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General

The Gospel and Its Relevance

I came across this substack email by Anthony Bradley recently, and given that today was a “review” day for our Band study, meaning that we’re not reading a particular chapter in the Bible today and should instead be looking back on what we read, I thought this seemed like a good point of reference from which to share a couple of thoughts.

The main point that I took out of what Bradley wrote was that The Gospel Coalition’s movement had failed because it focused on preaching the Gospel only. I don’t know the specific details here, but Bradley and others that he quotes suggest that those who purport to belong to the the Coalition, those that have focused solely on preaching the Gospel, have also failed in at least two great ways:

First, they have failed in the sense that they have turned a blind eye to the sin of the church around them. The issues of our day, such as sex scandals or abuses in the church have gone unaddressed, they say. Or other cultural issues such as those raised by Black Lives Matter or Covid are woefully unaddressed.

Second, the article seems to say, preaching the Gospel only gives a sense of how to be liberated from our sin, but doesn’t give us a sense of how to practically live. It is woefully wanting in this regard.

I don’t intend to try to defend any of the people that are being associated with The Gospel Coalition. I don’t know them. I don’t follow their work that closely, so I can’t really say. Bradley and those that he is quoting may be dead on in these regards.

But the part that struck me in this article is similar to a thought and a discussion that we have had quite frequently here where we live and work. Our discussion has been: Which Gospel do we want to preach?

Wait, what do you mean? There’s one Gospel, right?

Well, yes. In one sense that is right. But in another sense, we frequently lack completion in the Gospel that we preach.

On the one hand, the Gospel that is frequently focused on and preached in our churches today is the Gospel message that we see focused on through Paul’s writings in the New Testament. We speak of Christ’s death and resurrection for the forgiveness of sins. And that is true. It is an amazing reality to be forgiven of our sins. It is incredibly good news that God has loved us and has given us forgiveness.

But very often, we stop there, and I think that the impression that our stopping gives is that this is the end of the message. Even for those that have read through the Bible many times, they will still focus on the fact that God came to earth in the form of Jesus to give himself for us. To save us. Because he loved us.

Do you see a pattern in the discussion?

Us.

Me.

God is serving me.

Hang on. I think we need to back up because we’ve missed something along the way. Are we really saying that God is doing everything He is doing just to raise me up? Just because he wants to give me forgiveness?

Yes, His grace has come to us freely. Agreed. We haven’t deserved anything. Agreed. But God is doing something significantly more, and if we ignore these other things that He is doing, I think that we end up with situations like what we see here. We end up with people saying that the message of the forgiveness of sins doesn’t give us a way to live.

And they would be right. It doesn’t.

But what does give us a way to live is the more full and complete picture of what God is doing. That Gospel that I have explained above, which again, let me be clear, I do believe is good news and is Biblical, is an incomplete telling of the story.

I believe that the New Testament is nothing without the Old Testament. We need to back up to the time of the Old Testament, to the time of the Israelites, to be able to understand the context of the story. You see, God was the King over His people, the Israelites. They had prophets who spoke to them from God, their King, but they didn’t have a human king. They were a people unlike every other people.

The Israelites, though, looked around themselves and said that they wanted to be like the other peoples around them. They liked the lives that the others were living. As we frequently do today, they even thought that those lives, which were sinful in so many ways, were what they wanted to participate in, how they wanted to live. And what that led to was a rejection of God as their King and an embrace of the idea that they wanted to be like the other nations around them. They wanted a king who is a human, just like those other nations.

God allows it. He says that the people have rejected Him and, with many warnings, He allows them in the direction that they want to go.

And the Israelites pay the price. They are eventually destroyed and carried off into distant lands. This was God using the might of these other nations to punish and swallow up the Israelites, sending them out of the land that God had promised them.

But God wasn’t done. As Jesus came, what did he preach and speak about the most? The Kingdom of God. God’s Kingdom was being reestablished on the earth. Jesus came announcing, proclaiming, and demonstrating the Kingdom of God. And this is what Jesus called the Gospel. Very simply, the Gospel of the Kingdom.

Living as subjects of the Kingdom of God gives us the way to live. It shows us the direction. In fact, the King, Jesus himself has given us instructions on what we should be doing until he returns. We can decide to reject those instructions and then claim that we don’t have a way to live, but that doesn’t mean, by any means that we don’t have a practical way forward. We absolutely do. Not only in obeying commandments and avoiding sin, but in proactively moving forward, a purpose and a reason for doing what we’re doing, and thus we should make decisions and take action based on those purposes.

The Gospel of the forgiveness of sins is part of the Gospel of the Kingdom, but it is only the first step. It would be as if we saw the front door of the house, and the only part of the house we could see was that door, but we say, “Here is the house!”. We’re only looking at the door. The door is amazing. The door is marvelous, but it is still only the front door.

God has given us forgiveness of sins through Christ because that was the payment to bring us into the Kingdom. Jesus’s first proclamation and preaching told the people to repent and believe for the Kingdom of God is near. If we repent and believe, the Gospel of forgiveness of sins, we have come to the front door, but a mansion awaits. Christ has given us access to an incredible house.

However, it is HIS Kingdom. It is HIS. It is not ours. We are, in one sense, subjects to the King, and in another sense, His children. And Jesus has given instructions to his servants / children while he is away.

And yet, he is returning! And he has work for us to do in the meantime. And all of this should speak directly to the practical realities of the Gospel on our daily lives. If we live in the Kingdom of God instead of the kingdom of America, or the kingdom of the world, or the kingdom of the church, or the kingdom of Ryan, we see how things should be and we work for change. We see injustice and we work for justice. We see unrighteousness and we work for righteousness. We work for it because we have a purpose. We dedicate our lives to it because we see the overriding flow of eternity through the time that we are living now and we want our lives to have a purpose within that flow.

My reply and perspective, then, to Bradley article, is that we must see what he is saying, but then we must look at the true story that God is telling and realize that there is a big missing piece to our message. We have thought that the story was about us, the forgiveness of our sins, when in fact, the story is about Christ and his Kingdom. Our part becomes much clearer in the context of the bigger story and the Gospel of the Kingdom.

Categories
General

Kingdom Expansion from Sicily

I have thought for a little while that it is important to write in greater detail the reasons for expanding the work of Agape Bici, a project that we have undertaken over the last several months. I’ve thought that I might try to write several posts, but the more that I have started to write, the more that I think it would be best if I simply create one longer post here to lay out my entire thinking on one page. In that way, my hope is to create a cohesive set of thoughts amongst all of the various parts in my mind instead of attempting to cobble together several different parts into a cohesive whole. Let’s see how it will go… 😉

If you’re reading through what I’ve written and want to jump down to a certain part, here are a series of links to allow you to go to the section that you want to read:

I think the best place to start would be to take a step back and talk about the overall mission of Search Party and what we are trying to do here in Sicily and beyond. Let’s start with why we came here in the first place.

The Situation

Back in 2015, a friend of mine introduced me to the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis, where people from across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia were coming to Europe through various routes and ports. Many of them came through Libya using old fishing boats that smugglers and human traffickers would take to bring the people into Europe. They would take the individual’s money, promising them a much better life in Europe, and would set them out onto the water with little more than a hope and a prayer.

To give you a sense of what I am talking about, you might find these articles and videos interesting:

What’s Behind the Surge in Refugees Crossing the Mediterranean Sea? (New York Times, May 2015)

60 Minutes – April 2015

Even though both of those media items are from 2015, the situation continues on even today. Here is the latest situation in Italy according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. You’ll see that even last year, 2023, was the highest over the last several years after the government had taken significant steps, including those referred to as “dancing with the devil” in an attempt to stop or significantly slow the flow of migrants coming into Europe.

Our Arrival and Work

Arriving in Europe, we understood that there were few workers addressing the situation in Sicily and southern Italy, and fewer yet considering the spiritual issues that this situation would present. So, coming to Sicily, we have attempted to look at this refugee situation with the eyes of Apostle Paul when he said the following to the Athenians:

From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.

Acts 17:26-28

In the case of the Mediterranean Refugee Crsis, like many other movements of people around the world today, we see that there are people that the boundary lines that Paul spoke of are moving, and thinking about these situations, we asked ourselves why that would be. There are several reasons, of course, including war, poverty, hunger, and just a simple desire for a better life, but we realized that if we didn’t consider what Paul said here in Acts 17, we would be missing something important, something, in fact, fundamental.

Paul says that God marked out the appointed times in history for all peoples so that they will know Him, that they would seek Him, that they would find Him. God is not far, but He places the people around us to help us to find Him.

And so, what is happening in the case of the refugee crisis? The boundary lines are moving. And why? We believe that it is because God Himself is making Himself known. He wants those who have not known Him to know Him, and so God intends to use His people to make Himself known.

This is the reason that we moved our family to Sicily in 2016. We came to Catania so that we could be part of what we believe God is doing in the world today, making Himself known to people who have not known Him. Most of the people arriving in Europe are coming from places that have been resistent to the Gospel. Most are coming from Muslim nations. Most are coming from what is referred to as the 10/40 window, and in fact Sicily itself sits just inside of that window, making it a strategic location both from the perspective of the migration of people entering into Europe, but also from the perspective of reaching into the rest of that window.

A Political Note

I hate to interrupt the flow of what I am trying to communicate here, but immigration is a signficant political issue right now, so I think it is important for me to take a moment to address the political “elephant in the room”, as they say. I actually follow politics quite closely. It interests me and I watch the political movements both in the U.S. as well as where we live in Italy and elsewhere.

On the other hand, I also know that politics never brings true and lasting change. Working within politics, or yearning for political change doesn’t change anyone’s heart. Politics are primarily about power here on the earth, but this earth is passing away. It is temporary.

As I’ve thought about the immigration situation that we have stepped into here in Sicily, I couldn’t help but think back to a similar type of situation that is occurring on the southern border of my home country back in the U.S. There are people streaming across the border by the thousands, and even hundreds of thousands in those areas. I don’t see this as a good thing. I think it is wrong to allow people to break the laws of a country, to simply not enforce the laws that are already written. My sense has always been that, with regard to immigration, we should either have the laws that we have and enforce them, or specifically change the law. Let’s not say one thing and do another.

So we haven’t come to work in the midst of the flow of immigration because we agree, necessarily, with what the refugees and immigrants are doing. We don’t agree that they should just show up on the shores of Italy and say, “we’re here” expecting that the government will take care of them.

But, on the other hand, that is what has happened, and that is what is continuing to happen, and the people are here. That is just the reality. And so, looking at that reality, and seeing where these people have come from, we have needed to look at the situation with much different eyes, the eyes of the Kingdom of God. Looking at the situation with that perspective, we consider where these people have come from and we recognize that they haven’t understood the truth about Christ. They haven’t understood God’s plan for them. They haven’t known that Christ has already given himself for them, to purchase them out of the kingdom of darkness and make them part of the Kingdom of God.

And so, for this reason, we have come to Sicily and have inserted ourselves into the flow of immigration in Europe. Not because we like what has happened and what is continuing to happen, but because we want to be part of the opportunity to see the Kingdom of God expand among the unreached, those who have never heard the Gospel before, in a strategic part of the world that has relatively close, and relatively inexpensive geographical access to much of the rest of the unreached world.

A History of Our Work

Since moving to Catania, we have primarily worked to reach out to the immigrants and refugees. In addition, though, we have also worked to train and look for Sicilian Italians who would work along with us, both to reach out to the refugees and immigrants as well as to other Sicilians that they know.

We have sought to both evangelize and disciple new believers as well as train existing workers. We’ve translated the Zume Training materials into Italian as well as written our own training materials, translating those as well into Italian to more closely reflect the discipleship process that we use here in Catania, based on the Four Fields discipleship and church planting process.

We have heavily recruited missional workers to move to Sicily to work along with us, having as many as eight different families working together at one point, then through a process and series of years reducing down to three families over the last 2-3 years. And to do this, we have, and continue to run short-term team programs and summer internships in an attempt to continue to recruit workers.

Most of the work has been focused on prayer walking, sharing the Gospel, baptizing new believers, and then teaching those that we have reached to reach back into their own communities with the Gospel.

Our team now has a center in the downtown area of Catania where we run a bicycle shop, lead a small church of people from several different nations, and offer regular Bible studies and discipleship training. In addition, our teammates also have a community garden ministry both in the city of Catania as well as at land owned by one of our partnering churches.

Using our center in Catania, we have also developed a missionary field-based training program to help both incoming missionaries to Italy learn to live and work cross-culturally using the Four Fields process. Thankfully, God has also given us the opportunity to use the program with others coming from unreached nations, to send them back into the field after having been trained in doing the disciple-making and church planting process that we use here in Catania.

Finally, we have extensions of our work also in other parts of Italy and we are working to continue to train and send workers, whether they be incoming missional workers from the US or other English-speaking nations, or from Italy, or any number of other locations.

We have truly been blessed by what we have seen God do, both in us and through us up to this point!

The Great Commission Pipeline

A few years ago, I saw a video created by Troy Cooper for the NoPlaceLeft network and it made me think that this is the vision that I would like to promote for our work as well, including the primary vision for Search Party, the organization that we started in 2019. Here is the video that he made:

The video talks about developing a movement of disciples and churches in our home area and then sending them to the next field where more unreached people groups can be reached with the Gospel, making more disciples and planting more churches.

This is what we believe God wants to do through us. We want to bring people from our home country to work with us here. In that sense, we are creating a pipeline from our home churches to the unreached where we are.

But it doesn’t end there. In fact, the work is only beginning. Instead, from here, we want to send the disciples that we have made out to other fields. We see this happening as we launch workers from Catania into other parts of Italy and other parts of Europe, but even more importantly, launching workers back into the rest of the 10/40 window where more of the unreached people groups can be reached. We are connecting with the unreached here in Catania, but we can reach even more people by sending workers back into the home countries of the people that have arrived here in Europe.

So our desire is to create a Great Commission Pipeline in to Catania, and develop as well a Great Commission Pipeline out of Catania. To do this, we believe that we will need to connect a few different pieces of a strategic puzzle together, and that leads me to the first puzzle piece: Mobilizing and preparing workers.

The Ten:Two Team

In Luke, chapter 10, Jesus sends out seventy-two of his disciples to proclaim and demonstrate the Kingdom of God. This story has always captivated me in the way that Jesus sends his disciples, but I want to focus on a certain part of the story for my purposes in this article.

As Jesus was sending the disciples, he said:

“The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.

Luke 10:2

Jesus was sending his disciples out, but the first thing that he tells them to do is to pray for more workers because the harvest is plentiful.

Question to consider: Where are these workers that the disciples are supposed to pray for going to come from?

The disciples are the only workers at this point. There are no pastors. There are no missionaries. There is no one else. They are it.

Obviously, the only place that the workers could come from would be the harvest field itself. So, the harvest field that Jesus is sending the disciples into is also the source of the workers.

Now, in our day, we have pastors and missionaries and many other types of workers, but yet the harvest is still plentiful, and the workers are still few. So, from our perspective, we are praying for more workers, and we are working to prepare them and send them out as well. That is what the Ten:Two Team is all about. Pray for workers, mobilize them, and send them out. Whether they come from the U.S., from Europe, or from other unreached areas… Whether they come from believing or unbelieving backgrounds… Our desire is that the Gospel is preached and disciples of Jesus are made amongst people from all of the nations that we are touching here in Catania.

As mentioned above, we have had short-term team programs, internship programs, and missionary training programs that we have used in multiple contexts. We are moving ahead to aggregate and coalesce these programs together underneath a team that we will call the Ten:Two Team, working to pray for and mobilize workers, training them and sending them to do the work. This will be a significant part of the development of the Great Commission Pipeline here, continuing the formalized programs to receive and send workers into the harvest field, and in the meantime continue to develop disciples locally to do the same, sending them into the harvest field of Catania, or sending them out of Catania to do the work elsewhere also.

Agape Bici

In the midst of releasing from the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, we opened a new community center in the downtown area of Catania. Initially, it was the home of several different activities, including a bike shop, but in the beginning of last year, we decided to focus our efforts to simply – and only – be a bike shop. From that bike shop, we can, of course, do other activities, but instead of being known as a place where a lot of activities happen, we decided to make it into one activity from the perspective of what other people see.

For that reason, we removed the walls that separated the bike shop from the rest of the center and instead created one large shop. In this location, we have fixed bikes, received bikes in donation to fix them and give them away for free, and done outreaches from the shop, taking the creations of out teammate into the piazza to connect with people through fun on “crazy bikes”, bikes that probably shouldn’t be on the street but are fun to take in the piazza to try out riding. You can see more about what we have been doing with Agape Bici up to now on our Facebook page or by launching into the picture gallery from the website.

In the midst of working with the bike shop, and even more generally with mission work that we have done, there has always been one particular challenge, to have the funds that are needed to be able to do what the work is calling us to do.

From one perspective, this has been a challenge just to keep the center, the physical location, open. We have had several generous donors, and we certainly intend to continue to receive donations to keep expanding the work that we are doing, but we also have a sense of responsibility to try to figure out how to make the bike shop work self-sustaining. Instead of continuing to require donations to have the location and continue to do the work, we feel that it is time for us to find a way to help support and sustain at least a portion of the work here in Sicily.

In addition, we have also consistently faced the challenge of calling people into ministry work but forcing them to find their own support so that they can live. In some ways, I see this as a good thing as it can be part of confirming a calling to work for Christ, but on the whole it is a real challenge. It is difficult to have someone unable to eat and yet still call them to lead the work into their own communities. This is compounded in the fact that we work with immigrants and refugees who have little to no relational network where we live and don’t have an obvious path for creating or casting a wide net for relationships given many of the cultural, language, and relational barriers that exist between locals and immigrants in any location, and this is certainly true also here in Sicily where there exists a relatively closed-loop familial culture that is often quick to embrace the stranger on the surface but closed to the foreigner at a deeper level.

So, given the above, we began to investigate the possibilities that Agape Bici could be a way to help sustain the work in Catania, at least in part, and at least in connection with the two points above. If you would like to learn more about the overall plan that we put together, you can do that from this page, but I will note that as we prayed, thought about, and continued to investigate, we realized that there were three main things that we wanted to accomplish as we developed Agape Bici for the future:

Establishing a known and trusted location in Catania

In Sicily, there is frequent discussion about a “punto di riferimento”, a point of reference. A place that is known from which you can continue to navigate to other places as well. That which is established and known is considered to be trusted.

In our initial work, the only thing that was known, and possibly trusted, was us ourselves, but it was difficult to build a community, and especially a community of practice from us individually.

What was worse is that we are working with people who have very little that is established in terms of relationships with the local culture, and for that matter, relationships with other immigrants and refugees. As an outsider looking in, we frequently think that the immigrants would have community with one another because of their common background in coming from other countries, but we have actually found that there can be, within some groups, an even greater distance between them as a result of a competitive spirit or a lack of knowing who to trust within the context of this new and foreign culture. Everything is new and nothing is easy, so everyone is on edge.

When we opened the center in the downtown area of Catania, we noticed that some of our relationships began to change. We were able to develop a deeper sense of connection and trust because it was a known quantity, a known place. It was a place that people could come and connect with a community of people that they knew. They knew what they could expect when they came so they came to continue to have their bicycles fixed and to grow deeper in their relationship with Christ.

So we have an initial start in establishing and developing a location that is a known quantity in the area and we want to continue to develop this even further. We want Agape Bici to be a location that offers a service to the community but is also self-sustaining. We want it to be a place where bicycles are fixed but also cross-cultural relationships are made. We want it to be a place where we meet and are equipped in the Word of God but also a place from which we send out workers into the harvest field.

Furthermore, we see the fact that Agape Bici being a point of reference in that it can also allow us to connect with more people. As a known and trusted entity in the community, we will have the opportunity to reach into other institutions in the community using bicycles as a platform.

The example that I routinely provide on this point is that we will be able to connect with a refugee camp for the purpose of offering bicycles to the people that are living there. Or, we can offer bicycle repair courses in either English or Italian to provide new marketable skills to the refugees. Or we could offer to take the refugees on a bike ride up onto Mt. Etna, to experience a part of Sicily that they rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to experience.

And beyond this, we can look at other opportunities as well. Why not teach bicycle courses to children? Why not offer after-school programs that focus on bicycles, whether in physical fitness or in scholastics? With the right staffing and resources, we can do this, giving us the opportunity to not only be a positive force in the community but a positive force for the Gospel as we speak about our faith in the midst of the activities that we are doing.

But this reach into the community can only happen when you are a trusted entity, a known quantity.

Our desire is that Agape Bici is a point of reference for bicycles in Catania, but it is also a spiritual point of reference, where someone can come to know God and be equipped to tell others. And to do this, we need Agape Bici to become a point of reference in the community so that it will not only be here today but also tomorrow and into the future until it will be God’s will to close this work because it is no longer necessary.

Having sustainable funds for ongoing financial investment in the expansion of the Kingdom

Our desire is that we will be able to pay for the ongoing operations of Agape Bici as well as provide work that will help to support the workers, the workers of Agape Bici and the workers in the Kingdom.

We want the work to be self-sustainable. Each of the ex-pat missional workers will continue to receive support for their work, but from the perspective of the operational costs of the work on the ground, unrelated to personal support, our desire is that we will be able to cover those costs and support those costs through funds that we make from within the context of the work itself.

Even further, our desire is that we have the ability to support workers in the Kingdom of God by providing physical work for these workers. We can fix bicycles. We can rent bicycles. We can teach courses. And much more… There are many things that we can do by teaching people a physical work and skills that they can use to make money that will allow them to go on to use those funds to support themselves while they are making disciples of Christ amongst those that are the least-reached in the world.

Overall, our desire is that funds that we may be able to raise through the bike shop activities can be reinvested back into the work of the ministry here in Catania as well as be used to send people out from this place into other locations. We see the funds as playing a tanglible part in helping to expand the Kingdom of God here in Sicily and beyond.

Creating a reproducible model that we could use in other locations

Our desire is that this model could be built here in Catania, but eventually reproduced in other locations as well. There are a few ways in which we could see this happening:

First, we could imagine the possibility that Agape Bici opens locations in other cities. In this case, should this be the direction that we choose to go, we could open a branch of Agape Bici in a new location, allowing someone who is vetted and trusted and that knows both how we work together from the perspective of the bike shop as well as the mission of what we are attempting to do, to reach the unreached with the Gospel. In this case, Agape Bici could be a way for someone to take what they have learned while working in Catania and reproduce it in other places, making an income while also working to plant churches in the new city where they will live.

A second possibility, though, is that we could train someone to work within the bicycle industry, thus gaining skills for bicycle repair and how to run a business, using that to help support themselves as they move into other locations to be an ambassador for Christ in that new place and with those people. We have, in fact, already created and taken some initial stabs at an apprenticeship program. The program needs additional development and tweaking, but it is something that we can use in connection with the training programs from the Ten:Two team to prepare workers to go out into the field, thus giving them a practical way to support themselves while they are making disciples and planting churches in other locations.

Our desire is to give away the model, that it would be used for the Kingdom work to move forward in Catania and beyond. Bicycles are used everywhere, and their use is only growing. We can imagine that working within the bicycle world could be a useful skill that could be used in a signficant way in the Kingdom and so we are looking forward to seeing how God will use it in the future.

Church

In early 2022, we began to think and dream about the possibility that God would start a new church that would meet there in the bike shop. We had been part of our sponsoring Italian church, but we felt that it was important for us to have a church community that both represented the values that we were teaching and promoting to the people that we were working with as well as provide an example of what we are trying to see planted in other locations as well.

We had actually seen four separate churches started before that time. These churches were led by the people that we had been teaching and coaching, but as those people left the area to move on into other locations, which frequently happens with refugees and immigrants, the groups fell apart because the leader was no longer there.

Moving to Sicily, we never had the intention of starting or leading a church ourselves, but given the situation, and given the fact that we were needing to find a way to demonstrate what “church” meant in the sense that we were trying to communicate, we decided to go ahead and start a new community that would meet at the bike shop on Sunday evenings.

We have taught a very simple idea of what church means with the idea that each person should be able to reproduce church in their own context as well. We don’t want to overcomplicate the idea of creating a church. Instead, we want to help those that we are teaching have a simple and clear way to lead their own groups that will become churches. For reference, here is a tool that we frequently use as a vision for our own healthy church, providing a vision for other healthy churches in the future:

The church that we’ve started has grown slowly, but from the perspective of bringing people in to Christian community and experiencing that community, beyond simply describing it with words, we now have an example through which we are able to show a community in action. We have a lot of work to do, but we are moving forward with the people that God has given us up to now.

Our goal is to develop a network of churches throughout Catania, bringing in and developing workers within the context of that network, and then sending them to start new churches either in Catania or in other locations. We believe that by leading a church, and eventually developing a network of churches, will allow us to prepare leaders to enter the life and work of God here in Catania, learn and be equipped to do the same elsewhere, and then send them out into other locations. These people may be Americans who are passing through as missionaries as part of the field training, they may be Italians who are coming to learn and participate in what we are doing, or they may be immigrants and refugees who are in Italy, having arrived from across the 10/40 window into Italy.

Putting it all together

Hopefully you can already see the direction of where we have come from and where we are hoping to go. Our goal is to see a movment, if not movements, of disciples among the refugees and immigrants here in Sicily, but I would certainly be happy if we saw that same thing happen from amongst the Sicilians and the rest of Italy as well as we would then have the people who could teach others to reach out to the refugees and immigrants. We’re praying that God will work amongst all of them.

To help accomplish these goals, we are putting in place a few different components:

First, church. Establishing a church that will reproduce leaders and reproduce churches is critical to seeing the expansion that we are hoping to see. We need to know and experience how we can be the workers within the Kingdom of God and send people out.

Second, mobilization and training. The Ten:Two Team is designed to mobilize workers to enter into the harvest field and teach them what they should do when they get there.

And third, practical outreach, financing, and support. There may be several responses to this need, but we believe that Agape Bici can be a significant answer to this question.

First, I believe that Agape Bici gives us a platform from which we can reach out to others in our area, and in any area that we might ultimately take the organization. We can share the Gospel, we can make disciples, and we can plant new churches from this starting place.

But we also want to use the gift that God has given us to develop the funding for the Kingdom work to go forward, whether that is related to the expenses for the work directly in Catania, in other locations, or in helping to support the people that we want to send to do the work of making disciples and planting churches.

As we do all of this, we see the opportunity for more workers to come and work with us to help further establish what we are doing and then receive and send workers from here in Catania into other harvest fields, whether they would be here in Italy, in the rest of Europe, or beyond into the rest of the countries in the 10/40 window, representing the least-reached of the world.

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Sentiero Natura Monte Nero degli Zappini

We took this trail over the course of two and a half hours, including a time to stop for lunch. There are nice views of the Etna peaks and a walk through both the lava fields as well as through the woods.

This hike would be OK for our purposes with the people that we want to take. The only thing that I didn’t like about it was that, to complete it as a loop, the second half is primarily paved and, unless we did it incorrectly, returns on a road. Here is a map of the path that we took, starting and ending at Sentiero Naturalistico Rifugio della Galvarina. Here is the page on the Parco dell’Etna website for the trail.

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Ceremonial Washing and Baptism

In the Jewish law, ceremonial washing was required to allow a man or a woman to be ceremonially clean before God. There were several situations in which a person could be considered to be ceremonially unclean and need to be washed. Those might include:

  • A woman’s menstruation
  • A man or woman’s discharge of sexual fluids
  • Contact with a dead body, either an animal or a person

In addition, ceremonial washing was also frequently performed in advance of celebrating the sabbath, or important days such as Yom Kippur or the festivals when the Jews would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

A new convert to Judaism would also need to be washed.

And finally – so to speak – they would also generally perform a washing for the dead prior to burial.

In these, and probably also other scenarios, the washing would need to be performed through full immersion in what they would call “living water”, meaning water that was running and continually refreshed. That might be a river, but was most frequently done in a pool or a bath that was connected to a fresh water spring, thus allowing the water to be refreshed by the continual running of the water from the water coming from the spring.

I mention this because today I have been reading in John 3 where both John the Baptist and Jesus were at the Jordan baptizing. Jesus and John had both been preaching a message of repentance from sin, and for this the people came to be baptized – probably in their minds, ceremonially washed, similar their prior Jewish custom.

But this washing was, indeed, different. In the Jewish custom, you don’t see cleansing from sin as one of the reasons to be washed and yet here, they are washed as a sign of repentance from sin.

Earlier in the chapter, Jesus points out to Nicodemus, who had come to him in the night from the Jewish ruling council, that if you want to enter the kingdom of God, you must be born of the water and of the Spirit. Jesus is talking about a washing that occurs from the outside – a demonstration of your repentance from sin and belief in Christ through the washing of baptism – and through the washing and rebirth of the person’s spirit by the Spirit of God.

“Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’

John 3:5-7

This lasts even up to today. Jesus isn’t calling us to follow all of the requirements of ceremonial washing and by “ceremonially” clean. The ceremony of the rituals of sacrifice has been completed through God’s sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

Instead, he calls us to be completely clean, both inside and out, through a washing by water as well as a new birth – from death to life – by the Spirit of God’s work within us. Praise God that he comes for us to give us new life!

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Praise be to God

Last night, as we talked about how the Israelites rejected God as their king, and as Jesus came, he looked to re-establish this relationship, a man in the group looked at me a couple of times and said simply: I lay my head down on my pillow and sleep well at night.

This has a certain irony because this is the same man who, just the night before, had come to speak with us because he was raging about a scenario at work and felt like world was against him because of his employment situation.

This morning, we read 1 Peter and I noticed a simple, yet profound, statement that Peter makes in verse 3:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…

1 Peter 1:3

To believe in Christ is to believe that we are helpless, that we are lost, and yet God has come, in the midst of re-establishing his kingship relationship with his people, to save us from certain punishment and eternal loss. It is for this reason that we can and must praise God! If we truly understand our spiritual condition without him and his saving work in our lives, we realize that we have no hope whatsoever, except for the living hope that God has provided us through Jesus Christ. Without God moving to act on our behalf, we have no hope. We cannot save ourselves. Only he can save us – and he has come to do that in Christ. Praise be to God!

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The Cross Was His Plan

As Jesus hung on the cross, the people passed by him and hurled insults at him. They were saying things like:

Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!

Matthew 27:40

What the people failed to understand was that Jesus came for this very moment. Jesus specifically put himself in that place. The Jews thought that they had convinced Pilate to crucify Jesus, but in reality, Jesus not only knew that he was going to be crucified, he intended to put himself on that cross.

The values of men and and the values of God often stand in definite contrast. In fact, they can be as starkly different as the difference between black and white. I think you can even see it in this particular scene.

The Jews believe that Jesus’s desire would be to continue living. In that case, Jesus’s value would be the things of our world. His life. His possessions. They believe this because those are the things that they value. They value the things of this world, certainly not the things that God values.

But the truth is that Jesus values the things that God values. He wasn’t sure that, in his humanness that he wanted to be crucified. Jesus prayed that, if there was another way, that God the Father would use that other way. Jesus knew that immense suffering was coming. He knew that immense pain was coming. But he told the Father that he wanted his will to be done, and that was the specific value that he was working under. Not to preserve himself. Not to live for his own benefit, but instead to live for the will of God the Father.

It wasn’t the Jews that killed Jesus.

And it wasn’t the Romans that killed Jesus.

It was God himself that killed Jesus. Read this from Isaiah, who wrote this more than 700 years prior to Jesus coming to earth:

Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the LORD makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.

Isaiah 53:10

It was the Lord’s will to crush him. There were no surprises to God when Jesus was crucified. It worked out exactly as he planned it. God gave Jesus as an offering for sin, a sacrifice that was perfect. One sacrifice for all sin, for all time, for the past and the future. And it is the will of the Lord that is prospering. The Jews thought that their will, their desire, that was being done. And yet it was God’s will that was being accomplished, offering his people a way to come to him, the greatest gift ever given to mankind.

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Blindness

In Matthew 20, we see Jesus walking from Galilee to Judea, eventually on his way to Jerusalem. At one point, Jesus stops and pulls his disciples aside, yet again, and tells them that he will be condemned to death, mocked, flogged, and crucified, only to be resurrected and raised to life three days later.

And how do they respond? James and John’s mother comes and asks Jesus to allow her sons to sit at his right and left in his kingdom:

“What is it you want?” he asked.

She said, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.”

Matthew 20:21

You can see that Jesus patiently answers her and the rest of the disciples, but I have to imagine that Jesus is thinking to himself… What in the world??? Did they not hear what I just told them?

That’s my interpretation, of course, but wouldn’t that make sense? Imagine that you just said something that you think is super-important to your friends or family and they start talking about something else.

And why were the disciples thinking of something else? Only because they had their own ideas in mind. They had their own program for Jesus. They were ready to set him as the king over Israel because this is what they were expecting of the Messiah. That is who they were wanting him to be and so they started tuning out what he was saying to them. These truths of his real plan were hidden to them because of their own blindness and their own deafness.

How often is that the case for us? How often do we think we have God figured out and that we understand everything about him only to find out at some point that there is something new that we hadn’t considered and your perspective shifts?

Except for many of us, our arrogance and pride prevents us from really hearing and seeing what it is that God wants to say to us. In this case, Jesus is telling the disciples plainly what his plan is, and yet they can’t hear him because they have their own ideas about who Jesus is and what he desires.

I think that this should be a warning for us. Let us read the Word of God with the eyes and ears of our hearts open to seeing and hearing what Jesus is saying, not what we want to see or hear because it is our desire.

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Why so harsh, man?

This morning, we were reading Matthew 10 as part of our team’s regular Bible study. Jesus sends out his disciples to the Israelite towns, but spends most of his time giving them a warning that persecution, beatings, and even death await them because they are his disciples and because of what he is sending them to do.

But why?

Hasn’t Jesus been teaching love and good ways to live? Yes, he has.

Hasn’t he been performing miracles to heal people, curing them from their sicknesses? Yes, he has.

So it is a fair question, then, to ask… why all of this consternation? Why should the disciples be expecting persecution, beatings, and even death?

I believe that the answer is related to the message that Jesus gives the disciples. He tells them:

As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’

Matthew 10:7

This is Jesus’s primary message. From his first thing that Jesus preaches until the last thing that he says until he enters again into heaven, Jesus speaks about the kingdom of God.

So why would this be such a dangerous message? And why would it be so important to Jesus that this would be the message to announce, and the message that he is now giving his disciples to proclaim in the villages where they are going?

The answer is this: Jesus is claiming kingship. If you have a kingdom, you, by definition, will also have a king. And a king does not share loyalty. You can’t be in one kingdom and also in another kingdom. You can’t demonstrate loyalty to one king and also to another.

Jesus has called his disciples, and now through those disciples, all of the people in the towns where he is sending the disciples. As heralds, Jesus sends them to tell of a new kingdom that has come near, but that demands their complete loyalty. 100%.

But that demand isn’t a demand for loyalty at gunpoint, or at the tip of a sword, as the Roman empire did in Jesus’s time. Instead, it is a demand for loyalty out of love. Jesus as king has entered into the world of his people to call and save to bring them into the kingdom of God. As he does this, though, he calls his people both to salvation as well as to submission to his kingship.

But as people, we are prone to creating our own empires, to building our own kingdoms. In the case of the Israelites, they had rejected God as their king and asked him instead for a human king, just like all of the nations around them. Even though they weren’t still living in this condition, and instead had been scattered among the nations, this was still the Jewish peoples’ desire. To see *their* kingdom restored to them. Not the kingdom of God, but the kingdom of Israel.

And in addition, we see the Romans had conquered Palestine and the Israelite people. They were the empire that was ruling over the people. They had their own systems, their own government, their own deities and values, their own king.

This is the environment that Jesus was born into and the environment in which he begins to preach about the kingdom of God. And so this is the reason why Jesus is saying that his disciples should expect persecution. Kingdom is coming against kingdom. Loyalties will be questioned. Are you not a Roman citizen? Are you not a Jew? You are part of these kingdoms, not part of this kingdom of God with this new guy Jesus who claims to be the Messiah, the coming king from God, right?

These are the same questions that we are asked today. Sure, we are citizens of countries from a political perspective. Maybe in the USA or in Italy, or somewhere else in the world. But where do our allegiances actually lie? If we call ourselves believers… if we call ourselves followers of Jesus… if we call ourselves Christians, do we live with complete loyalty to Jesus as king, doing what he wants us to do? Do we live as he has commanded us? Or do we continue to adopt the values of the world? Or the political kingdoms where we live?

Jesus is still calling us to allegiance today. It isn’t enough to say that you are “saved”. We must know what we have been saved from, and what we are saved into because the truth is that we have been bought at a great price by the king himself and citizenship in his kingdom means that we renounce every other allegiance.

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What is My Role in the End Times?

Over the last several months, especially during the time of the pandemic starting in early 2020, and even more as governments around the world have issued “Green Passes” for vaccinations, a common topic of conversation amongst Christians that we have met has been the End Times, the time of the end of the world as we know it and when Jesus will return to fully establish his Kingdom.

This conversation comes up on a weekly basis, if not even daily. Typically, my goal in these conversations, as well as in this post, is not to try to determine whether or not these are specifically the end times. It may be, and it may not be. Honestly, I don’t know. But either way, whether Jesus is returning very soon or it will still be yet some time, I think that there is a question that is more important for us to consider:

What is my role? What should I be doing?

Why should I consider my role?

There are many people who seem to believe that their role is to point out all of the ways that the Bible aligns with various “signs” that they see around them. Facebook posts are frequent in these days:

Another earthquake today… Jesus is returning!

A tsunami… The end is near!

There is evil in the world today… The people’s love is growing cold – just as predicted!

The UN placed a statue in front of their building… Have you seen a picture of this statue? It’s from Daniel 7!

And beyond this, some of the first questions that I hear from Christians to others is whether they are vaccinated, some even going as far as to proclaim that they won’t be vaccinated because it is most certainly… the mark of the beast!

But are these really the things that we should be spending our time talking about? Is this what Jesus told us to do?

I would like to suggest that, if we are spending our time sounding the alarm as I have given in the examples above, we have probably lost our focus on the things that Jesus has told us to do.

What did Jesus say?

Jesus’s disciples asked him about the signs of the end times, and you can find Jesus’s response, which includes his thoughts on what the disciples should do, throughout Matthew, chapters 24 and 25. But if we focus on the first few verses of chapter 24, I think that we can get an accurate summary of what Jesus expects his people to do:

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many. You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.

“Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

Matthew 24:3-14

So based on this passage, what do we see Jesus saying that he expects his disciples to do?

First, let’s look in verse 4. Jesus says, “Watch out that no one deceives you…” In this particular place, he speaks of false messiahs, although later he also speaks of false prophets. In any case, it seems that the first thing that Jesus wants his disciples to do is to not be deceived. They should know their messiah’s voice, that of their King, and know the difference between it and someone else’s false promises.

Next, let’s look in verses 9 through 13. Jesus says that his disciples will be hated, betrayed, persecuted, and even put to death, but he says that despite the wickedness around us, we must stand firm, and if we do this, we will be saved. Jesus is saying that we must remain firm in our faith, grounded in what he has said, remaining faithful to who he is, continuing to glorify him even in the face of evil.

And finally, in verse 14, Jesus says that the Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached to all nations, and then the end will come. At this point, Jesus doesn’t directly say that the disciples must go and preach the Gospel of the Kingdom, but who is he speaking of when he says that it will happen? He is speaking of us, his disciples! So, since that is the case, Jesus is telling his disciples that we should be preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God to all nations. Do we know what that is, and how to preach that Gospel? Are we crossing national, racial, linguistic, and cultural boundaries and sharing it people from other places as well?

My Role

So if we believe that these are the end times, then more than anything else, and certainly more than propagating alarmism to those around us, we must:

  1. Stay vigilant and ready for the times that are coming.
  2. Remain connected to Jesus – our one and true Messiah – in prayer and reading God’s Word.
  3. Remain firm in our faith.
  4. Have a new urgency in telling others from all nations the Gospel of the Kingdom of God.
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The Birth of Our King

Each morning, our family reads the Bible together for about 30 minutes while we drink our coffee and eat breakfast. This week, leading up to our Christmas celebration, we have been reading a few selections from the Old Testament, working to understand together how God planned to bring the Messiah to the earth.

This morning, we took some time to think about the situation in Israel as Jesus arrived into the world.

First, we saw that Herod was the king in Israel, although underneath the authority and power of the Roman empire.

The emperor of Rome at this time was Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar. He infamously and routinely referred to himself as the son of a god, as Julius Caesar, his adopted father, referred to himself as “divine”, meaning that he was not just human but a god.

I wanted to note this with my kids primarily to help them understand that the world, not altogether unlike aspects of our world today today, claimed a sovereign status, if not also going so far as to consider themselves a deity, a god.

So with this in mind this morning, one of the scriptures that we read was Psalm 110. For reference, here is that Psalm:

The LORD says to my lord:

“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”

The LORD will extend your mighty scepter from Zion, saying,
“Rule in the midst of your enemies!”
Your troops will be willing
on your day of battle.
Arrayed in holy splendor,
your young men will come to you
like dew from the morning’s womb.

The LORD has sworn
and will not change his mind:
“You are a priest forever,
in the order of Melchizedek. ”

The Lord is at your right hand;
he will crush kings on the day of his wrath.
He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead
and crushing the rulers of the whole earth.
He will drink from a brook along the way,
and so he will lift his head high.

Psalm 110

This was a Psalm written by David, but what does this have to do with Christmas?

In this Psalm, we can see that David says, “the Lord says to my lord”. By this, he is saying that the Lord, meaning God, makes a declaration to “my lord”, meaning someone who is greater than David, the king of Israel.

The most interesting part is what the Lord says. He says that this person is to sit at God’s right hand until he makes his enemies a footstool for his feet. God is putting this person in charge as the King over all things, over all of heaven and earth! God will even put all things in order such that the enemies of this person underneath him and he will rule them.

If we skip forward, we then see that the book of Matthew shows how Jesus fulfills this prophecy as being a royal son of David from a human perspective. Here are the first 6 verses of Matthew 1:

This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham:

Abraham was the father of Isaac,
Isaac the father of Jacob,
Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,
Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar,
Perez the father of Hezron,
Hezron the father of Ram,
Ram the father of Amminadab,
Amminadab the father of Nahshon,
Nahshon the father of Salmon,
Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab,
Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth,
Obed the father of Jesse,
and Jesse the father of King David.

Matthew 1:1-6

We can see that Matthew is placing an emphasis on the fact that Jesus comes from the lineage of King David. This is important because of the promise that God made to David:

Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.

2 Samuel 7:16

Obviously, God isn’t saying that David will live forever. Instead, he is saying that his kingdom will endure. His line will live on and on, ruling and reigning over all.

This is why, therefore, it is important that it is understood that Jesus came from David’s line. First, Jesus is established as King from Israel in the line of David, having come from the genealogical bloodline of David. And second, Matthew establishes that Jesus comes directly from God as well:

and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah.

Matthew 1:16

But then shortly after, we see that Joseph was not Jesus’s biological father, but instead Jesus was conceived within Mary by the Holy Spirit:

When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.

Matthew 1:24-25

If we look back at the Psalm that we originally started with above, we can see that the prophecy of the King and his Kingdom are fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus is a King in both an earthly sense in that he comes from the bloodline of David as well as a King in a heavenly sense in that he comes also from the “bloodline” of God.

This year, as we celebrate Christmas, we want to remember that we aren’t just celebrating the birth of a baby. We aren’t just celebrating one that would one day save us. We are celebrating the birth of our King. Jesus came to establish his Kingdom, re-establishing God’s reign here on the earth. This is what the birth of Christ means: the birth of our King.