CHURCH PLANTING IN ROME, ITALY

Currently, Hope Rome is made up of Annett and I (Soh Chee Keong) in the team. I am glad to announce that Karolin, a Hungarian sister who has been visiting us, decided to also join our team shortly after the City Monks week. This is the second time that we hosted City Monks in Rome. The City Monks team which consists of Lucas, Dominik, Cornelius and Cathleen, led by Titus, drove down from Germany to Rome. They rented an apartment, which all of us, including Annett, Karolin and myself, stayed together for the week.

One of the objectives of City Monks’ visit was to help the local team make new contacts through a week of evangelism. A few weeks before the visit, Titus discovered Evangelism Explosion (EE) would be conducting training with a church in Rome in the same week. Evangelism Explosion is a ministry that trains people about how to share their faith in Christ and how to bring people from unbelief to belief. It utilizes a variety of components including prayer, actual on-the-job training where the experienced lead the inexperienced, and the principle of spiritual multiplication. After discussions with the leaders and praying, he decided that we will collaborate with them for our City Monks week in Rome. All of us went through the EE course for that week, went out every day to the streets to share the Gospel and we also took a test at the end of the week to be a qualified EE trainer.



We would have our usual morning worship, sharing and self-study before we joined the EE course in the evening. When we finished our sharing after coming back from our street evangelism, it would already be late and by the time we reached our apartment, it would be past midnight. Physically, it was tiring but inwardly we were definitely refreshed by the Holy Spirit.

The EE course was held at a small local Italian church. It was great to meet other fellow believers with the same burden for the city and through hearing their struggles, we realized that we are not alone. I believe this encouraged our fellow brothers and sisters too.



As we learnt how to share the Gospel in a systematic way through illustrations and relevant questions, we realized that EE is indeed an effective evangelism tool. Of the many people whom the different teams have spoken to, there were many wonderful conversations and even some who prayed to receive the gift of eternal life. It was such an encouragement for all of us to see the impact that a small group of people can make when they dedicate just a week of their lives to serve God fully. How much more can we achieve when we dedicate our whole life fully to God!

We have also learnt in the EE course that discipleship is the key after sharing the Gospel. Indeed, the challenge after the City Monks week is to follow up with some of the contacts we have met and continue sharing the Gospel so that we can identify the disciples.

An interesting thing happened recently. I bumped into a guy whom the team met during City Monks last year. Even though we followed up a few times with him, he was pretty firm in his own belief so we slowly lost contact with him. However, when I met him in the metro a year later, his first response to me was that he became a Christian!

I was of course pleasantly surprised and God just reminded me the passage in 1 Corinthians 3:6-8 that whether we sow, water or reap, it is God who made it grow. Our goal and role should be being faithful in the task that God has assigned to each of us and expect Him to move in His timing.

Written by Soh Chee Keong, Hope Rome, Italy Hope Rome website