Sorry this one is so long, but I have been in Italy for about 3 weeks and as expected it is Absolutely Amazing. So far we have been to Venice, Pordenone, Casarsa, Verona, San Vito, and of course San Lorenzo (where campus is). Verona is my favorite so far. It is sooooo beautiful and full of history.
Classes have gone very well. The first week of class we outlined the process of salvation and marveled at the sovereignty, compassion, justness, mercy, and love, of our Lord. We also had some pretty heated discussions over Calvinists and Armenians. And we learned some sobering facts about Italy that most people do not realize.
About 60,000,000 people live in Italy. Less than 1% (.6%) of them are evangelicals (that is significantly less than are in Africa or Asia). Yet it remains unnoticed by so many. Also 90% of missionaries who do come to Italy leave within 4 years. That is the highest dropout rate of all the mission fields in the world. 32,000 cities and towns in Italy currently have no evangelical witnesses (out of 34,000). So where are you going on your missions trip? Why not Italy?
This leads into this past week and explains why we were so busy. We were split into groups of 5 (4 groups total) and each group had to plant a church in a different city…. We had to do all the research and the planning for it and write a 30 page (minimum) paper on it. We needed to explain why we picked the city we did and give a brief overview of the area. We needed to come up with, justify, and make posters advertising the evangelistic methods we would be using. We had to write out the church constitution (including mission statement; membership, leadership, and doctrinal info; etc.). We needed to create budgets for our missionary team and for the church we would be starting. We needed to develop a detailed 5 year plan about what we want to accomplish and how we plan to accomplish it. We had to write support letters and thank you for your support letters. Now okay we did not literally go to the city and implement the plans we made, but we could. So we also needed to write/make up 4 years worth of journal entries (including monthly update newsletters) about how it actually played out. And as if that was not enough, the professor threw in some major problems the day before it was due. It turns out one of our elders became addicted to drugs and a member of our team lost their financial support in our third year there. It was super stressful to have so little time to do this all. We had a week to do what usually takes months.
I was the leader of team Turnorburn (Turn or Burn). As may be guessed by the name and my group was very interesting. We had two supper serious, passionate over-achievers, two frivolous slackers, and one who adapted to whomever she was around. Take a wild guess which one I was. I’ll give you a hint, my part was the only part done early. The boys drove me up the wall constantly. They were slackers about everything but the doctrine. One was a hardcore Calvinist and the other a hardcore Armenianist. Oh boy was that fun to referee. Needless to say, our church doctrine took a LONG time to complete and turned out to be VERY complicated. By redistributing the jobs (by which I mean giving the boys the few non-essential parts of the project while the girls doubled up on all the hard parts) we were able to get it done on time. We had started with the jobs equally distributed, but when Wednesday rolled around and the boys had not finished even one of their things we had to re-evaluate. The project was worth 50% of our final grade for the class (non-negotiable) so we did what we had to do to pass. What the boys did not know was that the professor asked the team leaders to evaluate every team member and give an account for who did what part of the project. Sorry boys. Overall our project turned out pretty good. It ended up being a little over 40 pages.
The program director surprised us this morning (Sunday) by informing us that he was so pleased with our work that he sent the final drafts of our projects the missionary organization (Saints Equipped to Evangelize) that supports Saints Bible Institute and they have actually decided to use some of our plans to start real churches. How cool is that? They are hoping to start with our project and are sending a group of their missionaries to Bologna, Italy as soon as next year. It is so cool. It would be so awesome if, when I next return to Italy, I got to see our plan in action. I am so excited.
Also in the past week or so, I have been able to talk with a lot of friends back home (thank you skype and facebook). I was very pleased to hear that the Giants won the superbowl. And I was even more pleased to find out that both my Mom and my Auntie Lorri (my Father’s sister) will be coming to Italy for a visit. They are coming up the week I have Spring Break (the week after my birthday) and we shall be exploring Italy together. I am soooo excited that they can share this wonderful experience with me. The Lord is good. I was, however, sad to hear that my mom’s car (my old car – the Ford Taurus that used to be my great grandmother’s) broke down. I am surprised it lasted this long, but hey, we will take it. Thankfully she can use my car while the mechanics find out if the Taurus can be revived. If it is down for the count that means we will have to find the funds for a new one. Again the Lord is good and He will provide.
I met some awesome, cool people yesterday. We visited an Italian high school in San Vito and told them about American culture. Some spoke more English than others but over all I think it went pretty well. Keep us in prayer as we reach out to this nation and share the love of Christ.
After we returned from the high school late that afternoon we played soccer with some local Italian guys for a good couple of hours. They spoke a little English so they tried to give us some playing advice. When we first came out to join them they were slightly confused because girls do not really play soccer in Italy. You should have seen their faces when we were actually semi-decent. And they were really impressed whenever we scored on them. They still majorly kicked our butts but it was really fun. I got to talk to a guy (about our age) who stopped to watch us play and it turned out that he was not a native Italian. He did not come play with us because he thought we were and his Italian is not that good. He just moved here with his family 3 months ago from Ghana. We invited him to come play with us again this afternoon but he said he could not because he had church. What are the chances of that? We asked him what type of church he went to and he said Catholic. Then we asked him if the services were in Italian and he said yes. And he had already told us that he did not really speak or understand Italian, his English, however, was quite good I told him that we held an English church service on our campus (right across the road) every Sunday and invited him to come. He said that he would talk to his family and that they would probably come visit, not this week (today), but soon after. I traded numbers with him so he could call if he had any questions and so we could contact him when we were going to play soccer again. How awesome is that? The Lord brought him right to our door. He is certainly doing a mighty work over here and I am truly blessed to be a part of it.
