Around 250 Italian evangelical students gathered from October 31st to November 3rd for the Italian GBU (IFES) National Study Conference (NSC), which this year was entitled “Living and Engaging with Islam”.

The speaker of the NSC was Emil Shehadeh, an Israeli Arab living in UK who has long been involved in Islamic studies. She talked in four plenary sessions “aimed at allowing Italian evangelicals to have a better understanding of Islam”.

The topics of those plenaries were:

1. True and false prophets: a general introduction to Islam;

2. Jesus is the Messiah. How to share the gospel with Muslims;

3. How to live together with Muslims;

4. Responding apologetically to the main accusations of Muslims against Christianity

There were also various workshops that framed Islam from a historical point of view; talked about the way in which Italian literature has received and presented it; or showed the interest of the Lausanne Movement for that theme.

It concluded with the interview of theologian Miroslav Volf, conducted by the organizers of the conference.

17th edition

The GBU NSC, organized by the entire Italian GBU fellowship and managed by Edizioni GBU, the publishing House among Italian student movement GBU, has reached its seventeenth edition.

All these years, important contemporary evangelical scholars such as Donald Carson, Pablo Martinez o Lindsay Brown, among others, have participated

The main purpose of the CSN-GBU is “to connect the evangelistic ministry of the GBU (currently present in about 28 universities) with the world of churches, leaders and especially families”, said Giacomo Carlo Di Gaetano , Chief Executive of Edizioni GBU.