Why Italy?

Last night I finished an amazing book that ended with a challenge to do 5 things over the course of a year, one of which is to pray systematically for the entire world. I'll blog more about the book later, but I wanted to share something that the Lord showed me this afternoon.

Throughout the book, the author told stories of great needs in the third world and how radical Christians are rising up to meet those needs and in the process, sharing the love of Christ with a lost and hurting world. As I was reading and contemplating our future as missionaries to Italy, I began to question God. Why Italy? While it's hard to argue that the spiritual need in Italy is great, the physical needs there are nothing compared to countries like Sudan or Haiti. Deep down, I began to wonder if it would be better for us to go to a country where the needs are more visible.


This afternoon, following a suggestion from the book, I logged onto www.operationworld.org. Operation World is a book that guides you through praying for the whole world in one year. It includes a profile for all the countries of the world and prayer points to help you know how best to pray for each country. Every day of the year has a "country of the day" to pray for and seeing a link on the website to "Pray for Today's Country", I clicked on it out of curiosity. Imagine my surprise when today's country turned out to be... you guessed it, Italy. In fact, the Italian Republic is the country not only for today, but also for tomorrow and the next day.

God spoke to me in that moment to remind me that while the needs in Italy may not be the same as those in Ethiopia or India, there are still over 55 million people there who don't know Jesus as their Savior. He reminded me that He didn't call me to the third world. He called me to Italy. Honestly, I don't completely understand it, but I cannot deny that the Lord has made His will clear. 

So, I urge you to join with our family over the next several days to pray for the people of Italy. Here are the prayer points for today to guide you in your prayers:

July 5

1 This great and gifted nation has decisively affected Western and world culture in legal systems (Roman law), language (Latin), culture (Renaissance art, music), and innovation (clothes, cars), yet is in deep spiritual need. After the fourth century collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church became a political as well as a spiritual power, deeply impacting the politics of Europe, the Muslim World (the Crusades) and Italy itself. The Church's temporal power, though reduced since 1870, was in conflict with its spiritual responsibilities – destabilizing, dividing and impoverishing Italy in the process. Most Italians are Catholic in culture, but deeply cynical about the Church. Pray for the removal of the multiple barriers that conceal a true understanding of the gospel.

2 The Roman Catholic Church shows ambivalent signs of persistent crisis and renewed power. On the one hand, it has lost over 10 million to New Age thinking, cults, the occult and materialistic secularism. Church attendance is decreasing, as are the number of priests. Yet Catholic traditions and mindset continue to permeate every aspect of national and personal life. The Catholic charismatic movement is growing, though its allegiance to the Church weakens its potential for inner renewal. Pray for millions of Italians to turn from dead tradition to the living Lord Jesus.

3 The unresponsiveness of Italians. The last four decades of religious freedom have been met with indifference. Occultism is widespread, and there are reckoned to be 100,000 full-time consulting magicians – nearly three times the number of Catholic priests. Satanism is strong in the north, Turin being one of the global centres of its activities, which include praying for the removal of all evangelical missionaries from the country. The strong pre-Christian pagan powers have never been fully routed in 2,000 years.

4 Protestantism has had an 800-year history in Italy. The world's oldest Protestant denomination, the Waldensian Church, began in north Italy, but was subjected to terrible persecution for centuries. Italian Catholic bishops officially apologized for this in 1997. The Waldensian Church is now in federal union with the Methodists and some Baptists but rather influenced by deadening liberal theology. The Protestant witness is weak and divided, especially between the growing Pentecostal majority and non-Pentecostal minority. New churches are often begun through bitter splits rather than strategic church planting. Most congregations are small, introspective and largely ignorant of the biblical challenge to missions and the few large congregations in the south are committed to 'prosperity' teaching. Pray for revival that breaks down barriers of individualism, mistrust and doctrinal extremes and leads to cooperative outreach.