Church Planter Conversation: Ed O'Mara

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

BENJAMIN KREPS:

Hey everyone and welcome to the Mark Prater Podcast — where our aim is to connect our global family of Sovereign Grace churches with our executive director.

Mark, we have a global friend on the podcast — Pastor Ed O'Mara.

Welcome to the podcast, Ed.

ED O'MARA:

Thank you. Thank you both for having me here. It's a privilege.

BENJAMIN KREPS:

It's a privilege to have you on. It's a real treat for anybody checking out the podcast who doesn't know, Ed has been a pastor in Sovereign Grace for many years. Just a few years ago, he and his family moved to Torino, Italy. A year and a half ago, they officially planted Sovereign Grace Church of Torino, which is an exciting development, especially in a country that desperately needs the gospel.

Now, I call it Sovereign Grace Church of Torino because I am an American who has no idea how to actually pronounce the name of your church. So let's get into our conversation.

Ed, tell us about your family, about your wife and your kids, how long you've been married, and the actual pronunciation of the church that you planted.

ED O'MARA:

Alright, I'll do my best with the pronunciation and my good friend Rocco Dalia can tell me if I did it well or not when he listens to this. But it is Chiesa Grazia Sovrana di Torino.

BENJAMIN KREPS:

I said to Ed before we started recording. I said, I'm not even going to try. It's probably the right thing. I would just embarrass myself, so thanks.

ED O'MARA:

You just do this a lot, then you're probably going to get it.

BENJAMIN KREPS:

Tell us about your family.

ED O'MARA:

I'm married to Robin. We've been married for a little over 27 years now. We actually met over 30 years ago. Now it helps me remember that I am getting old.

We met at university, actually, the first night I was there. She had been there a week earlier to play for the soccer team at our university. So we met there, and we were together throughout our university years, got married right after university, and then about nine years later, we had our first child, Tegan. She's 18 now, and then Leiden, she goes by Leia here in Italy she's 16, and then our son is Killian, he's 12.

MARK PRATER:

That's great. Some good Irish names there.

ED O'MARA:

Yeah, it's very easy for Italians to pronounce.

BENJAMIN KREPS:

And with the flag behind you, the connection with your wife and soccer, it’s all coming together.

ED O'MARA:

Oh, yeah. I use anything I can to keep fooling her into thinking that she should just stay close to my side. By the grace of God, she has done so.

MARK PRATER:

Yeah, and that flag, by the way, for our listeners, if you don't recognize it is the Tottenham Hotspur Club flag. One of the things Ed and I go back and forth on is the Tottenham Club, since we're both fans. So just a shout-out to Tottenham.

BENJAMIN KREPS:

I have no idea what you guys are talking about.

MARK PRATER:

Right. I know you don’t.

ED O'MARA:

It’s the Lord’s Chosen Team.

MARK PRATER:

Yeah, it is. There are some other Sovereign Grace pastors who are Tottenham fans. They'll be cheering this podcast episode on.

So, you've been a pastor in two Sovereign Grace churches here in the States: Grace Community Church in Souderton, Pennsylvania, and CrossPoint Church in Arnold, Maryland. You've got a number of years of pastoral experience behind you before you went to Italy. So tell us about how your desire to plant in Italy first surfaced and how your move to Italy came about.

ED O'MARA:

Yeah, well, it's sort of a long story. I'll try to be brief for those of you who know me know that's not always easy. But I would say I had a long sense of connection to European things, European life, culture.

Before I was a pastor, when I was working as an electrical engineer, my wife Robin had an opportunity, and we were very close to accepting and re-accepting jobs and moving to London. But it was around that same time that the Lord stirred up a call to ministry.

But the thought of Europe always kind of stayed on our hearts, knowing, at least to some degree, that there was a need for church members who could be there and help the work of the ministry go forward. So that was in our mind, in our hearts.

We thought, maybe we'll go to Europe, and when the Lord stirred up the thought of pastoral ministry, we kind of put that to the side and went to Pastors College. Came back and served at the church that sent us to Pastors College, which was Grace Community Church in Souderton, where Jeremy Bell is leading, and we loved it there. We loved being part of the church family there. We were there for a number of years, both as members and then serving as part of the pastoral team.

Then the Lord moved us to Arnold, which is near Annapolis, Maryland, to lead a church that was seeking adoption there. We were just so grateful to be there as well, feeling like it was really home.

We relocated to Maryland in 2013. I thought, this is where we're going to be for life. This is home. We were very happy with that prospect. We love the church, we love what the Lord was doing, and the work that He was doing within the life of the church. We felt just a lot of joy and connection with the broader community, and had opportunities for outreach and evangelism. We couldn't have imagined a better scenario for serving the Lord and His church.

Fast-forward another three years from there to 2016. Robin's parents gave us a gift to celebrate our 40th birthday, and Robin found an amazing deal to go to Italy. So we spent about ten days just exploring. It was really just a vacation time.

At the end of the trip, the day before we were set to fly out, we were in Milan and it was a Sunday morning. We'd been going sort of nonstop at that point, and I said, Robin, hey, I think I want to try to get over and see the Last Supper painting. There were one or two potential spots and they fill up very quickly, and I didn't have a reservation. She wasn't very interested in doing that. She was like, you know what? I think we've been going so much that I'd like to just stick back and rest here this morning before we fly out tomorrow.

So it was a Sunday morning, and I'd been in Europe a number of times on Sunday mornings, and in all of my opportunities, all the times I've been there, I'd seen people on public transit, perhaps taking a Bible with them, or people walking on the streets, you could tell there were people on the way to church.

But what stuck out to me on that particular morning is that, as I made my way across the city from our hotel to where the Last Supper is, I didn't see anybody. There was nobody out on the streets who looked like they were on their way to church. So I never did get access to see the Last Supper painting - still to this day, haven't seen it. But that stuck out to me.

A few weeks later, after we got back from Italy, I started a class I had already chosen and signed up for called Intercultural Church Planting. The class's capstone assignment was to design a plan for a church-planting network in a foreign country.

So that required some research into the current state of affairs, building relationships to a certain degree with people who were there to understand what was going on and how you could pray for them, and then presenting that as your final project.

I asked the professor if it would be all right if I focused on Italy. I was like, I know a lot of people are doing Malaysia, places in Africa, places that are in other parts of the world, would Italy be okay? He said, absolutely, I've actually never had anybody do something in Southern Europe. I would love to see what you come up with and to better understand the state of the gospel and what gospel-centered churches are, particularly in Southern Europe.

I started reaching out, doing research, and the Lord used that to help me build relationships and get more information and better understand the situation there. And actually, I learned it was worse than I thought. Statistically, less than one percent of Italians are regenerated. So Italy is actually ranked by the Joshua Project as an unreached country, which I learned during that research. So, believe it or not, with the Vatican right there in the center of Italy, people calling it a Christian country, it is not. It is nothing further from the truth.

In the midst of all that, one particular relationship that I continued to develop, I began to discuss their local church with our elder team because they were a small church plant in Italy, and we were a small church in Maryland. I said to our elders, "What do you think about if we did some short-term missions to just try and help them out and reach out with the gospel?” It might be helpful for our church after having gone through the season that we went through to just kind of get our eyes open on not just doing evangelism here in our own city, but, you know, across the globe.

They liked the idea, we put a team together from a couple of different Sovereign Grace churches, actually, and we did that short-term mission trip for a couple of years. And it was through that, the Lord continued to press more so on my heart at the time, the thought of maybe one day doing missions in Italy. And it was kind of that reawakening of some of the European connection at the time.

In 2019, three years after that, two years after the first trip, three years after the trip that Robin and I did for vacation, the Lord started to speak more pronounced and more clearly to the point where, in the span of a week on two different Sundays, He spoke to Robin very clearly and spoke to me very clearly, independently. And we basically said, this is not the discussion just between us anymore. We need to bring this to the elders and get their help with it, get their input, and just say, hey, listen, if you guys say no, we stay. We love it here. We're not looking to go anywhere. We're under the authority of the eldership team here. We're part of this team. We love this church. We don't want to do anything that hurts this church.

But they all listened, and they heard, and they agreed to go away and pray, and came back, and to a person, and this was so humbling, they said, " We don't like this because we don't want you to leave, which is nice to hear. You don't want to be like, yeah, this is a great idea, I'm not going to be right there, because they don't want you there. But what's even more humbling is they said, we don't think you're just meant to go, we think we're meant to send you.

This is a church plant from CrossPoint Church in Arnold. Now, keep in view, this church had gone through the wringer before I came there. There was just a lot of difficulty, Mark, you'd be familiar with it, and the Lord just was restoring and bringing health to the church through the elder team that was there before I got there, and He continued that when we were able to be there and serve.

And here we are now, they're saying, yeah, let's sow out. So that was very encouraging. And that's really where things kind of crystallized for us, and then COVID hit and slowed everything down. But the Lord was actually at work, even during COVID. That's when I met Rocco Dalia, and we had the ability to have longer Zoom calls and just to get to know him and get to understand what he was thinking about church planting. He was in the UK at the time, doing seminary. The Lord was bringing him back to Italy to plant the church, and he wanted to do it with a family of churches and felt like Sovereign Grace was the place where he wanted to be.

I was excited because, from the beginning, I felt like the Lord was positioning me to go and maybe be more on the pioneering side, but really to work with somebody that I could invest in and position that person to be the long-term lead pastor, so that the church is authentically Italian and is being built into a network of other Italian churches in the Sovereign Grace network, Sovereign Grace churches in Italy, so to say which is what we're doing. We're extremely grateful. I couldn't be doing a tenth of what I am doing if it weren't for Rocco. So we decided to send Rocco to the Pastor’s College. He went to the Pastors College for a year between the UK and then came back to Italy. And that's the year that we moved to Italy and were working on language training and just getting our feet under us.

We were in Sicily with the church that's now a candidate church in Sovereign Grace, led by Giuseppe Fortuna in Catania. And in the midst of all that, the Lord led Scott Crook from Minnesota, from Chaska, Minnesota, to take my role in Arnold. And he is just doing an outstanding job there. I was there right after the conference and he is just doing such an outstanding job. It's bringing such delight to my heart to see how healthy the church is and how he's leading. I think probably the best move I ever made at CrossPoint Church was leaving so that Scott could lead. He's the real deal, and I'm very, very encouraged by what God's doing there. So, okay, that wasn't as brief as I maybe promised, but that's the answer.

BENJAMIN KREPS:

It's a great answer.

We're so grateful for your faith to do an extraordinary thing, to relocate to Italy. And clearly, coming through all of this is your heart of compassion for a country that desperately needs Jesus, and I love how your story really illustrates how God's kind providence works so often. You're just taking steps of faith, and there's more light and clarity as you seek to be faithful to what God puts in front of you. Next thing you know, you're in Italy planting a church.

But before you went to Italy, you served in rural Pennsylvania and the hinterlands of Maryland. So that's a very different world, of course, the East Coast of the United States to Italy, I would suspect. Yet God uses all of these things together to prepare a man like you for this kind of work. So, how did your experience in pastoral ministry in the States prepare you for this church plant?

ED O'MARA:

Yeah, that's a great question.

Again, much to be said here. First, I would have to say nothing can really truly prepare you or totally prepare you, I guess is maybe a better way to say it for church planting or for moving to a new culture. You're going to be brought low, you're going to be brought to see your weakness. It's going to be revealed, especially when you're entering a new culture. You have to go through it to be prepared for it, in one sense.

But I do think that there are some really key elements that must be in place, and I think the Lord did a few things in me, beyond just having an interest or a burden. There are a lot of people who have an interest or a burden, but there's a difference between just having an interest or a burden and actually being prepared.

I would say that for pastoral ministry in its most proper sense, it owes its allegiance to a gospel culture and not to a national culture, right? So, we don't contextualize for the sake of, well, we need to make the gospel fit here. No, the gospel fits wherever we're called to go.

So, being prepared and theologically trained at the PC in particular, and then putting that into practice in the life of a local church, for me, it was Souderton and Arnold, and that's what pastoral ministry is. It doesn't look a lot different. It wasn't a different task than what Rocco and I are doing here in Torino, than what I was doing in those two locations.

Now of course there are cultural considerations to consider within life here in Italy, but the Word of God and the gospel of Jesus they transcend. They subsume and transcend and supersede all of these other considerations. The Word of God and the gospel are timeless, transcendent truths that we must not seek to alter or adjust or accommodate the culture in any way.

So there are a lot of things that we can grow in as a family of churches. But one thing I think we have that is a key and correct foundation stone is that everything must be tested by and built on the gospel.

I just never want to lose that. I know that sounds so foundational, and people out there who are Sovereign Grace pastors are saying, " Duh, that's who we are. And I thank God that's the response, right? That our pastoral experience, our pastoral call and work is built on the gospel.

So I think that those experiences in Souderton and Arnold and just watching people patiently bear with me as I was making pastoral mistakes all of that's relevant to the planting of a church in no matter what culture you're in, what country you're in, but it is the gospel.

I think the other thing that came to mind as I was speaking there is the importance of ecclesiology. It's a key factor, which is obviously not just a stack of pages in something called the BCO, right? Our ecclesiology functions; it works, and being a pastor means we function within it.

So what we're doing in Italy is not building the plane in the air. We're building on what we've been given, and we're seeking to do it in a way that integrates the church God's called us to plant and integrates the people that we're shepherding and caring for into our family of churches really right from the get-go.

I think that's huge. I think that's a very important thing. I have friends who are planting churches and doing pastoral ministry in various parts of the world. Some of these guys don't have ecclesiologically defined or bounded families of churches that they belong to. And I can see them being even sometimes when guys do have that, but I particularly see it with guys that are sort of untethered. The sense of intense pragmatism is what's driving, particularly in church planting.

I see these godly, gifted guys, I mean, good guys, way better than me by 10,000 miles, but in fact, I can see that there's a weakness that's getting repeated over and over again. There’s a tendency to try to innovate and make the church project, the project of the church, run efficiently, be impressive to those around them. That temptation exists here in Italy as well as it does in the States. Now, of course, we consider those things, but our ecclesiology is a gift to us. It's also a guide for us that keeps us confessionally bound, keeps us building on shared values. And it must not be compromised in the name of pragmatism.

I learned that in the States. I learned it on the ground in Pastors College, but I saw it fleshed out on the ground in Souderton and Arnold. And it applies everywhere we build churches because it gives us the grid that can be compromised. It also helps us not be super rigid, so we can prioritize the local church and local context in a way that both honors our confession and uses an appropriate amount. It helps us to learn how to be flexible and how to appropriately contextualize. Without that grid, you contextualize based on a set of rules that you just make up for yourself.

So again, I'd have to say that I think Rocco being alongside me, which is of course part of our ecclesiological value team, elder plurality, and to do ministry having him alongside, after having had a year at Pastors College, in which he absorbed the same values and convictions and the DNA of Sovereign Grace, and then being an Italian man, it just makes this church plant work a joy. It could be slow at times, but it's slow and it's steady and it's solid right from the start because we're doing it on those ecclesiological values that we've been given here in Sovereign Grace.

MARK PRATER:

Well said, that's a great answer, and I really appreciate you pointing out the importance of gospel centrality, which is not just a Sovereign Grace thing, as you know. But man, it’s something we never want to lose and always want to keep at the center of what we do in terms of how we plant and build churches.

Speaking of planting, tell us about your hope and vision for planting your church in Torino.

ED O'MARA:

Yeah, well, first and I guess primarily, we are happily under the mandate to establish a strong, gospel-centered local church in Torino. I can't say that after everything I just said, right? I think it's sort of mandated to make that response, too.

But I would say that we're seeking to do that in a way that's visible and accessible to those that the Lord is calling us to reach here in our city. That could be quite general, I guess, in one way but secondly, to refine a little bit, we're committed to reaching out to our community with the gospel and being an evangelistic church that is meaningfully connected to our community around us, which means that we're pursuing youth and families and university students and working professionals.

Relationship in Europe, the programmatic approaches, it's very quickly looked at with suspicion. So you have to build a relationship before you can even start inviting and getting people into a context where you can share the gospel in a more systematized way, in a group setting, or for them to come to church. You have to have a relationship, there has to be a sense of connection with the people.

The other thing that I would say vision-wise for our church is we specifically want to pursue and train future leaders such that Torino, along with the church in Catania as well as other churches that are yet to be planted here in Italy, will function within a broader, interdependent European network a Sovereign Grace Italian network, but also our broader European family of churches here. Those are things that, if you don't, I'd say it this way, if you don't in Italy pursue future leaders, you've got one generation, and you're done. That's true everywhere, but it's truer here in Italy, because there's no future generation yet to be pursued.

So from the get-go, that's what we felt like the Lord was calling us to do: pursue, pursue, pursue young men that can be pastors, pursue young people that will build the church, be pillars in the church, and even those that are university students that may leave here after a few years and go elsewhere pursue them and invest in them. There may never be a Sovereign Grace church in their city, but what you sowed into them will bear lasting fruit.

BENJAMIN KREPS:

Excellent. You know, people think about Italy, and some of us have seen the pictures here, and there come back from you living there, it's beautiful, people think about food and the beauty of Italy, and so forth, a vacation destination. But in reality, you are working hard in Torino. There are certainly blessings in Italy, your new home, but many challenges as well. So, share with us what is most challenging about planting a church in Italy?

ED O'MARA:

Yeah, I think, and you hit it on the head. Rocco and I laugh about this all the time, about how Italy is probably the best place in the world to visit. But it's not the worst place in the world to live at all. I don't mean it that way, but it is definitely harder to live than in many other places throughout Europe or in the States.

I think one of the challenges for me, you could even just hear it in the pace with which I speak, I'm not a patient person, the Lord has been working on my heart for coming up on eight years now, and I've got a long way to go. The pace is really difficult in Italy at times - it is slow.

There can be expectations that you move fast when somebody wants something from you, but the pace of getting things done can be very, very slow at times. Sometimes it feels like you take two steps forward and then sometimes one, two, maybe even three steps back.

Bureaucracy, for instance, is challenging to navigate. That's been both personal and church-wide impact. Getting our church registered as a legal entity in the States is pretty straightforward. You still have to write bylaws and submit those sorts of things, and it might take you a month or two, maybe a little longer, to get them done. But here, it was the better part of a year, maybe even a little longer than that, closer to a year and a half. Going through all of our internal documentation, registering all of that, waiting on approval... So that's just a small example. The bureaucracy can be challenging at times.

I think one of the other challenges a lot of pastors face, particularly if they don't read English, is that there are lack of resources and lack of church culture as well. So it's not just written resources or audio resources. There can be a sense in which you feel like you're constantly clearing the ground and pulling up rocks, because even the people around you don't really have a biblical vocabulary. You almost feel like you're constantly passing over the same ground not building and that can be challenging at times.

Economically, it's very challenging for people who live in Italy. Taxes are very, very high, salaries are low, and the tendency to not buy into giving to a church, people haven't been taught about tithing and giving, and even if people are seeking to be generous and give, there's just not as much to go around as you would have in a wealthier culture. So that has an effect, and I'm sure you can feel that at times.

Personally, the biggest challenge is the language. I make so many mistakes. I say things wouldn't repeat it on a podcast but I said something in my preaching this last Sunday. It wasn't vulgar necessarily, but it was embarrassing that I said it, and it was humiliating. It's just a mispronunciation of two words that are similar, and I meant to say one word, and I said the other word, and people were snickering, oh boy.

So, you know, that's humbling. Humiliating and humbling, both. But one really wonderful thing about Italians is that they are incredibly forgiving and patient with language. I mean, you just come over and, you know, on vacation, you're like, "pizza pasta!" People are like, oh, you speak Italian! *(laughs)*

So, Italians are wonderful in that regard. But in reality, I think if there’s any work you want, that would probably be the biggest counsel I would give to somebody that was thinking of doing any foreign missions in a place where they have to use a language that's not their mother tongue and they have to acquire the language, particularly if you're older like I was when we moved: focus on the language, work hard, and don't quit focusing on the language.

Our call as pastors is word-based, so you can't minimize the importance of communicating clearly. I think my foibles and weaknesses in the language create difficulties for me, even though people are very gracious. Those are just some of the challenges I would list.

MARK PRATER:

Yeah, it's good to hear those, just because I think everywhere we live, whether it's the state or people thinking from outside the States, it's one thing to plant in a culture that you know and the language you know. It's a different thing to do it in a different culture, a different language. So we really, as Ben said earlier, appreciate your faith to go, as well as that of Robin and your children.

And also, just listening to you, Italy, as other parts of Europe, are just spiritually dark places. You are a light in the darkness, and so grateful for what you're doing.

In light of that, tell us how long the church has been gathering on a Sunday, and what those services are like.

ED O'MARA:

So, technically, we've been a church plant for about a year and years now. I guess it's been a year and a half. We've been meeting at our house, and when we started, for the first four months or so, it was just about seven of us: my family, Rocco, and his family. And by the grace of God, we just started to grow. The Lord just started adding people through various outreaches and connections and ways that we were meeting with people. So we meet in our living room and we're at about 20 people now.

MARK PRATER:

Oh, wow.

ED O'MARA:

It's still small, yeah, but in reality, we're almost to the size of an average gospel-preaching church in Italy. If you this is anecdotal, I don't know if this is 100 percent accurate, but I was talking to a friend who's also a foreign pastor, he's a part of another group of churches, and we were kind of thinking that somewhere in the 40 to 60 range would be on the large, to maybe even the largest, of the reformed churches in all of Italy. So that just kind of puts it in perspective.

We're halfway there. And we're still meeting in our house. We can't even advertise that we're here. The services have been great. We gather, we worship, we celebrate the sacraments together, and we share fellowship. I think it's outstanding. It's small, but it's special. We just completed our first members course and the process of formalizing the recognition of the first members of the church, and we'll be doing that here in the next few weeks.

I would also have to say, maybe two other things that are connected that have been a highlight for me: just seeing Rocco leading and taking more of the pastoral place in the life of the church. The Lord has also given us two other young men that we are investing in. I mentioned the importance of that earlier - the Lord answered that prayer very early on in the life of our church, and these men are reading, they're studying, and they're evaluating what pastoral ministry would look like in the future.

I actually had a Sunday off. It was probably about five or six weeks ago. I came back from visiting some sister Sovereign Grace churches in the UK. I got back on a Saturday, and I think Rocco was preaching that Sunday, and then the other two guys were doing different things and leading, and I just sat there and watched these three Italian men leading our church. Lord, you are doing this. It's incredible to see, but also very encouraging to my heart.

So yeah, that's how things have been going. I'm constantly looking to get out of the way because those guys are just growing and they're just doing some great work.

BENJAMIN KREPS:

Well, if someone lives in or near Torino, or anyone checking out the podcast who has friends or family who might be interested in visiting the church, how does one find out where you meet?

ED O'MARA:

Right now, we're still meeting in our home. Probably the easiest thing to do would just be to go to our church website. That's https://www.cgstorino.it/ for Italy. There's both an English and Italian platform there. It's a very simple website, but there's contact information right on there, and you can see how to get in contact with us and we can connect you with where we're going to be. We make sure people, if they were in the area, make sure they knew how to get to where we are, public transit, or if they're driving, or whatever it would be.

So yeah, if somebody were visiting or planning a trip to the area, that's what I would say: check those means out, get in contact with us.

If somebody were thinking of it, I'm not 100% sure you asked this question, but I'm going to say it anyway and be a little bit of a salesman here. If someone wanted to consider relocating to be part of the church, we would welcome that discussion and would love to see it happen. Again, there would be language learning and all that if they're coming from outside Italy or don't speak the language. They can use the same website to contact us via email, WhatsApp, or whatever method they prefer.

But we really want to interact with them and help them think through and guide them in the evaluation process, so they don't see it as just coming for pizza and beautiful scenery. I'd like them to understand the realities of what it would look like and be sure they're positioned to serve for a long time.

MARK PRATER:

That's wonderful. And we may have folks listening to this podcast who hear that and are stirred in some way; the Spirit may work in unexpected ways. So may that happen.

Ed, as you know, you've been a part of Sovereign Grace for a long time. We're a family of churches, a denomination, but a family of churches, and a couple of things I want to say related to that. You're the only Sovereign Grace church in Italy at this point, and I'm sure there are moments when you feel a bit isolated or alone. And just know, we are a family of churches carrying you and Rocco, your families, and your church in our hearts.

We would be remiss if we didn't ask you in this podcast how we can pray for you, because members and pastors in our churches will do just that. So, how can we pray for you and your church plant in Torino?

ED O'MARA:

Well, thank you, Mark. I do have to say, by the grace of God, we have not felt alone at all. I think it's fair to say that Rocco would say the same thing. We feel very well cared for, supported, and connected. Rocco doesn't have the same amount of time and history in Sovereign Grace, and I think he would say that. That's a testimony to the people who are not just the pastors but the people in Sovereign Grace: praying people, caring people, committed people. We're so thankful for that.

So, the starting point would be Thanksgiving. I think, going along with that, one of the things people can pray for us to start with is thanksgiving, because God has been doing some wonderful things. He's been providing for us. We've been growing. As I mentioned, we have future Italian leaders that we're investing in. We've seen at least one conversion; there may be another one. The Lord has been at work in another individual's heart. God has protected and provided for everything that we've needed.

He's protected and provided for Rocco and Maudi with the gift of their little daughter, Claudette, who was born and wasn't breathing for four minutes; the Lord spared her life. She has had no lasting impact; she is one of the most joyful little girls I've ever seen. She lights up when she sees people; she's such a gift to the church. So our family is thriving here, our kids have done wonderfully in the Italian school system, and that was probably the biggest request we had: that they would adjust well. So all of this is to the praise and glory of God, and I want to start there with thanksgiving.

But I am also thankful that people do want to pray for things that are still before us and for ways we need to continue to grow. Pray that the Lord would continue to grow us both spiritually and relationally, and numerically, and that our outreach efforts would be effective. We came here to see the dark pushed out and the light shining brightly, so we want to see people saved, and we pray for that. We want to be effective in His hands in our outreach.

Another thing to pray for is pray for Rocco and Maudi. I don't think he would mind me saying this, but he wouldn't say it himself. They need to find a house that's big enough for their family. They both work from home; they have a four-month-old daughter who is right there with them in a small one-bedroom flat. Getting the provision they need to get into a house is a real need, so we're praying that the Lord would meet that need, either financially or by leading them to a place that's affordable and fits their family, where they'd be very content.

Similarly, pray for our church to find a meeting place outside of our home. We’re actually looking at a two-pronged approach right now. We have a building that is potentially affordable for purchase. We would still need to raise significant funding for that to happen, but it would be ideal and really set the church up for the long term, so we wouldn't need to take on a mortgage or anything like that. You would be in a place that you could grow and have connection to the community, and it's in an ideal location. But until we have those funds, we're looking at a community center in the area where we would just rent space once a week, or maybe twice a week if we had some outreaches or ministry in the midweek. So we'd really like to be into something by springtime. It'd be wonderful to have some clarity, open doors, and direction on that.

As I said, things move slowly in Italy. So we've been trying to keep the gas down but also recognizing that the Lord has to open the doors. I'm preaching in Mark this Sunday, the passage where, at the end of the book, the three women come to the grave and the stone is rolled away. In one of my readings, the commentator just made the point that the stone was rolled away because God rolled it away. He's the only one who has the power to do these things.

It just gave me encouragement in my heart. Whatever needs to be done here, we may have a whole punch list of things that we want, but the things that we need to have done, God will do, and He'll do it. So we can have faith for it, and we are so thankful for the prayers of the people of Sovereign Grace churches and whoever else might be listening.

BENJAMIN KREPS:

Great. Well, thank you for taking the time with us and for giving us an update on how things are going there. It's so encouraging, your example of faith, your willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the gospel, is compelling. We thank God for you and Rocco and your families and we'll be praying for you and looking forward to hearing more stories of God at work in Torino as you seek to be faithful there.

Thank you, Ed. Thank you everyone for checking out the podcast, and we'll see you here next week, Lord willing. Bye for now.