News and prayer information from Richard and Pinuccia Wilson

During the week, there was a training and coordination meeting for all the group leaders – the five Bible study groups, the four “specialized” groups (Youth, Young Adults, university students, English language) and the three Sunday School classes. I was a bit surprised when I counted them all, and arrived at 23 people. And then there is the same number again serving in other ministries in the church: welcoming, preaching, Sunday School assistants, prayer, music, our social-cultural association, and son on. Half the church mobilised for ministry in some way. When I started coming to the church, there were not even 23 people attending. So I am grateful to God firstly for the vision of the church to create an organic and flexible structure rather than institutional and hierarchical (which is what the church elder spoke about in the training part of the meeting, to remind us all of this and especially the many new leaders there are now) and to equip people to take on new responsibilities, and secondly that he has been sending people to the church who have been able to serve the church in many ways. I believe, and have seen it many times, that if God wants a church to undertake a ministry, he will provide all the resources necessary, including the people.

Today there was the annual general meeting of Altrimenti, the social-cultural association run by people of the church. There was nothing new in the meeting, but it was good to be able to take a step back and see all that has been done in the past three years. It has worked in overseas aid (Romania and Cameroon), helped refugees and other foreigners in the province, and organised cultural events (conferences and theatre on freedom and human rights, games for people at the street markets), which meant a turnover of more than €10,000 last year. But more than that, it has been a time of making contacts and getting known as a valid association in the local society, not just as a group of evangelicals who want to push their minority view point on other people. So the association is a member of provincial forum for peace and human rights, has been approached by the local department for immigration to help it, and is able to request funds from the local government and banks for some of its projects. The president today said how he gets excited by these possibilities that were out of the question three years ago, and so do I.

This coming week there are a few special meetings to pray for. Tomorrow night Pinuccia leads a meeting to plan for the children’s camp in June. I should be at the meeting as well, as I will be one of the leaders of the camp, but I will be staying at home with the children. I have already written up my contributions, which Pinuccia will take to the meeting, and I hope that the others will not decide in my absence that I will have to do most of the work to prepare for the camp. On Tuesday there will be a meeting of most of the ECM missionaries in Italy at our house, until I have to leave to pick up the children from school. Then on Thursday evening a church committee meeting, which always has interesting and important issues to think about. I am also looking forward to making one of my bimonthly visits to the Valsugana group this Friday: it is a group that is still special for me after having led it for many years, and is always an encouragement for me. Together with those there are the regular Bible study group and band practice for me, and two extra meetings at school for Pinuccia, so we will have a lot to do.

We arrived back home from Sicily on Friday afternoon. Just enough time to get unpacked, sort the house out, and have a bit of a rest, before the other three go back to school tomorrow. And I get back to preparing Bible studies, other meetings, and programming. As usual, a lot of our time in Sicily was spent with friends and relatives, eating a lot and having late nights. The nights certainly disrupted the children’s usual life style, although in some ways it did make life it a bit easier for me. I tended to go to bed at my normal time, but with the children exhausted and waking up a lot later than usual I could catch up on some rest and sleep in a bit, and still have time to get some work done before the rest of the family woke up.

This morning in church we heard a report from a group of young people that went to a large (3000 people) youth missionary congress in Germany over the New Year. There were eight from the church who went, together with two others from other churches at Trento and who attend the GBU group at the university. Since most of the participants read this on Facebook, I won’t go into the personal details. But it was great to hear each one of them say what they had learnt and experienced at the congress, and what helped them at this particular moment of their walk with God.

Finally, a message that I received late yesterday:

I read the Bible every night thanks to your mailing list and I am grateful! I had never read it before, except small pieces when I was a child, without understanding anything. How many questions that arise, and how many answers I find! Now I understand. Thank you, I would like to shake your hand and hug you with this e-mail.

During the week I paid my first visit to the international students’ group of the church, which is run in English. In the past it has usually been around half a dozen people, although it has been growing in the last couple of months, and there were 14 there when I went, which was a pleasant surprise. It was good to see, once again, that when there is the need and opportunity to reach out in a new way, that God provides the human resources necessary to develop this witness – an American couple recently moved to Trento. Pray that this group will continue to grow, and will be an effective ministry in all the world as the students return to their home country.

This group was the last one that I visit. So now I will start over again going to most of the groups to see how they are going, and encouraging and challenging them.

For the Sunday School, today there was the annual Christmas market to raise funds for a school in India. Pinuccia and the other teachers worked a lot to prepare for that, so are happy to have a rest from that now. Although now we will have to start working seriously on the preparation of the Sunday School camp in June/July.

There has been a lot of Sunday School activity lately, which means mostly more work (and pressure) for Pinuccia, although I have been involved as well. Last Sunday afternoon there was a reunion meeting from last summer’s Sunday School camp. Although Pinuccia was not at the camp this year (as we were in Australia) she went to the reunion whilst I stayed home with the children. The reports are that it went very well, with something both for the church children (who learnt something new about prayer) and for those not from the church (who learnt about the Gospel).

Next Sunday there will be the annual Sunday School market, selling biscuits and bread sticks to raise funds for a school in India. So yesterday the production lines were at work, with some children making biscuits at one house in one of the valleys, whilst others came to our house to make the bread sticks. I travelled up and down between the two places, ferrying children and supplies, and filming for a video.

At the same time, Pinuccia has been trying to start to get next summer’s camp organised, at least to decide when and where it will be, and who will be helping out. It has been difficult to get this done, and in fact still has not been decided, which together with the other Sunday School activities has left Pinuccia a bit frustrated. I doubt it will be much better this week, with the market to organise, but hopefully it will be done before the Christmas break.

The highlight for me this week was meeting with the youth group leaders – one who helped me last year and took over in September, and the other who has just started to help. Even though it was their first meeting together, it was great to see the desire, and the God given gifts, to serve the teenagers. It made me happy that I was able to leave the leadership of that group, with people more capable of relating to that age group able to take over. It is a privilege for me to be able to help and encourage them – and the leaders of the other seven groups in the church that I am following. In fact, pretty much every week lately the highlight for me has been helping the other leaders. This week, it is the turn of the Val di Non group, the most distant group from Trento and another future church plant. I’m looking forward to getting encouraged by them as well!

During the week, there are some other meetings to pray for as well. There will be the first Bible study for the refounded group at the university. As I have said in the last couple of messages it has been a joy for me not only to be able to help the students start the group, but also because the university ministry is still on my heart. I also have the second meeting with someone I have started discipling and training. Pinuccia on the other hand has a planning meeting on Thursday night for the church children’s camp next summer, and on Sunday afternoon a camp reunion from last summer, of which the main aim is to continue the relationships with the many children who came and who are not from the church.

This weekend was another busy time in the family, with a guest staying. She came to do some training for the Sunday School teachers, which lasted all day Saturday. However we did not want to leave our children with another family for the whole day, so I missed the afternoon session to retrieve them. But it was a helpful time for us all, both in what we learnt and the issues that the teachers were able to discuss together. Then on Sunday both Pinuccia and I taught a class of the Sunday School, and in the afternoon we kept the discussion going with the trainer and the family of one of the other teachers that we had invited for lunch.

Next weekend we will get to rest a bit more, being hosts instead of guests for a meal, and then going to one of the rare services in which neither of us have a commitment, and so can listen to what is said. During the week there are instead the usual regular meetings for me, plus visits to some of the other small groups and other group leaders, to help them in their ministry.

Today there was the meeting that I had been looking forward to for a couple of weeks. And rightly so as it turned out, because it went so well. We had invited the five university students in the church, and the GBU (the national university movement) staff member for north-east Italy who came from Bologna, to lunch, to talk about the forthcoming rebirth of the group at the university. So I could sit back and – well, I won’t say relax, as we did all the organising and hospitality. But it was a privilege to be able to facilitate this meeting together. It brought back happy memories of when I used to go visiting students to help them with their groups at the universities. As I come to grips that I am not as young as I used to be, and I can’t do (well) everything I used to do, I thank God for the possibility to help others and so still be involved in what I still believe is important. And I thank God also for Pinuccia, who shares the vision, and spent a lot of time in the kitchen to help this meeting to be a success. Anyway, tomorrow there will be a introductory meeting of the group at the university, with the first Bible study in a couple of weeks. It has been great as well to hear the stories of how the students have been finding others – Christians and not – who want to come also.

Next weekend Pinuccia and I will be swapping roles. Someone will be coming from Turin to do some training on Saturday for the Sunday School teachers, and staying for church on Sunday when we have also invited another family for lunch, so that they can speak together about the Sunday School. So I hope to be able to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, so that Pinuccia is free to help the training event and also learn herself about leading this ministry better.

I’m continuing to work with the new and future leaders in the church, and I’m looking forward to meeting three people in the congregation in the next couple of weeks to help them to prepare Bible studies or to start a series of meetings to prepare them to serve. Three might not seem a lot, but it is a good proportion of the membership of the church, and a high proportion of the leaders who will be ministering in the church in the future. We (as a family) also have the privilege of hosting next Sunday a launch lunch for the university group, which will start meeting the following week. There will be five or six students, plus someone from the national student movement (GBU) to help and encourage them, and of course I’ll be there to help as well.

It was interesting to see the church hall full once again for the service this morning. There were a lot of visitors, but even without them there were not many less than there were before we sent a lot of people to plant the church at Rovereto. With the church numbers getting close to what they were, and this new generation of leaders quickly coming up, we should be in a position to plant another church soon. I’m looking forward to that too!