“I have believed therefore I have spoken, 2 Corinthians 4:13: this is how Paul links belief and communication, this is how our responsibility to the media challenges our faith”.

With these words, Leonardo De Chirico kicked off the 36th edition of the Giornate Teologiche 2024, the annual theology conference of the IFED, Italy’s Evangelical Institute of Formation and Documentation.

Dialogue and evangelical witness in Italy

Celebrated in the entity’s building just outside of the northeastern city of Padova and attended by over 250 people coming from several regions of the country, the 48-hour gathering had the theme “Evangelicals and the media”.

“All communication has a creed behind it. The evangelical responsibility is to combine a sound creed with proper communication”, the organisers said.

The Giornate were attended by both experienced Christian leaders and many young people as well. The yearly event seeks to be a place of “thought and dialogue for evangelical witness in Italy”.

How to live in a media-saturated world

Tim Challies, a Toronto-based blogger and evangelical pastor, addressed themes of his book The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion (2012). He invited attendants to inhabit the digital and media world not with a naive embrace, nor with total rejection, but by exercising the disciplined discernment that is nourished by the biblical worldview.

Giuseppe Rizza of the Evangelical Reformed Baptist Churches in Italy essayed on the relationship between ecclesiology and technology, identifying this topic as a sensitive terrain in which evangelicals with a poor ecclesiology too often tend to chase after technology, getting caught up in it, without governing it.

Roundtables on religious freedom and media

Two panel discussions allowed for dialogue with worlds other than the evangelical one. In the first one, Nazzareno Ulfo (Alfa & Omega Publishing House) and Dario Voltolin (Theological Faculty of Triveneto) started from documents produced by the evangelical and Catholic worlds. On the evangelical side, Lausanne Movement's ‘The Church in the Digital Age’.

Ulfo emphasised the fact that the evangelical church enters the digital world with elasticity but always at the service of the mission assigned to it in the cultural and missionary mandate and within biblical parameters.

Another round table discussed the question ‘Religious pluralism and information: where do we stand?’, with Chiara Lamberti (Ideaitalia, the news channel of the Italian Evangelical Alliance), Alberto Corsani (Riforma magazine) and Riccardo Cristiano (for many years a Vatican expert of public radio RAI).

The picture that emerged is that information in Italy is not pluralist and is ‘closed’ to minorities, with a deficit of pluralism in culture that is also reflected in the national communication context. This does not detract from the evangelical responsibility to develop professionalism that is up to the task, it was said.

Media case studies in Italy and beyond

In other sessions, the audience learned about evangelical experiences in the field of media, at the Italian level with Calogero Sorce (Notiziario ADI, a news service of the Italian Assemblies of God) and Liberato Vitale (of culture and faith magazine locicommunes.it).

At the international level, journalist from Spain Joel Forster explained the vision and story of Evangelical Focus and how it could be replicated in countries like Italy.

‘To belief is to communicate’

In his concluding remarks, IFED founder Pietro Bolognesi recalled how the Giornate Theologiche, despite being an expression of the evangelical minority, can be an example of how to listen carefully to plural voices. A model from which larger Italian cultural institutions and media could learn.

As every year, space was dedicated during the conference to the Theology and Culture Course, with the presentation of the programme planned for the 2024/25 academic year.

It was also an opportunity to congratulate the four students who received their diplomas at the end of the five-year course.

The Theological Days were a chance to “appreciate in all its force what the Apostle Paul wrote and to apply it to our situation as Italian evangelicals who believe and, for this reason, want to communicate in all the media squares”.

The Giornate Teologiche 2025 will be held on 12-13 September with the theme “The Politics of the Gospel”.