Cedarville Magazine, Fall 2018

TREASURE IN JARS OF CLAY JONATHAN ’01 AND NOELLA (FISHER) KLEIS ’99 “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Cor. 4:7). The truth of Paul’s word perhaps best sums up our 13 years serving in Italy as full-time missionaries with ABWE. Paul is speaking here of his ministry in which the darkness-dispelling power of the Gospel is manifest in his own weakness, frailty, and suffering. Our ministry has been marked by pain and adversity. We witnessed our first church plant implode and utterly fail for reasons beyond our control. For years, Jonathan has struggled with chronic and debilitating ailments that, on the surface, would appear to severely limit his ability to minister. And yet it has been on account of these trials — not despite them! — that we have seen the Gospel of Christ at work in its most powerful form, both in our lives and in the lives of those to whom we minister. We came to Italy in 2005, specifically in the area of Turin in the northwestern region of Piedmont. While many think of Italy as devoutly Catholic, very few actually practice their faith, or even have any kind of faith at all. Around 13,000 people live in our community, and the average attendance of Catholic mass on any given Sunday is only around 30 people. This number is indicative of what Italians truly believe and what their spiritual condition is. In reality, secularism and the occult hold far greater power in our area, with Turin being the point of convergence for European white and black magic. Our ministry is specifically focused on church planting, or better, planting church-planting churches. In other words, we are all about seeing an indigenous church-planting movement come to fruition in which self-sustaining Italian churches are reproducing themselves and multiplying throughout the region. We praise God that, in 2017, we saw a church started in our community, and we are currently pouring our time and energy into discipleship and further evangelism in order that the church may grow in both breadth and depth, always with the goal of seeing this church reproduce itself in the surrounding area. In this last year and in answer to prayer, God has opened countless doors for the Gospel in our community, and we are confident that He will bring an abundant harvest. Our ministry approach can be summarized simply as pastoring our community. While pastoring is normally considered a work done within the confines of the church, God has led us to see the whole community of the unevangelized as our congregation, and our task is simply to dedicate ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the Word in their midst. God’s greatest blessing to us in our ministry has been to show us with painful clarity that truly we are only jars of clay, and when we fully embrace this fact and rejoice in our weakness, then we see how great indeed is the power of the love and grace of God in Christ. It is no accident that our most fruitful seasons of ministry have been accompanied by our most trying and difficult circumstances. 26 | Cedarville Magazine