There comes a point in every long obedience when it is right to stop, look back over the road, and ask the question honestly: has this been the way, or have we been walking the wrong road with great sincerity?
This is that post. It is not a triumphant one, and it is not a bitter one either. It is an attempt to take stock—of a calling, of two painful church experiences, of the encouragement that has reached us from unexpected directions, and of what we believe God is asking of us next.
Where we came from
We are Italians who found Christ in England. That sentence carries more weight than it seems. We did not grow up in the faith we now hold; we received it as adults, in a country not our own, in churches that—for all their imperfections—taught us to open the Scriptures and take them seriously. England gave us our conversion, our marriage, our first children, and our first taste of what a local church can be. To this day, it feels like home. Not just to us, but to our children too, despite how little they were when we left. They truly miss it and love it.
Yet it was there, in the early years of our Christian life, that a conviction formed which we could neither manufacture nor shake: God wanted us back in Italy. Not for a career, not for the weather, not for family convenience—for the Gospel. We would come to Italy on holiday, visit churches wherever we happened to be, and see the same things again and again: a piety heavy with rules and light on assurance; congregations organised around a single strong man; grace preached for salvation and quietly withdrawn for everything afterwards. We wrote about the cultural roots of this pattern at length in Loving One Another Across a Cultural Fault Line. The point that matters here is this: we saw the pattern before we moved, in churches that did not know us, where we had no history and no conflict. Hold on to that. It becomes important later.
So we came. Genuinely believing—and still believing—that this is where God wanted us to serve.
The hard years
The first years were harder than anything we had prepared for. Between 2020 and 2023 we were taken apart and, slowly, put back together. Some pieces have still to fall into place. We have written elsewhere about what those lessons produced in us, so we will not rehearse them all here. But two chapters of that season concern the local church, and we owe our readers an honest account of both.
The first church
The first congregation we joined received us warmly at first. We are grateful for that welcome and for some real friendships formed there; nothing in what follows erases it.
But all of that happened during a very complicated time. Covid. We have already said publicly what we believe about that period—that it exposed a moral crisis in the church far more than it created one. We could not, in conscience, go along with what we regarded as absurd and unjust impositions, inside the church even more than outside it. We said so. We challenged people—believers and unbelievers alike—openly, as we thought (and still think) faithfulness required.
The church could welcome us as people. It could not stomach our convictions. Within a year we were, in effect, on the outside. We do not tell this story to reopen it; we tell it because it is the first data point in a pattern.
The second church
The second congregation embraced us from the very first day—in the middle of all the Covid craziness, when embracing anyone was itself countercultural. Some of them loved us precisely for the things the first church could not bear. And in time, some came to love something better than us: the message of grace we refuse to dilute. In fact—for a while—that message seemed to have an impact even on the leadership of that church, which became more grace-centred. Up to a point. For people formed by a legalistic mentality—and we say this with sorrow, not contempt, because we know what that bondage does to a soul—hearing that God’s grace is truly free was water in a dry land.
People in that church—and many others before them—told us, unprompted, about “the ministry you have.” Some of them feared aloud that we would one day leave to fulfil that very call at its fullest.
Then the wind turned. The words changed: inflexible. Too firm. Too much grace. Too outspoken. You think you’re always right. In practice, it looked like this: we were called upon when nobody else was available, and given roles shaped so that almost nothing could actually be influenced. Welcome to serve; unwelcome to contribute.
Our attempts to contribute—to discuss openly how things might be done differently for everyone’s benefit—were heard as a challenge to “the authority.” We had not challenged anyone, though. We had done something that, in a one-man-leadership model, is functionally indistinguishable from it: we had discussed things openly, as equals, the only way we know. Some of the very people who had prophesied our fruitfulness, and feared our departure, helped bring it about.
We left. We have already written about how believers ought to think when someone leaves a congregation, and we have tried to practise what we wrote—no campaign, no faction, no scorched earth. But we will not pretend it did not wound us. It did.
The question we cannot dodge
Two churches. Two departures. One constant: us.
We would be fools not to ask the question, and dishonest not to ask it in public: is the problem simply us? Are we, in fact, arrogant people who mistake stubbornness for conviction and call the resulting friction “persecution”?
We have sat with that question longer than this post can show. Here is where the honest audit lands.
What we own. We are firm. We are direct. We are Neapolitans shaped by British evangelicalism, which is roughly the personality equivalent of espresso served in a china teacup—and not everyone wants that at their table. We are sure there are conversations we could have had more slowly, or simply at different times and in different places. Perhaps moments where our confidence in what we said left too little room for care in how we said it. Grace that is preached must also be worn, and we will not pretend we have always worn it well.
What we cannot own. We also spent, in those years, all the patience and grace we had, and then some—though we accept that this is our account of it, and our readers may weigh it accordingly. What we can say without qualification is what we are unable to repent of: believing that the Gospel is good news and not good advice; that grace is free or it is nothing; that a church where the pastor cannot be questioned is not being protected but endangered; that conscience is not suspended by decree. If holding these things firmly is the offence, then the offence will have to stand.
And here the early observation returns with force. The pattern we collided with is one we had documented years before anyone in these churches knew our names. The rule-heavy piety, the one-man model, the allergy to open discussion—we watched it, as strangers, in church after church across Italy, long before we had any conflict in which we were a party. A pattern that predates our arrival cannot be explained by our arrogance. The most economical explanation is the one we started with: these are cultural traits of our people, imported wholesale into the church, and largely invisible to those inside because everyone shares them.
The witnesses we did not recruit
If our self-assessment were all we had, you should discount it. Interested parties make poor judges of their own cause. So weigh, instead, the testimony of people with no stake in our Italian conflicts.
Our brethren in England. Every year we go back, and every year they pour love on us that we have done nothing recent to earn. “I wish you guys came back.” “Your messages were a blessing, right at God’s time for this church—and you didn’t even know.” We came away from the last visit humbled.
Missionaries with no Italian background. This detail matters more than it appears. Missionary friends serving in Italy—foreigners, formed elsewhere, with no share in our relational history—read our work, share it, and tell us, independently of each other, that what we describe about Italian church culture matches what they see on the ground. They are not defending us; they are corroborating the diagnosis. Our writing is read and passed on by workers in Italy, the UK and the US. One book contribution has been published; another book is on the way. Ministries in the US support our work. Our home church in England supports this work. By prayer above all other things.
But there is one more strand of evidence, and it is the strangest of all.
A small cloud of witnesses
From our earliest days as believers—young in the faith, unknown, with nothing visible to commend us—individual Christians, most of whom never met each other and knew almost nothing about us, kept telling us the same thing: that God would use us significantly. Not once, not twice. Again and again, across years, countries and congregations, from people with no way to coordinate their words.
Before my conversion, my older sister asked me to read 1 Corinthians 13 at her wedding. I didn’t want to—those were still my agnostic, anticlerical days—but I did. Afterwards my uncle told me, “I can see you as a priest.” He meant it within his own Roman Catholic frame, of course; but strip the word to what he was actually perceiving, and he was looking at an unconverted man and seeing someone made to stand before people and handle sacred words.
The Italian pastor who officiated our wedding told the whole congregation that day that God would use us both, as a couple. That there was a call on us. He had not known us long at all—we were living in England at the time.
The brother who first brought us the Gospel told us: “One day you guys will teach me.”
Our pastor in England always strongly believed in our calling.
The pastor of one of the Italian churches we used to visit while living in England—together with his wife—told us once: “Vincenzo has the gift” (of preaching and teaching). Several people told me, Vince, the same thing over the years.
Another pastor, whom we talked to through our harder times in Italy, told us both that there was a “strong calling” on us. He also told Manuela that she would draw to herself people who are in need. He does not know it, but that has already happened, several times over.
A brother in England and a sister from the second church here in Italy, speaking years apart and unknown to each other, used the same peculiar phrase about our mission: “to share the true gospel.” We understand this as our calling to preach the unadulterated grace of Christ, free from the shackles of legalism and performance-based approval.
The former principal of the theology school from which I have just graduated also believed in our calling.
And the list goes on—people, one after another, confirming the same call on us as a couple, over and over.
We never talk about this small cloud of witnesses, because we do not want to risk boasting or becoming puffed up. But this felt like the right time to bring it out, for once. We record these words not as credentials—words like these save no one and prove nothing on their own. We record them because, taken together with everything above, they form a thread we did not weave. We only noticed it when we stopped to look back.
Two Readings
Now let us try and set two readings side by side.
Reading one: we were never meant to leave England. On this reading, the fruit in England was the real calling, and the friction in Italy is God’s “no.” But this reading has to explain away too much: the conviction that sent us here, tested over years and not weakened by suffering; the Italians who have been reached and impacted by the grace message; the missionaries who confirm the diagnosis from outside; and the plain logic that a pattern we observed before arriving cannot be our fault for arriving. It also proves too much: by this standard, no missionary who suffered rejection was ever called—a standard the New Testament itself cannot survive.
Reading two: we are exactly where we are meant to be—and the friction is the mission field, not the verdict on it. The love from England does not summon us back; it settles a different question. It tells us the gifting is real and the message lands where the soil allows it. Which means the resistance in Italy is not evidence that we are the wrong workers. It is evidence about the soil—the very soil we came to work.
A prophet is not without honour, except in his own country (Mark 6:4). We are wary of wrapping ourselves in that verse; we are not prophets, and self-application of Scripture is a well-worn road to self-deception. But the pattern the Lord names there is simply true to human nature, and we would be equally foolish to pretend it has nothing to do with what we have lived.
So: what next?
Both church doors have closed. We do not believe the calling has.
Together with other developments in our lives, this has brought us to a decision we did not take lightly: we are going forward on our own—not away from the Church, but towards a different expression of it. When we bought and restored our home, we wrote that we wanted it to be more than a home: a place where people come to bless and be blessed, to eat, to open the Scriptures, to rest. Over the past year, that vision began materialising without any engineering on our part. We intend to lean into it: fellowship gathered around the Word and the free grace of God, in our home, growing at whatever pace God gives—with the prayer that, in His time, it becomes a congregation.
We know the objections, because we have made them to ourselves. Isn’t this just two hurt people building a church where nobody can disagree with them? It is a fair question, and the answer will not be given by this post but by the thing itself: whether the table stays open, whether disagreement is welcomed there in a way it was not welcomed with us, whether grace governs not only the preaching but the leaving. We ask our readers to hold us to that.
And the doubts do not disappear on command. There are evenings when “you’re arrogant” rings louder than “your messages were a blessing.” On those evenings we go back to what we know rather than what we feel: the Lord who said to another discouraged worker in a resistant city, “Do not be afraid, but speak… for I have many people in this city” (Acts 18:9–10). We do not claim that promise as ours by right. We claim the God who made it, and we stay at our post.
Trust in the Lord and do good; Dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness. (Psalm 37:3)
And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart. (Galatians 6:9)
We came to Italy because we believed God sent us. We have taken stock, honestly, of every reason to think we were wrong. And having weighed it all, we find we believe it still.
To Him alone be the glory.
If this post finds you in your own season of taking stock—of being loved for your welcome and resented for your convictions—this letter was written for you.