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.
