Dear Friends and Supporters,
From the Editor
Thank you for your continuing help with letters, suggestions, donations, purchases and prayers!
Please keep looking at www. waldensian. org. uk for past reviews, updates, new items and on Facebook: The Waldensian Church Mission. This year we have two important anniversaries: 200 years since the Waldensian Church Mission was founded and 50 years since the Integration of the Italian Methodist Church with the Waldensian Church.
Synod 2025 will take place 23 – 27 August in Torre Pellice as usual.
At Synod 2024 it was great to see the Morris-Chapmans again and we are happy to announce that Grace( pictured here with children, Daniel and‘ our’ Nicky) has been ordained minister in 2025.
We have a new Chair, Rachel Morris, who writes: I’ m Rachel Morris, delighted to introduce myself as the new chair of the committee.
Firstly, thanks are due to our outgoing chair, Ian Nimmo-Smith, who has been in the role for the past 11 years and has now retired from the committee due to ill health. We all want to express our sincere gratitude to Ian for ably overseeing a sometimes challenging period, particularly keeping things going during the Covid pandemic.
My connection with the Waldensians started in 2002, when I went to volunteer for a year as part of an international team at La Noce, a Waldensian social work centre in Palermo, Sicily. Director of the centre at that time was Alessandra Trotta, now Moderator of the Waldensian Church. I took a‘ crash course’ in Italian language and Waldensian history at the Collegio Valdese in Torre Pellice and very much enjoyed the year working in the nursery school at La Noce – working with young children was the ideal way to learn the language.
Then from 2007 to 2010 I moved to Turin, and worshipped at the Tempio Valdese on Corso Vittorio in the city centre. I sometimes attended the Italian congregation( and particularly enjoyed their great church lunches in the nextdoor Casa Valdese) and sometimes the English-speaking congregation which met in the same building. I also made lots of visits to the Valleys, including
Cover: Moderator Eugenio Bernardini with Pope Francis and S. Velluto, President of the Concistoro.( Photo: Pietro Romeo)