Between Ruins and Renewal
How to Pray for the Discipling of Italy
A strategic prayer guide for the frontline of the Reformation in Italy
The Context
Italy is a land of extraordinary beauty, profound history, and enduring influence. It is also a place where spiritual apathy, nominalism, and deep-rooted tradition often obscure the reality of the gospel. Yet God is at work. Across cities and small towns, a new generation is asking questions, seeking truth, and encountering Jesus in unexpected ways.
​
This prayer guide is an invitation to stand with the people of Italy - to pray with understanding, to intercede with purpose, and to believe for a gospel renewal that reaches every region, from the great cities to the hidden villages.
Italy is a nation known all around the world. It's not a distinct tribe hidden away in a jungle. People study the history of Rome, and they marvel at what the Italian people have accomplished. They travel thousands of miles just to spend a few days visiting Italy and experiencing its unique culture and people.
​
The Italian people have impacted our world in more ways than we can list in this blog entry. Christopher Columbus himself was an Italian explorer from Genoa, and the very name of the continent we inhabit—America—is derived from the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci. Even the design of the US White House- the underlying ideas and style can be traced back to Italian (Palladian) architectural theory and practice. Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) was an Italian Renaissance architect from the Veneto region of Italy and based largely out of Vicenza. The list goes on and on.
From the ancient ruins of the Roman Empire to the ornate cathedrals that dot every village, the landscape of Italy tells a long story, one of power, tradition, and eventual stagnation. As missionaries, we must understand that the threat the Roman Empire once posed to the early Church has long since passed, yet a new, arguably more insidious threat has taken its place: the spiritual lethargy of a nation that has forgotten the Gospel.
The Lord once used the collapse of the Roman Empire to create the vacuum in which His Church thrived. But over the centuries, the vitality of that faith hardened into a cultural shell. While the Reformation sparked a return to Scripture and the true gospel in all its splendor across much of Europe, Italy remains the great, un-reformed frontier of history.
Today, the Italian people, though brilliant and resilient, are pressed between two destructive illusions:
​
-
The Nominalism of Tradition: A cultural Roman Catholicism that permeates the land but is hollowed out, void of the Gospel, and largely abandoned by the average person in daily practice.
-
The Vacuum of Secularism: A modern secular state and pervasive humanism that has crept in to replace the void, leaving the modern Italian adrift in a sea of materialism, moral relativism, conflict, and chaos.
The state of Italy is not merely a social problem; it is a spiritual crisis that requires a deliberate, strategic, and Gospel-centered intervention.
​
The scale of this crisis is visible when we look past the beauty of the Italian landscape and into the heart of its towns. While 60 million people call Italy home, the spiritual reality is sobering:
​
-
A Disconnected Majority: Although most Italians identify as Roman Catholic, only 5% actively practice their faith.
-
The Gospel Desert: Less than 1% of the population are evangelical Christians. Of Italy’s 34,000 cities and towns, over 31,000 have absolutely no evangelical witness—no Bible studies, no accountability groups, and no access to the Gospel.
-
A Lack of Shepherds: There is effectively one evangelical church for every 45,000 to 50,000 people in Italy. To put this into perspective, the United States averages roughly one congregation for every 1,000 people. The difference is not just numerical; it is a fundamental disparity in the presence of the Gospel and the availability of trained shepherds to feed the flock.
-
Biblical Illiteracy: According to the Vatican’s own records, Italy possesses the second-lowest Bible literacy rate in all of Europe.​
The result is a nation that is spiritually famished. When we look at these numbers, we are not looking at mere statistics; we are looking at millions of souls without a shepherd, living in towns where the name of Christ is not preached, and the Word of God is largely unknown.
​
At Practical Missions Cohort (PMc), we are committed to more than just planting isolated churches; we are laboring to see the nation of Italy discipled—to witness the genuine Reformation that has yet to tangibly take root.
​
To participate in this work, we invite the Church to move beyond generic requests. To see this nation discipled, we must pray with precision, persistence, and an understanding of the spiritual history that holds Italy captive. Here is how you can effectively intercede for the Lord’s work in Italy.
The Four Pillars
Four areas of focused prayer for a lasting gospel impact in Italy.
Pillar 1: Shattering the Nominalist Shield
Pray for the hearts of those steeped in religious tradition, that they would recognize their desperate need for a living Savior rather than resting in a hollow cultural inheritance. The ultimate fruit of the Roman Catholic system in Italy has been a profound, widespread indifference to the things of God. For the average person, "participation in the church" is limited to the bare minimum: showing up for Christmas, Easter, baptisms, First Communions, weddings, or funerals.
​
Many have been misled to believe that the sacrament of infant baptism provides a permanent, unconditional standing before God, effectively nullifying the necessity of personal repentance and faith. This reliance on institutional initiation leads to the false conviction that salvation is a lifelong process of 'working out' one's status through the Church, with purgatory serving as a final, post-mortem refinery for the soul.
​
Because this framework substitutes human participation for the sufficiency of Christ’s finished work, it renders the Scriptures largely irrelevant to the common Italian. They remain biblically illiterate, lacking the only foundation capable of sustaining a civilization. Consequently, as the influence of Islam steadily rises, a nation stripped of a robust, biblical Christian foundation finds itself spiritually and culturally helpless—lacking the necessary armor to provide answers to the erosion of its own society[1].
Join us in praying for the following:
​
-
The Dissolution of the System: We pray not merely for the reform of this system, but for its total dissolution. Pray that the Roman Catholic edifice would crumble under the weight of the true Gospel.
-
The Shattering of Nominalism: Pray that the Holy Spirit would shatter this shield of nominalism, exposing the vanity of these traditions that keep millions inoculated against the Truth.
-
A Call to Living Faith: Pray that the Italian people would be drawn out of the darkness of institutional ritual and into the necessity of a living, personal faith in the finished work of Christ. 1
And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.” - Mark 7: 6-8
​
Footnotes:
-
In a country like Italy, Roman Catholicism is not just a religion; it is a cultural inheritance that provides a sense of identity without requiring a biblical conviction. This 'nominal' shield, however, leaves the nation spiritually defenseless. When the foundation is a tradition of men rather than the finished work of Christ, the society lacks the necessary armor to face the challenges of secularism and the steady rise of other robust worldviews like Islam. - De Chirico, Leonardo. Same Words, Different Worlds: Do Roman Catholics and Evangelicals Believe the Same Gospel? London: IVP, 2021.
-
The tragedy of the Roman Catholic system is that it has inoculated millions against the true Gospel by giving them just enough religion to be comfortable, but not enough Scripture to be transformed. It creates a cultural Christianity that is wide but shallow, leaving the people biblically illiterate and culturally helpless when the winds of change blow through Europe. - De Chirico, Leonardo. Credomag.com
