News and prayer information from Richard and Pinuccia Wilson

The meeting at the cultural café on Thursday went were, I was told, with a handful of people from outside of the church. There is the hope that this groups consolidates as they continue with the next 5 fortnightly meetings.

This week is another of those weeks when everything comes up for me. Apart from the two Bible studies and band practice that I have every week, this Thursday is the bimonthly leaders’ coordination meeting that I lead, and I will be teaching in Sunday School next Sunday (as I did today as well). Usually I get Monday night free as Pinuccia goes to her Bible study group, but tomorrow the group is coming to our house so I will be busy then as well. In the middle of the week there is also Pinuccia’s birthday, although given that I will be always out we celebrated last night instead, going to our favourite restaurant at Trento. Stefania was looking forward to it all day – but then fell asleep in the car on the way there, and stayed asleep in Daniele’s stroller as we walked around town, including going past a very noisy Carnavale parade (like Mardi Gras), and all the time in the restaurant, waking up just as we went out the door. But at least she was able to participate in the cake time at home.

This Thursday there was a meeting to discuss the Rovereto church planting project amongst the people in the church interested in it, a year after we officially got it going. So we talked a bit about what we had done, the current state, and what we would like to do and what we can do with our resources and abilities. It was encouraging for me hear the elder start the meeting with the statement, “Every church should have in its plans the planting of new churches”. Not only has he caught the vision of what we want to do (as a church and in ECM), but he is transmitting the vision to the others. There will another meeting to work out some of the details, and some other changes coming up in the next few months, but as usual I will write more about them later on when they happen.

Next Thursday there is something a bit different that the church will be trying. There will be the first of six fortnightly meetings at a caffè/cultural centre at Trento, in which the other elder will be leading a conversation on the six requests of the Lord’s prayer. It is certainly a different type of evangelism, and a result of our vision to have a voice in the culture of the city.

My regular readers may have noticed that I have been off the air for the last few days. Unfortunately, on short notice my old server could no longer host my site, so I have had to transfer it to a new server and reconstruct the site there. It is mostly up and running now, although in the Italian part of laparola.net (which is the main part of the site) there are still a couple of things I need to fix up. In this blog, I lost my last post (which was written after my last weekly back up) and for some reason all the categories of the messages.

To catch up then… The main point of the lost post was that Daniele’s operation was cancelled again. This time it was because he had a cold and was all blocked up, which is not a good time to have a general anaesthetic. So now we will try again in Spring.

Then last week I was in Madrid for one of the regular six monthly meetings of the leaders of the mission. (I usually have problems with my web sites when I am away, and it is hard for me to do anything about it.) The meeting went well, but it was the worst trip I have ever made. I have to go Verona-Rome-Madrid when I make my trips there, and there was industrial action by the ground staff of the airport at Rome which delayed everything. On my way to Madrid, the plane gave up waiting for the luggage to be loaded and left anyway, so all the passengers arrived with nothing. My bag arrived the following morning. On the way back, the plane was late and I missed my connection to Verona, so the airline put me in a hotel to get some sleep (although I didn’t get there until 1am), and I caught the first flight on the next morning, which was also one hour late. But I did get home by 1pm – which did create some problems for Pinuccia and her work as well.

Anyway, it is all back to normal again now, and this week should have all the usual events and I hope no out of the ordinary problems to look after.