Today, our team traveled by bus from Rome to Terni. Terni is a city of about 150,000 people about an hour northeast of Rome. We met our host missionaries Keith Bloyd and Fernando Justiniani at the hotel where we are staying. The Lord provided a wonderful place for our team to stay through a very interesting set of circumstances. Right before the trip, we learned that we could not stay at the original place we had booked in Terni due to a problem with the fire inspection. The company we worked with provided an alternate location that ended up being much nicer than we expected. We thank the Lord for working out all of the details for our team.
After enjoying a delicious lunch, our team rehearsed the special music for the concert along with Kristi Colas. Our team will present solo and choral vocal music along with violin and piano music for this special evangelistic event. The theme of the concert is “Music: A Path to God.” During the concert, our musical selections will be introduced by Missionary Bloyd who will explain the historical and cultural significance of each piece with an interwoven Gospel presentation.
Besides preparing and presenting the music for the concert, our team is also helping to promote the event and invite people. We had the unique opportunity to perform a mini concert on the streets of Terni. Several of our team members sang in Italian and English while others passed out concert invitations to everyone who passed by. We were joined by Pastor Justiani and his family along with several people from their church.
After singing for an hour or so, the team went with Pastor Bloyd on a tour of Terni. Pastor Bloyd pointed out many of the historical sites and shared his passion for Italy.
Nicole Fisher, a junior Criminal Justice major at Pensacola Christian College, shared the following summary of her day today:
“Today, we traveled by bus to Terni, Italy, and met a couple of people from the church we are working with. We had a delicious lunch at our hotel, and a group of us went to practice for the concert; we all met up to sing in the streets in Italian and English and pass out invitations for our concert tomorrow in the street. We even got to meet some people from the church, and they helped us passed out invitations as well. It was amazing to see how many people took invitations and how many stopped to listen to us sing. Hopefully, they will come tomorrow to hear the whole concert; and we can be a blessing to them, and they are open to learning more about God, if they do not know Him already. Afterwords the pastor then gave us a quick tour of Terni, and we were able to learn more about the history of the city. We then traveled back to where we were staying.”
Please join us in praying for our concert tomorrow. Here are some specific requests:
- Pray for our team’s health. Several of our singers have sore throats or hoarse voices and are resting their voices and drinking a lot of tea. Pray for everyone to be in good voice to sing.
- Pray for good outreach and promotion of the event. We will be out singing and inviting people to the concert tomorrow morning and afternoon. We are praying that we will be able to fill the church with guests.
- Pray for the Gospel presentation in both word and song. Pastor Bloyd will narrate the concert and the team will present many carefully selected pieces. Pray for the audience as they listen and for soft hearts to respond to the message of the Gospel.
Thank you so much for your continued prayers for our team. We are so excited to report back to you tomorrow about what the Lord has done!