

Genoa currently has approximately 15 churches ranging from mainline Waldensian to full gospel apostolic. This city falls a bit short of the ASCP suggested 700.

We feel peace and purpose with the decision to go to Genoa. And I believe that with God’s power in five years we will turn that city upside down with the good news of Jesus Christ.

Click here to view pictures from our various trips to Genoa.

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Go and make disciples...

We had an awesome time as a church family the other day!

We celebrated with Silvestro, Giovanna, and George as they gave public testimony of their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

I was especially pleased to share this ministry experience with my Italian brother Francesco.

View the video here.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Grace Filled Missions


I just returned home today from Rimini, Italy where I attended Missione 2006.

The purpose of this first ever nation wide missions conference was to motivate italians to get involved in God's global work.

In order to accomplish this goal they had mission representaves to promote their respective organizations, workshops to answer many questions that Italians had regarding cross cultural ministry, and George Verwer, founder of Operation Mobilization, to challenge us twice daily.

If you have every seen George Verwer speak you know that there really is no one else like him. But there was one theme that kept coming through which really stuck with me.

In his famous simple yet powerful style George talked about the importance of grace, love, and acts of mercy in modern missions.

The gospel is essentially a love story with God as the sovereign author. The Lord Jesus is the main character. And we retell it to the world when we love our neighbor as ourselves.

Our greatest argument for Christ is a changed life and heartfelt compassion for the most needy among us. This is grace incarnate.

View photos here

Monday, August 28, 2006

High Risk Faith

Recently I finished reading Erwin Raphael McManus' book Chasing Daylight.

What an incredible challenge to any person's faith!

So often my goal is to avoid failure and minimize risk. I then wonder why God never does anything amazing in my life.

Abraham followed the call of God on his life, left the land of Ur and went "without knowing where he was going."

This is the kind of reckless faith that can unleash the power of God. This is the kind of faith that I want.

But the message is gets even deeper.

Reckless faith like that of Abraham assumes the possibility of failure. It's possible that I won't succeed, and yet this is what makes it so exciting.

It's like the friends of Daniel who refused to bow to the king's image. "Our God will deliver us out of your hand O King. But even if He doesn't, we are not going to worship the golden image."

There is no false promise of health, success, or fame. Just uninhibited adventure.

In the spring our family will embark on this sort of adventure, attempting to do in Italy what has never been done here before.

Along with a great team of coworkers we will attempt to ignite a church planting movement, multiple churches in less than five years.

High risk, but even greater reward.

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Getting Started

As the popularity of blogging grows it seems to me that it just might be a really effective way to let all of our friends and family out there keep up with us while we're in Italy.

I may include the latest news relating to our minstry with Avant or I may share some things that God's been teaching me in my life.


I'll also try my luck at getting Amee to occasionally post a few things as well in order to add variety and certainly to improve the content.

As we progress in this experiment I'd love to get everybody's feedback so that I can measure its effectiveness.

So...we'll see you in the blogoshpere.