Who are you?
Marcus keeps asking God where the journey is headed. And when he hears Rome, he goes to Rome.
Werner, on the other hand, is a physician and much closer to retirement. But because God had already talked about Italy some years ago, so much so that he has been reading the Bible in Italian ever since, he took Beate with him. And Beate, his wonderful wife, learned in Italy never again to say: "I am not an evangelist".
The three are no longer alone. Unfortunately, there is not enough room here to adequately introduce Mark, Edgar, Sally, Nicola, Othmar, Johanna, Landry, Annett, Kim, and the others .
What do you want to see?
We want to see baptisms. Everywhere.
We've already had the first one. Mark's baptism. In Lake Albano, below the Pope's summer residence. We want to see many more of these!
We meet so many different people in Rome. Some live in the city, but many live outside, in the suburbs and even beyond. Some are Italian, some of them wish they were. Many are already introducing us to their friends, wherever they live.
We want to help them take the next spiritual step. That's why we need to move between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Adriatic, between Florence and Salerno. So that everywhere - in Tuscany, in Umbria, in Lazio, in Abruzzo, and in Campania - spiritual families are born. Three independent house churches in Rome and three outside are likely by the end of 2022.
How did you get this idea?
Some ideas are simply the next step.
Dorothea helped in the kitchen of a student camp during her holidays. Since then we can't get Andrea and his team in Florence out of our prayers. During our first visit to Landry in Terni, Steve showed up completely unexpectedly and invited us to his villa. Annett and Alessandro moved to Salerno last year, and Sally can't be stopped by anything or anyone anyway.
And then there are the tears. Not everybody feels this way all the time, but almost every time one of us cries. Because in almost every conversation it becomes clear that for most people we meet, Jesus is merely the baby in the manger or the almost-naked man on the cross. If that much. This has to change!
What challenges do you expect?
In Italy there are many migrants from all over the world. Some of our best friends come from Cameroon, Great Britain, Pakistan, the Philippines, and South America. Many of them have very little money and work on a cash basis from day to day. We are eager to help and will certainly be overwhelmed.
We are also a big team. We need to learn to coordinate better, and find out what we should do together and what we should do separately. And how we can train people across distances.
What are you going to do?
We hope to be back in Rome for the first time in August. Because new people have joined our team, by 2021 at the latest we want to have one team per month always on-site. From now on Werner and Beate will also start to pray together with the new people on the team. And some of us are already learning to actually speak Italian . . . not only eating Italian food!
published in May 2020