Italy (MNN) — With the 2006 Olympic Games in full swing in Italy, AMG International has several teams working along local churches to distribute Scripture and talk with people.
AMG’s Traci Ragan recently returned from Italy, and says is a tough place to reach. “It was very interesting being in Italy. Our missionary informed us that the country as a whole is a post-Christian country. So they’re not really very accepting of anything that has to do with Jesus or God.”
That’s why AMG is part of helping the More Than Gold program, designed to promote unity among Christians. “More than Gold is an organization that has worked with many of the larger game venues. They were in Greece; they’ve also done World Cups in France. And their main objective is to bring the local churches together, throughout the entire country really, the evangelical churches to work together in their own country.”
As the teams reached out to people there for the games as well as those going about their normal lives, Ragan says she saw a common goal among the Christians doing the outreach: “We met several people from different churches and from different denominational backgrounds, but they all seemed to have one goal. And that was really just to reach Italy for Christ.”
One evening after distributing Scripture resources, a Christian woman approached the team at church. She told them how a friend of hers had received one of the bookmarks from an AMG team. This woman and was excited because she had been reading the Bible and talking with her friend for several months. And her friend was excited because random strangers gave her something that coincided with what they had been talking about for months. Ragan praised God for giving them that rare glimpse of fruit from passing out literature, and that it was God working through their team and local Christians working together.
The important thing for the Italian church, says Ragan, is to encourage them that they have brothers and sisters in Christ in the States and around the world, “who walk through the same things they walk through, who live on a daily basis, pretty much like they do, and yet we just wanted them to know that they’re not alone.”
Prayer is crucial as the Olympics wrap up and people go back to their homes. Ragan trusts that God will take their work and it will bear fruit, but she asks prayer. “Pray for the materials that are being received, that people would be willing to accept them and that the Lord would use His Word, as He says it never returns void, and that is our prayer, that they would see the truth and that the truth would set them free.”
