The online prayer groups started one year before pandemic started with a group of 5 young adults from Jamaica, Malaysia, Australia, Mexico and Brazil. This number was growing month after month, at that time the idea of handling a group of “unknowns” sounded still awkward for some. In one year the number grew from 5 to about 12 faithful participants, always open for visitors any time.
Then pandemic reached us in the whole world in march, a real bad news, but as God always takes something good even from the worst of things, he did the same with us coordinators of Alive in Christ online community. We missionaries thought: now we have more time! As we are all at home, we cannot do anything outside, so let’s fortify our online activities. In that way, the online world became our fishing sea. In this immense ocean we thought: let us throw our nets to the east, to the west to north and to the south, in all languages, let’s break the barriers and make walls fall apart, let’s build bridges, it’s a new time, it’s a new evangelization, Jesus is the same, the Gospel is the same, but He’s giving us new tools to go farther, to go towards the peripheries of the world, and where people need we go.
So people from all over the world started sending messages to Alive in Christ social media, asking if they could join online prayer sessions. Some of these joined during the pandemic because this was the only option they found to get closer to God, others not, but people started being more used to online activities more and more in this covid challenging season, while before it sounded weird. In the year of the pandemic the english group grew from 12 to 40 active participants and the participants of the spanish group numbered 17, some of these are having their first experience with God’s love in an online way. As in Italy missionaries were also promoting online groups during lockdown, other young adults from different cities around Italy and from other countries too started joining in and we have officially created one more group in Italian. As thank God numbers grow, we will soon open a new english group on saturdays.
The participants themselves are also protagonists of an evangelization, they promote live rosaries on instagram and zoom and chaplets of divine mercy with songs of worship and testimonies. These activities are held in order to intercede for all those who suffer and they are a way for us to get closer to one another by means of intercession.
We praise the Lord for all His good works, nothing is impossible to God, nothing can separate us from His immense love.
Email: aliveinchrist@comshalom.org
Instagram: @aliveinchrist.sh