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Ciao! Wow, I can’t believe we’re already this far into September!

I’ve been here in Milan for a month and a half now, and things are going well. I’ve settled into my apartment and learned my way around a bit. I live on the west side of the city, in the San Siro zone. My apartment is an attic apartment on the fifth floor, in the middle of three buildings that share a gated area between Via Tesio and Via Pinerolo, if you’re the sort of person who likes to see things on a map, as I am. Just across a parking lot from the front gate is the massive Stadio Meazza, a 83,000 seat (almost everyone from Maury County could fit in) stadium that is home to both the Milan and the Inter (international) soccer teams. I really ought to get a game schedule; I’m often surprised when I walk out into our normally quiet neighborhood and instead find myself in the middle of hot dog vendors and a crowd dressed head-to-toe in the red and black of the Milan team.
Most days I go into town to the church building to work. The church building, in Via del Bollo, is right downtown, only a few blocks from the duomo and the castle; the tiny little street is tucked into the financial district. Milan is the finance center of Italy, and the headquarters of most of the major banks of Italy are concentrated on Via Cordusio. To get downtown, I walk about ten minutes around to the other side of the stadium, where I catch a tram. The trams are sort of a cross between a bus and a trolley. It takes 30-40 minutes to reach Piazza Cordusio, which is about three blocks from the church building. I get a lot of reading done in the hour or so I’m on the tram most days.
I was back in Florence from August 22-26 for the annual Florence convegno, held at Harding’s villa in Scandicci. There were about 150 in attendance, from as far north as Padua and as far south as Catania, and everywhere in between. The theme this year was on the Biblical canon, and how we came to have the Bible we have today. We had two speakers each day, and plenty of time around them for food and fellowship.
Once we got back to Milan, Tammy Short and I began reorganizing the children’s Bible class material. We had quite a pile in the cabinet, and so we sorted it by story and filed it all in binders. There are quite a few young women at the church who are interested in teaching, but have never taught before; in fact, most of them have never been in a children’s Bible class before. So, with the lessons and material better organized, we hope it will be less daunting. The reorganization turned out to be quite a project. We started this week splitting the children’s class into a pre-school age class and an elementary/middle school class; the younger class will be studying major Bible stories, and the older class is studying the life of Christ this year.
I taught the first lesson yesterday in the older class, starting with the Bible in general—how we came to have the Bible, inspiration, and starting to learn the books of the New Testament. The song we sing in the States about the books of the New Testament actually adapts quite well to Italian. The only thing to stumble over is the Italian version of ‘Thessalonians’: Tessalonecesi. Six-syllable words are hard to sing, but it works alright if you sing fast enough! We normally have five students in that class—Manuela, 13, the youngest of a Ghanaian family; Matteo, 8, a Peruvian-Polish boy who usually talks faster than I can listen; Rovelyn, 10, a sweet Filipino girl; and brothers Nico and Janfor, 12 and 11, also from the Philippines, who have only recently began coming and are still quite shy. Soon, we hope to also start a class for the teenage girls (we don’t have any teenage boys), which I will be teaching.
We had nice weather in August; not too hot but sunny. So, after church on the 19th, the Milan church went to the park. We had a potluck picnic, a paper airplane contest, a scavenger hunt, and enjoyed spending some time together.
All that to say, I’m settling in here in Milan, and I’m excited about the work we’re doing. I hope you are all doing well, and enjoying the fall! Thank you again for your continued prayers for our work. Dio vi benedica! (God bless you all!)

The Brothers and Sisters in Italy

One of the long-time members of the Milan church is Enrica Salvone. The widow of a theology scholar, she has a son and a daughter, and one grandson, of whom she is quite proud. She is active in the church, setting a good example by never missing a service, even when her knees hurt (people tend to miss church for all sorts of reasons around here), handling the financial records, and being an honorary grandmother to everyone.