A lighted cross.

ROME: A few blocks away from Rome’s central railway station, a man pauses outside a tiny, nondescript storefront. Not a lot is visible through the windows, and a passerby has to look carefully to notice the faded signage, which reads “CLC Ministries”.

“We had our first meetings in here,” he said. “When we first arrived in Italy, my wife’s purse was stolen, which had her Bible in it. We came here to buy another one, and the store manager turned into one of our closest friends.”

This man is Brent Harrell, a Protestant Evangelical missionary working in Italy. He counts that meeting as part of a long series of “divine appointments” that have led an American evangelical to spend 12 years attempting to missionize the world’s most Catholic country.

Harrell is back at the bookstore today to buy more Bibles to replenish the supply at the church he established in a suburb far from the city centre. He doesn’t have a great deal of money to spend, and so spends several minutes contemplating the various options — hard or soft cover, various translations. He confers with the young shop assistant, speaking Italian, that while fluent, could never be mistaken for a native’s, and still bears the rhythmic stamp of a mid-western American drawl.

After he’s chosen his Bibles, he spends a little time browsing in the two-shelf section for “bambini” picking out Biblically-themed coloring books for the Sunday school. In the store — barely 10 feet across — books fill all the available space, volumes about “Gli Ultimi Tempi” (The End Times) and “Battaglia Spirituale” (Spiritual Warfare) sitting alongside Italian translations of Christian literature heavyweights like Billy Graham and Max Lucado. There’s a tiny multimedia section, which prominently features VHS copies of a 1980’s concert tour by Italy’s only evangelical folk singer.

Harrell doesn’t visit the store often, as it’s a long way from the outer suburb where he ultimately “planted” his church, Calvary Chapel Roma. But this area of central Rome is where he and his wife worked until 2009, doing everything from street evangelism to working with students on the nearby university campus.

“We would meet in this bookstore, clear out everything from the middle, and pray together — and not even fill this space,” said Harrell.

“Now we have a church of 50 people — which is actually pretty large for an evangelical church in Italy.”

In person, Harrell has an intense manner, maintaining constant eye contact from beneath a black baseball cap.

“Italy is the greatest missed mission field in the world,” he said, swiftly downing a thimble-sized cup of strong espresso at a cafe nearby.

“If Jesus were to return today, only about 500,000 people in Italy would be raptured with him,” he said, referring to a belief held by many evangelicals that “true” Christians will be taken to heaven at the end of the world.

And as for the rest of Italy’s 60 million citizens — 90 percent of which are Catholic? According to Harrell, they will not be counted among the true believers when the last trump resounds.

“Catholicism is a counterfeit cult, a heretical sect, a demonic lie,” he said. “It’s an oppressive system that is so far from what Christ intended.”

“Instead, it’s all been built on a man name Peter,” he said, referring to the disciple whom Catholics consider the first pope.

Of course, the Catholic Church would disagree with Harrell’s assertion. Their official line is that while the Pope is the ultimate authority on earth, he is also the ultimate servant, living a life of obedience that points followers to God. In conversation, Harrell also refers frequently to the supreme authority of the Bible on all matters. This is another major point of difference with Catholic teaching, which assigns equal weight to “church traditions,” beliefs that are not found in the Biblical canon, such as prayer for the dead and the liturgy. (Interestingly, an appreciation for those traditions is often cited as a significant motivator for conversion to Catholicism by Protestants.)

Harrell is unabashed in his opposition to the Catholic church. In fact, it was his conviction of Catholicism’s enslaving power that spurred him to leave Boise, Idaho and come to evangelise the “lost” in Italy.

“God sowed it into my heart how desperate the situation was here. You have this country that is 99.9 percent Catholic, but has no concept of personal intimacy with God,” he said.

Harrell grew up in an evangelical Christian family, and eventually attended Bible college in order to pursue full-time ministry. He first became passionate about Italy after a brief summer mission trip in 1985.

“There was a man in the Venetto region who had been a Catholic, but was then saved. He wanted to start an evangelical church in the north,” said Harrell, who went to Venetto to help with three other American missionaries.

“I remember him saying that to be Italian is to be Catholic — and it’s got nothing to do with God,” he said.

That level of cultural entrenchment proved to be one of the greatest obstacles Harrell and his wife faced when they moved to Italy three years later in 1999.

“People would say to me ‘I’m atheist, but I’m still a Catholic’ ,” he said. “It’s part of their identity, and the indoctrination is deep seated.”

The Harrells arrived in Rome with no plan, no Italian and just one contact. When he speaks of this time, Harrell compares himself to Abraham, who was called by God but with no idea of where his faith might take him.

After working in Rome’s center, that faith took Harrell and his family (which now includes three children) to the outskirts of the city, to a suburb known for drug dealers and poverty. There they started a church, which was affiliated with Calvary Chapel, an American evangelical fellowship that sponsored the Harrells’ mission work.

Just 0.1 percent of Italy’s of population identifies as “evangelical,” and are separate entities to the country’s mainline Protestant churches, which evangelicals widely consider to be only slightly better than Catholicism. Harrell knows of about 150 “Bible-believing” churches in Italy, most averaging around 20 members.

“We’re cushioned from it a little in a big city like Rome, but in these smaller villages, when evangelicals arrive, it’s like the wicked witch coming to town,” said Harrell with a rare laugh.

“They’ve been taught for so long that you cannot be saved outside the Catholic church. They steer clear of us.”

This distrust surprised the Harrells, who found most Italians to be a lot less open than movie stereotypes would suggest.

“They’re superficially friendly, but they are actually very sceptical and critical, and take a long time to open up,” he said. “It’s an ancient culture, very slow to change.”

“Slow” is also how Harrell describes his conversion rate, a process which he likens to a farmer cultivating a field, with a long interval of waiting between sowing and harvesting. Large events like tent revivals would not work in Italy, said Harrell, who prefers to focus on building relationships.

“There’s a woman who attends our church now who also had a child in my daughter’s class. We would just talk casually about our beliefs, and finally a year later she was saved,” said Harrell.

According to Harrell, the conversion process is actually hardest for those who have been practicing Catholics (which is about 30 percent of Italians).

“There was an older woman who would come to our church, and be in tears every Sunday she was so moved. But she also kept going to Mass — that guilt is a hard thing to get rid of,” said Harrell.

When explaining his take on the gospel to Catholics, Harrell often quotes John 3:16, which in the New International Version translation reads: “For God so loved the world he gave his one and only son so that all men might be saved”.

“It shows how much God loves all people, and how he desires them to have the free gift of eternal life,” said Harrell. His explanation of the christian faith heavily emphasises the idea of grace, rather than “works” to obtain salvation.

“No Catholic will ever say they are going to heaven for sure. They can’t be certain they’ve earned it yet,” said Harrell, who repeatedly asserts the simplicity of the ideas he preaches.

Along with abandoning some fundamental beliefs about the way to eternal life, a Catholic converting into Harrell’s church has to give up something dear to many Italian hearts: praying to the Virgin Mary.

“They’re taught that God is this stern father, and Mary is a nurturing mother, almost a co-redemptress with Christ,” said Harrell.

“But I always say to them – if Obama was your father, and could give you anything, why would you go through some other intermediary to talk to him? It’s the same thing with God.”

Harrell and his family are in Italy on missionary visas, which he calls “a miracle,” given what he sees as the Italian institutionalised suspicion of non-Catholics. While they haven’t faced significant personal hostility, he mentions “subtle persecution,” particularly when dealing with bureaucracy.

“We run into roadblocks, like lost paper work. And we have sub-par status to the Catholic Church, since we are only considered a non-profit organisation.”

Still, Harrell is sanguine about these perceived difficulties.

“Christ told us that we would be hated and suffer for him,” he said. “Whether we reach millions or just a few, I’ll keep following Jesus”.

A view of the San Clemente Basilica from the outside. | Photo by David Bramhall.

I would not normally consider myself a claustrophobic person, but I had a close encounter of the walls-closing-in kind on Monday.

After our visit to hear the Archbishop of Canterbury discourse with ponderous loquacity, Professor Stille, our resident Roman, led us all on an excursion to the church of San Clemente. After meandering down cobble stone streets in the shadow of the Coliseum it was a weird transition to enter the Medieval basilica.

It was dim, as many of these churches are, lit seemingly by the dull glitter of the mosaics above. The wooden benches were dark and despite it being a glorious day outside, the stained glass did not let in much sunshine.

Still compared to our next destination, the sanctuary of this historically significant church was positively overexposed. It is still a working Catholic church, with mass held every Sunday, but it was the history that we there for. For one, the bones (aka relics for the faithful) of Clement, a fourth century Corinthian killed by the emperor Trajan. The basilica dates from 1100 AD and has the one of the largest collections of medieval wall paintings in Rome. It certainly does not lack for ornamentation, from the floor inlaid with semi-precious stones, to the ceiling that is a masterwork in gilding.

Underneath this space, however, is another story entirely. Archaeological digs have revealed the remains of more than two thousand years of usage, which have been stabilised and fitted for tourists.

From the rather bland office of the basilica, you descend a wide set of stone steps, and are immediately hit by the moisture in the air. The space is dark, lit only by rather eerie blue lamps. This level represents an early Catholic church, which in its early years was a clandestine operation. On this level, it is difficult to get a sense of the space as it once must have been – to be perfectly honest, it just felt like a series of rather large stone rooms, with a few faded paintings of saintly myths on the wall.

At the end of that structure, you descend to the next level, where the darkness seems doubled, maybe because the spaces are much smaller, the ceiling lower. This is was a first century Roman senator’s home, which also contained a pagan shrine to Mithras, a deity associated with bulls. The sound of running water that could be heard in the level above finds its source here below, to the point that it sounds like a river is rushing beneath your feet. The air down here is very moist, clammy and the rooms connect to each other through narrow passage ways.

It is at this point in my journey that I began to feel the stone walls closing in ever so slightly. I have a wonderfully overactive imagination, that kicked into overdrive when I found myself separated from the group, stumbling along a tunnel like passage way. It felt like a scene from a B-grade movie — the foolish maiden lured into the labyrinth, pursued by the minotaur. All I needed was to bump into an albino monk and we’d be filming The Da Vinci Code.

You can imagine my relief then when I bumped into some of our party, who ever so kindly indulged my strangled ‘Get me out of this place!’ and walked with me to the exit.

The metaphor here, of course, is a rather obvious one — weight of history etc, but I truly was struck by a sense of all that had come before, everything that had happened here, how incredibly OLD this city was. It is a city where you are constantly stepping on ghosts as it were, and in religious buildings it seems this happens tenfold. It’s something I’ve noticed particularly in Catholic churches – they seem to have absorbed a great deal of the earlier city’s paganism, allowing statues of Roman deities to sit in their church, often modified to represent a saint. The Egyptian obelisk that stands in front of St. Peter’s Basilica is the best example of this attitude of compromise.

Whether it’s practical recycling or doctrinally questionable I wouldn’t want to say – but in the cases of buildings, it makes for some pretty scary basements.

Professor Goldman on our first day in Rome! | Photo by Anam Siddiq.

ROME — The wonderful thing about a sleepless night, mixed with jetlag and a healthy dose of mid-semester exhaustion, is that it produces a wonderfully random first impression of Rome.

The flight was (thankfully) a fairly uneventful experience, and we arrived en masse at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, where we were welcomed with open arms by Professor Goldman. The ride out from the airport was initially unimpressive, Neha Prakash going so far as to remark that it felt like she was in New Jersey. Brandon Gates even began concocting conspiracy theories involving a plane circling New York for 8 hours, but an ancient Roman highway weaving between stuccoed houses finally convinced us of our genuine Italian location.

Professor Goldman had described our hotel as “adequate,” which we interpreted as  “may or may not have a roof or been cleaned since Caesar Augustus’ day.” Luckily, we found he was under-selling the charms of Hotel Emmaus, which overlooks St Peter’s Square and includes a genuine-old-school cage elevator. In the room occupied by Ines, Teresa and myself, we had a wonderful “I’m in Italy” moment, opening our Venetian shutters and looked out upon the sun streaming over Rome’s rooftops.

The Religio team, delirious at the airport in Roma. | Photo by Anam Siddiq.

Our itinerary kicked off with an introduction to one of our hosts, Ashley Naronha, who bestowed upon all 16 of us state-of-the-art touring technology. The devices –radio receivers and headsets – meant to allow us to hear our guide while in the busy city streets. I’ll leave it to another chronicler to deliver the final verdict on this innovation.

I’ll also leave it to the guide books to give a run down of our whirl-win tour of the Capitoline Hill, which took us from Castor and Pollux to Gilat Shalit to Vestal Virgins and back again. After a molto rapido coffee break (and a cappuccino whose praises Anne Cohen could sing for 5,000 words), it was time to head into the Jewish ghetto, a short, sloping cobble stone street away from the Capitoline. After hearing about this area and its history (grazie Professore Stille!) throughout the semester, we were all eager to experience it. At first glance, it looked much like the rest of that part of Rome: – yellow stucco buildings, fragments of a temple ruin sticking out every now and then – but with the notable exception of a white domed building that dominated the skyline.

Michael Wilner and Anne Cohen outside the Roman Synagogue. | Photo by Anam Siddiq.

This was the Great Synagogue of Rome, and on a Friday evening, we were here to attend the Sabbath service. As the sunny afternoon turned into a chilly twilight, we mobilized to pass the “security check point” at the synagogue gates. We surrendered our passports, and were called up one by one to a table, where our bags were stripped of any electronic device that would not be considered a “Sabbath item.”

The most striking thing about the service was the physical beauty of the synagogue. With ornate gilding and stained glass to rival the greatest churches, a soaring dome drew the eye heavenward. Being female, I watched the service from an upstairs balcony, my view obstructed by an ornate metal grille. I don’t think many of us, women or men, could claim to understand much of the substance of the service, since it was unamplified and entirely in Hebrew. But an atmosphere of solemn worship spoke volumes.

After the Great Synagogue, Day One ended with two hours of deliciousness at our Shabbat dinner, held at a famous Jewish restaurant in the ghetto. Many of us ate deep-fried artichoke for the first time, savoured spaghetti with spinach, and washed down tasty with red wine. The highlight of the meal wasn’t the food however, it was Professor Goldman’s matchless rendition of the Sabbath blessing.

And with that…I think it’s time to rest.

Lifting holy hands.

In the darkened auditorium, it is difficult to make out individual faces, features blurred in a fog of dry ice and dust. The occasional roving strobe light, neon blue or green, shoots down from rigging high above the crowd. A man with an asymmetrical haircut moves to sit behind the drum kit, soon joined by a guitarist in skin-tight black jeans, then followed by four young people, all of above average attractiveness. In their hands, they all hold microphones.

For the moment, the crowd ignores the activity up front, squeezing between rows of fold out chairs, or moving amongst the mass of milling bodies clustered around the bar. But nobody’s serving drinks at the Gramercy Theater tonight, last night’s shot specials covered by a large white banner, “Hillsong NYC” scrawled in graffiti script.

A quick-tempoed bass riff begins, insistent beneath the buzz of conversation. The quick one-two-three click of drumsticks, and suddenly the front of the room bursts into a wall of sound. As of one accord, bodies turn, rising from their seats, eyes fixed on words projected three feet tall across the front wall. A zing of electric guitar hits the melody, and in a rush of off key voices, the fourth service of the day has begun.

It isn’t long before the hands begin to rise. A young Asian man up front was there at the first beat, arms flung heavenward before the singing even began. Through the first verse, the crowd seems hesitant, shifting on their feet, still a little distracted by latecomers pushing past. By the second chorus however, they are popping up everywhere, two hands held high, palms open to the sky. Another variant emerges as the music takes a turn for the contemplative – two arms held at waist level, fingers splayed, a half shrug toward the divine.

The third song can only be described as the sacred equivalent of a power ballad, all soaring melody and passionate declarations of adoration. Half hidden behind a veil of brown hair and an acoustic guitar, a young woman sings:

“The same power that conquered the grave lives in me,

Your love that rescued the world, lives in me”.

By the time that bridge has been sung for the fifth time, the majority of the worshippers, some crying, have their hands in the air, swaying back and forth. The tension in the upheld arms is visible, reaching, grasping, striving. It looks like whole-body worship – par for course here at one of New York’s fastest growing churches. Just 18 months old, it is an offshoot of Hillsong Church, a vaguely Pentecostal evangelical group based out of Australia. The church has no building of its own yet, and moves between venues, larger with each move. This week, they’re at the Gramercy Theater on East 23^rd St in Manhattan.

“I’ve been coming here for about a year, and this behavior in service is pretty typical,” said Chris Strickland. “I think the technical term for it is ‘raising holy hands’”.

Strickland, a 27-year-old retail worker, grew up worshipping this way, which he likens to a crowd showing appreciation at a rock concert.

“It’s a physical way of expressing gratitude. It’s also a way of surrendering that feels very natural, even though it’s something I do consciously.”

Emma Payne, a 23-year-old student, takes a slightly more cynical view of the proceeding.

“Sometimes it’s just pure mimicry. If you were watching, you could see people start shaking their fists after the lead singer started doing it,” she said, acknowledging the power of peer pressure in worship.

“I do think it’s got a Biblical basis – it’s mentioned in the Psalms, among other places. But do I think it’s a salvation issue? Of course not,” she said, adding that she often raises her hands to help her concentrate on worshipping.

She could be referring to any one of the dozen references to worshipping specifically with upheld hands in the Psalms. For example, in the 63^rd psalm, the writer specifically exhorts his reader to: “Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the Lord!”

Payne also provides an interesting commentary on the various postures, likening them to spiritual sign language, or perhaps interpretive dance.

“Palms open is a receiving gesture, and you’ll often to it when the song is about being filled by Spirit or something. The reaching is for songs that are about giving, like when you’re thanking God, or praising Him,” she said, before turning away to pass the collection bucket on down the row.