Reaching Milan

The area of Milan that our teammates from World Team have targeted is Zone 9.  Sadly, in this zone of 300,000 people, there is only one small evangelical church with no other witness.  

The team has developed a strategy for planting reproducing churches. It unfolds in four phases:

The first phase is evangelism. This takes many forms: one-to-one, interest groups, topical studies, English classes, etc. One thing the team did several years ago was offer a special study on managing stress. This simple study has led to an ongoing weekly Bible study.

The second phase is called the “Proto Community.” The purpose of this phase is to meet with new believers for Bible study, training and discipleship.  "Not-yet Christian" Italians may also participate in this fertile ground of the Proto Community of interacting over the truth and application of the Scriptures.  Leadership will be sought out and trained within this small group and then the group launched on its own to be the seeds of a church plant. Currently, the missionaries have one Proto Community group going.

The third phase is the planting of an Italian Church by the Italians. In the first two phases the missionaries take an extremely active role. In this phase they are mentors. There will be some missionary influence, but the goal is to have the Italians start the church believing that the best people to reach Italy are the Italians themselves.

The fourth phase is for these churches to reproduce new churches. While the process will start slow, the results could produce exponential growth.

Milan is a strategic field in bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ to the northern part of Italy. This church planting effort is in its infancy stage.