We took a few days off last week and went up to Austria. We named our trip Kraustria. Can you feel the originality and creativity oozing out here on the digital page? I’ve added some photos of this beautiful country and other photos of our family on the trip in the gallery as well.. The weather and beauty were fantastic for us and we had a wonderful time.
Here are a couple interesting tid-bits about Austria:
There are numerous types of schnitzels — chicken, beef, pork etc. — and they eat it like Italians eat pasta.
The Austrian military is drawing down from 110,000 troops to 55,000 troops. Why? because everybody else around them is “NATO”.
Austria has fabulous golf — if you’re so inclined. And if you are so inclined, be prepared to be inclined as a number of their courses are for billy-goats.
The toll to drive through Austria is $11.30. The toll to drive in Austria is $10.40. Coming or going, you’ll help them build their tunnels.
You’ll pay about 20 cents for Ketchup at McDonalds in Austria.
A bottle of water can run you $2 - $5 in many locations. We love their grocery stores.
Deodarant is just being discovered in this nation.
While Austria is a wonderful place to vacation, its people are lost without Christ. There are a number of missionaries and pastors in that land. Will you pray for Austria and its messengers today?
Last Friday we were with an Italian pastor-friend of ours and we began sharing some of our mutual understanding of ministry in this land. A common thread among us is how strongly the grip of Romanism is upon the minds of the people.
Our pastor-friend then remarked, “It is easier to get Jesus into the hearts of the Italians than to get the Pope out of their minds.”
If you can catch that — you’re starting to understand Italy.
At our Italian LifeTeam (small group), one of the men who we have asked you to pray for has been digging into the Word for months now. The man’s name is Dino. This fellow has not yet formally declared his allegiance to Christ, but he has been devouring the Scriptures and pouring out proper interpretation again and again.
Last Thursday, all of the LifeTeam members were present — even though they were all physically exhausted from work and other conditions. I digress for a moment. I want to give you a small example of how much of a blessing it is to see these Italians meeting together. What you don’t know is that one has lived in slave-like conditions for a long period, another is raising two teenage boys after their spouse died last year, another is newly pregnant (tired and sick), and another closed his factory early to be there.
For two hours they devoured the Word with fresh zeal after devouring fresh pasta. You didn’t realize that zeal and pasta go together did you?
In the course of the action of the moving Lord in their midst, the verse of Isaiah 52:7 came up, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”
And Dino asked if he could share what he had come to understand about this verse. So he says, “The beauty lies in the message of good news. Really, the feet are not beautiful at all. They are the lowest part of the body. They get in the dirt and do the work. But when a person brings the Word of God in truth to another person, even their ugliest and dirtiest aspects become beautiful. That is the power of the Word.”
Now that’s beautiful! And to have Italian men richly pouring over the Bible in a Christian home is like a beautiful gem pulled out of a vast field.
Pray for two men in that LifeTeam to be saved — Dino & Giancarlo.
We’re off on a short trip to the mountains as a family. It is a much-needed time together.
So, it’s not that we don’t want to respond to your emails — we just chose to ignore them before you wrote them. 
We’ll get back with you next week.
However, there are a few more blog posts that are scheduled to come out this week while we’re away. So, please keep checking back to read those. We couldn’t let you miss us that much!
If Paul had them, I’m sure he would’ve included them. “For we fight not against flesh and blood but against principalities, municipalities, powers, rulers…” We had a chuckle over that one as it’s impossible for a city to recognize healthy religious activity here in our province. The municipality loves commercial-driven entities, then industrial, then artisian, and then cultural. So, we continue on trying to establish a good meeting center for our ministry — 31 months after beginning the pursuit.
As we’ve been working on a new place to meet for our congregation, we sat at a round table with our commercialist (an interesting Italian breed of lawyer-accountant), a bank manager, a property owner, a pastor, and a deacon. It’s so hard to describe, but if I could stereotype northern Italians into one person, the bank manager would’ve taken the cake. At the risk of the dreaded political incorrectness I could say I’ve never met a more northern Italian than this man. He had a big booming voice, dressed to cultural code, ever-so rounded face, and he utilized every local phrase in AND out of the book.
While discussing different possibilities, we came to an important point. As the bank manager grabbed the lapels of his jacket, he says, “Now I think we should represent it this way… Now we don’t want to say lies… (quickly with tongue in cheek) because lying is not our style… we want to do such, such, and such.” I looked around the table to see if anybody caught it and they hadn’t, but I had to laugh in amazement.
It just rolls off the lips as it bubbles from the heart — man’s noble, moral style. As men of God, we have to be so careful in this land to share with others that honesty is more than our style, it’s our command.
You see, if this man feels he’s lied in any way (since he sets his own standards), he believes that he’ll just go down and attend a mass or do some confessional booth time (if it’s a doozy). Then, with his false sense of self-forgiveness he’ll continue on in his sin and flesh because he’s been told his root of original sin was removed when he was an infant under the sprinkling priest’s baptism. Not so for the Bible-follower! I can’t look to myself or a system of flesh and tradition for appeasement if I think anything’s gone bad. No, I have to look squarely into the eyes of the offended Party. It’s the Spirit I offended — not a system; a real Person Who knows — not hides.
And this is why we would say that lying makes us lawbreakers — not just culturally un-stylish.
“For our boast is this: the testimony of our conscience that we behaved in the world with simplicity and godly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom but by the grace of God, and supremely so toward you.” 2 Corinthians 1:12-13
I’ve uploaded some new pictures of the baptism that we administered on the 1st of May. You can find the photos in our gallery in the Serenissima Ministry Group section. Or, you can click here to go directly to the album if you’d like. You can also make comments on the photos and watch them as a slideshow. I’ll add more photos of the baptisms in this album throughout the year.
Each year, our home mission asks us to write an annual report. Have you ever had to do one? If you keep a journal or diary, doing an annual report of yourself and family is an excellent entry. It’s a great exercise and well worth it. I heard one pastor friend of mine say, “The best discipleship question in the world is ‘what are you doing’?” What a great point! What are you doing? Ask and answer that one and you’ll thank me later.
I’ve modified our report some and will share it with you here.
Before I do, I must announce that Reilly swung his first golf clubs today. He was hilarious — almost as hilarious as his Dad when he plays. We let Reilly hit the ball all over the place. He hit the ball so much that he got his first blister — another new experience. They say that you learn something new every day. It’s when you start learning two new things a day that you’re really living it up!
By the way, I added a new picture of the kiddos in our Gallery. I caught them sitting still for two seconds. It’s an anomaly shot…
Now, here’s a portion of the annual recap:
With gratitude to the Lord Jesus, we joyfully report another year of faithful service on the mission field of Italia. Our family has grown by one; a beautiful and precious daughter whom we gave the name Jessi Kay. Jessi turned one at the end of April, ’05. She is a quick learner and will provide quite a challenge to her bigger brother Reilly who is four. Reilly is in his second year of an Italian school and is becoming very fluent in the language. He even has the proper accent down. Reilly’s started to quote his first Bible verses, his hair is still a rich red, he’s crazy about puzzles and swimming, and dad is going to take him out to start learning to play golf. Dad realizes that he only has a few years left to win anything in this talented family so he’d better start now. Rob & Sandy celebrated their eleventh wedding anniversary and seventh year on the Italian field.
We had a full year and some of the highlights would include many salvations (of people from a number of different nations who live here), baptisms, life-changing church retreats, books and Bibles distributed by the hundreds in English & Italian, new small groups started including one in Italian, an Italian congregation started, and a trip to see our families in the States.
Last June (’04), we had a group of guests with us on the field. Brother Andrew Maxwell is finishing up Bible College and he was with us for the summer. Andrew was one of the fellows that we led to the Lord out here when he was in the USAF keeping jets in the air. Andrew is set to return again this June to help us through the summer. Also, one of our supporting pastors, Brent Snook, and his wife and three daughters visited us for about two weeks. They had a wonderful time here and witnessed for Christ among our people.
In December, we returned to the States for the holidays. During that time, Rob took a graduate class at IBC and our family visited one of our supporting churches — Grace Baptist Church of Farmington, NM.
In March, we began an Italian congregation where our Italian folks are taught in Italian, by an Italian. About once a month, Rob trades with Brother Roberto and teaches the Italians. It’s a young group, but already, there are a number of Italians participating along with people from the Ukraine, Africa, and Cuba. We would like to see this congregation established and stabilized with a good 30-50 people in it within the next couple years. At that point, we can begin to look to plant ministries into other cities.
One other project that we had hoped to have finished this last year was securing a new place to meet as a church. We have been working on this effort for thirty months now. The slow pace is due to Italian bureaucracy, corruption, and lack of religious liberty. Securing a new worship & equipping center is an important step toward future ministry and we hope to have this project completed this coming year.
Finally, about a dozen men from our church have been deployed down to the big sandbox. We will be meeting the needs of their families throughout the year. Please keep them and us in prayer. This is a very hard time for these men, their wives, and their children.
Thank you for your time and consideration in reading this report.
During this last week, Rob’s cousin, Jason Carlson and his wife Kim, visited us for about 6 days. Jason is an assistant pastor at a Baptist Church in Minneapolis, MN. We had Jason teach a class entitled “Postmodernism & the Christian Worldview” to our church. The class was great and our folks really enjoyed it.
Our kids really attached to Jason and Kim too. Reilly had a classic line the other day when he walked up to Jason and gave him a big hug and said, “I love you. What’s your name?” Jason showed Reilly some magic tricks so now everything in our house has to be some sort of trick. It’s too bad Jason didn’t show Reilly the go-to-bed-right-away-without-delay trick. Reilly’s a rascal on that one — and so creative too — that we’ve started to wonder, “Who’s the magician?!”
Jessi turned 1 on April 28th. We got some great video as she mashed her chocolate cake into her mouth as fast as she could. We had a hard time telling if she got that from her dad or mom… 
She is a cutie. She probably won’t start walking soon — she’ll start with running. Look out world!
During the time that Jason & Kim were with us, I was finishing a paper for a grad class that I took in January. It was due on Friday. Then another paper was due by Sunday as well as preaching and teaching. I made all the deadlines — at least all the ones I know about.
On Saturday, we had a going-away BBQ where some of the guys in my church thought it would be fun to pour the ice chest over me. They said it was like I was the “winning coach”… ya, ya, ya … only 11 months left until April Fools’ Day guys!
This morning was our baptism Sunday. We had incredible weather. It was such a beautiful event! I’ll share more in another update and post a few shots in the Gallery sometime this week.
Sadly, around 10 guys from our church are being tasked for duty in the big sandbox. We will be praying for their protection as they’ll be gone for some time. Our hearts just go out to these guys first because we’ll miss them so much and second because it’s so hard on their families. I know it’s a comfort for them to know that their church is behind them, praying for them, and caring for their families while they’re gone. You can help us care for them too through prayers and gifts.
I’ll have some more up on the blog here this week so be checking back. Thanks!
