Italy Report

To steal a line from Dickens, "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." We made it in late Tuesday afternoon after 6 days, mainly in Florence and Bologna. I mentioned in my last post that we took a group of 4 leaders from our young singles ministry as a hands-on leadership development opportunity. They're going to be taking a larger group of Young Singles in June, so we spent most of our time meeting with our ministry partners on the ground, learning a little about the culture, and trying to get some good traction for how a larger team might be most effective.

The opportunity to serve our mission partners in Italy were "the best of times." We spent the first two days in Florence, with a team from Agape Italia (Campus Crusade for Christ's branch in Italy). They were so gracious to show us around Florence, and to take us to one of the campus buildings to dialogue with some of the Italian students there about their perception of Americans, Italy, and the state of the church in Italy. Put mildly, this was eye opening. In the eyes of Italian students the Roman Catholic Church has so abused its power over the past few decades that the words "Christian," or "Christ" are synonymous with "corruption" and "control." They don't want anything to do with Jesus as a result of how poorly He has been represented, especially over the past several years.

On almost every corner in Florence there are gorgeous, elaborate, intricately beautiful monuments to a God in Whom virtually nobody in Italy believes.

After a very successful time in Florence, we trained to Bologna, where Jesse and Tricia Marcos have just landed on the ground to serve with Agape Italia at the Western world's oldest university, which is attended by 100,000 students. The largest two campus groups are the Wiccans and the GLBA. On a campus of 100,000 students, there are zero evangelical Christian organizations. As far as Jesse and Tricia know, there are no evangelical Christians attending university in Bologna. As you walk through the streets of Bologna, the darkness of the culture is almost palpable.

I told you we took this trip as a leadership development opportunity so some of our leaders could get some on-the-job-training, and learn some lessons about mission work in Italy before taking a larger group over there.

Thank God we did.

My plan was for us to learn lessons the easy way - by talking with missionaries on the ground, observing students in their environment, and decoding the culture by observing it for ourselves.

Unfortunately, we learned most of our lessons the hard way. Italy is a tremendously difficult place to travel. It took us six days to feel like we had a good feel for the train system in Italy. Nothing is marked well, or organized. Trying to board a train in Italy with all our luggage was like trying to herd ten thousand cats into a 4 foot by 4 foot room. And the train only stops in the station for 2 or 3 minutes.

We planned to spend the afternoon in Cinque Terra (Rick Steve's favorite spot in the world), where we had been assured there would be a place to check our luggage while we did the hike from village to village. There wasn't.

So, I spent the day sitting by the Mediterranean on a park bench guarding our luggage while the rest of our team walked part of the trail. They stopped after only about 1 kilometer because there was a toll for the trail nobody had bothered to mention, and they didn't want to spend 10 dollars a piece the way the day was going. They should have - the pictures of Cinque Terra are beautiful, and I'd like to go again someday now that we know what we know.

That evening, we hopped on a train for Milan (we were told it was most convenient to fly out of Milan), got to the train station and hopped on a bus for the airport (fifty miles away from the city) and then caught a cab to get to the hotel. The cabbies there have a racket going because there's no way to get to your hotel but by cab, so they were attempting to charge anywhere from 40 dollars to 70 dollars for the one mile ride to the hotel. We finally got a guy to take us for 30 dollars. By the time we finally got everything navigated, and arrived at our hotel, it was midnight, and we had 3 hours to sleep before we needed to get up for our flight the next morning.

The best of times, and the worst of times.

I'll write more about our missions philosophy in the future, and the benefit of my stay in Cinque Terra was the opportunity to read three books I'm looking forward to reviewing. One of them was incredible. I'll get back to that once we get back in the swing of things. For now, I'm just glad to be home.