
Welcome to our website. May the peace and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be yours in abundance. We pray that God will greatly bless you. We would like to introduce ourselves to you.
Our names are Pastor Marco and Joan Caiani. We are a Christian couple, born again of the Spirit of God. We have been married since December of 1998. Our meeting and subsequent marriage was the result of a period of prayer for both of us and finding the will of God for our lives. While we prayed to God to find us a mate of His choice and to prepare each others’ heart for one another as well as our lives to be the right kind of man and woman He had in mind for each other, the Lord through a series of situations clearly directed by Him had us meet so that after a brief period of courtship and engagement we married on December 12, 1998.
After my conversion, which happened in January of 1997, and our subsequent wedding in December 1998 and going forward, the Lord used us in various ways making certain that these experiences would form us spiritually and prepare us for the present day. We are confident that He will continue all the more to conform us to the image of His Son Jesus Christ.
From 1997 to 1999 the Lord had given me, Marco, the opportunity to be the director of a Christian support group for the assistance and counseling of people within the church, and also outside the church, and their families. This ministry, Higher Ground ministry, is for people who are, as we biblically put it, afflicted from idols in the heart. http://www.highergroundministry.org/ ( SEE LINKS TO CONNECT WITH ITS WEBSITE )
The world calls these things habits, dependence, alcoholism, drug addictions, obsessive compulsive behavior, even illnesses etc. The Bible calls these things sin and idols in the heart Ezekiel 14:3-5
Through the work of the word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, we have witnessed several conversions and people have been set free from these idols, sins. The most important thing is bringing people to salvation. In July 1999, the Lord used Joan and me for a brief missionary trip to Africa. There we established a relationship with a Pastor and a small Evangelical church, Christian Covenant Church, in the nation of Malawi (see our Missionary Ministry page to know more about them). After returning to the USA we have maintained a close relationship and contact with this pastor and his church as well as providing some financial support. It is a church, that by God’s grace, we were able to help in many ways (even financially at times) to grow spiritually and in number. Distance for God does not exist in order to be used by Him effectively.
During the period immediately following our return to the USA, we felt the Lord calling us to serve Him in a very poor neighborhood in the city where we lived, Bridgeport, Connecticut. Here also working in close contact and cooperation with a family of our church who lived in this neighborhood, we had seen the Lord change the lives of many people. We are thankful to God that during these times, often difficult and challenging times, He used us to be a blessing to several families. The seed of His word was planted in the lives of many; we had witnessed some fruit and more of it we pray to see it in eternity. Praise be to God.
During the period between 2001 and 2006 I had attended a Bible school by correspondence, called Bibleway Institute. In 2002, we had been part of the foundation of a local home church called Canaan Fellowship. In this church I served as a memeber of the local council as elder of this community, was used in the ministry of teaching of God’s word, and served in evangelism ministry that was organized especially to bring the Gospel outside abortion clinics and public schools. During this period, from 2002 to 2006 Joan and I founded Jeremiah Ministries which remained a part of the organization Operation Save America, www. operationsaveamerica.org until 2014.
After we felt a call from God to serve Him in Italy, we left behind all of our belongings in the USA and moved to Firenze Italy. I, Marco, had grown up in Firenze from childhood to the age of 20 (See Marco’s biography). Our first intent was to create an evangelistic ministry similar to the one we had worked in back in the USA. There however having little, and I mean little, evangelical support in that country and with an Evangelical church there being close to biblical ignorance and being poorly organized, the formation of such ministry became a great challenge and went unrealized. However, the Lord since the beginning of my conversion had made it evident in my spiritual life the manifestation of the Spiritual gift of teaching and preaching.
Unfortunately, often as it is in the American ecclesiastic environment, but not only, I noticed much of the same problem even in Italy, as it may very well be a universal problem. Such a problem is that many believers are placed aside in their gifts, in other words, it is difficult to find the right church where they recognize and allow one to fully express the gifts God has given them. You have to know and perhaps you do know, that in denominational and even non denominational churches at large, the majority of the times one has to fight against and contend with carnal beasts called politics, favoritism and spiritual pride at all levels. These three beasts sown by Satan’s nature in the human nature often impede all people to express their gifts because if they did it would have a real powerful impact in the life of a church. The enemy of our souls knows fully the risk that sound doctrine and truth in the word of God properly interpreted, taught, and preached could do to his kingdom, what damage this could inflict upon his deceptions and lies.
Satan wants to sow these deceptions and lies, not so much in the world, which already is in his grasp and control, but in the church. There he knows is where he can make the most damage. However, thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph through Christ Jesus, things do not have to remain like this. When God has a purpose and a call on one’s life, He will bring it to pass regardless of the obstacles that present themselves.
We do not have to worry about the obstacles and the apparent delays of our marching orders. Our marching orders can be aligned with the will of God as far as the knowledge of the project might be; and yes, often we misunderstand that too, but most of the time we have a hard time lining up our progress with God’s timing and His ways.
The time line is almost always off because God is preparing us, and the circumstances, to bring us where He wants us to be. In other words, we want everything now, right away. God instead is not in a hurry. Our Father, after calling us, powerfully opened many doors for us to make us arrive in Italy and having greatly provided the way for us to serve Him there full time, serving Him with the gifts in which He entrusted to us.
I knew the Lord had given us a difficult, challenging task to perform besides being carriers of His Gospel of salvation, a task of which we are not worthy, but a task we took to heart to fulfill and we wanted to be faithful administrators and executors of it.
The Lord had called us as we said in 2006 to Firenze and to serve Him there full time. He had powerfully opened many doors to make this happen. We had served Him there from August 2006 to August of 2013. We took part of and worked with a Pentecostal Evangelical church in Firenze. I worked there in the capacity as an assistant to the pastors and had also been appointed assistant pastor in a church plant in Montevarchi, Valdarno.
After six years of ministering in this church, it became evident through the Biblical reality how far away from God’s truth the doctrines of this denomination were. In addition, the leadership did not want to submit to Biblical and Apostolic authority. Therefore, because of these issues we decided to leave this church and the Lord did reward our faithfulness to His truth forming Himself a fellowship which we hosted in our home in Italy. During these two years I led this home fellowship, yet the Lord still had another change and move in our life. We felt strongly the desire and God’s guidance to lead us to return to live in America. In August of 2014, we did finally move back and now live in Bristol, Connecticut.
Upon returning, I have been preaching as a guest at Lighthouse Fellowship in Bridgeport, Connecticut, about an hour drive south of Bristol. I was sought after as a possible pastoral candidate for this small inner city church; however, I did not see the Lord’s definite call to pastor this particular church for several reasons. One of the main reasons is that living an hour away from the church and knowing that the pastor needs to be close by the church it would not be feasable for us nor would it be fair to them. There are other important reasons to which I am not at liberty to describe at the time, you may understand better what they are as you delve more into this website. The difficulties to find a church that closely fits the Apostolic New Testament description are becoming seemingly improbable. As the visible church is falling all the more into apostasy, the reality of a true apostolic church which retains the authority of God’s word is becoming all the more very, very difficult. We have been blessed though with a great privilege, that is, the Lord has once again by Himself allowed us to have a home fellowship in our house. We called this church Living Word Home Fellowship, a Truth Reformed Evangelical Church. We feel that God is bringing His church, His true church back to her roots, which are home based fellowships. We see God doing this work more and more. Now we must be faithful to continue to operate under the sole authority of God’s word.
On March 30, 2016 I was officially ordained a pastor by the GMA ministry.
For these reasons and for the ministry of God’s call upon my life, this website has been created. It was created for the promulgation of sound doctrine, the true Apostolic doctrine, Apostolic not in the denominational sense rather the doctrines which are the foundation of the church, foundation laid by the Apostles and the prophets of Christ, being Christ the cornerstone. Ephesians 2:19-22
Our objective is to help the church of Jesus Christ to reform herself one more time and to return to her true Apostolic roots. Not those roots created by man and by denominations but those founded by God, Who wants His church to be edified, built up on the real and original foundation of the Apostles and prophets. This is a call for the church to return to fully function exclusively under the authority of the word of God, the true and only authority of the church.
Having known churches in the USA and also seeing and having experimented church realities in Italy, the call God has placed upon our lives has clearly been defined and become more and more evident.
The greater part of churches today need to experience a new reformation. The moment has arrived where the church has to stop seeking new things as they often say and has to instead return to ancient truths, her foundation, the foundation laid by the Apostles and prophets of the days of her birth. The church has to return to fully submit only to the authority of God’s word.
We say that the world is lost and does not know God and this is true, but I want to be drastic and blunt, the greater part of the visible church is lost and does not know God, the true and real God who is revealed for us in the Scriptures. There is a level of Scriptural ignorance and illiteracy in the church that is astounding. The misinterpretation and contextualization of Scripture has become a real problem. Scripture is being reduced to symbolism and metaphorical stories which have reached the level of fables. By consequence the knowledge of the true God described and revealed in Scripture is distorted causing people to serve and worship an image of God that is not real. It becomes the image of God made in the image of man’s wants and carnal desires.
I firmly believe that the Bible confirms that as the return of the Lord is getting closer and closer, the false prophets and teachers and deceivers are more and more numerous MATTHEW 24:24
In addition, the world has gotten so much inside the church, with all it’s culture, philosophies, and yes, sins and they have been well accepted and adopted by the greater part of the church. There are great numbers of unsaved persons sitting in churches everywhere, people who are void of the life of Christ, without true salvation, they are missing God’s grace, and they sit in comfort in their sin, deceiving themselves into thinking they are true believers. This has happened because it has become more important to drag people in church in every possible way. This is done with any type of method and strategy instead of plainly preaching the real Gospel the only way people really are regenerated by the Spirit of God and God’s word and become part of the body of Christ.
The REAL GOSPEL is no longer preached. The word of God has become something subjected to the erroneous interpretation of many who use it for carnal reasons and have transformed it into fables without any spiritual substance and lacking any real power to the point where now jokes and comedy are introduced instead of preaching the entire counsel of God in the power of the Holy Spirit.
God’s word has lost its authority in the church, not because it is not authoritative in itself, but because who preaches it and teaches it has rendered it ineffective by transforming it into stories, magic formulas, symbolism, metaphors and spiritual manipulation tactics.
Many Evangelical churches are today practicing the same blasphemy and false doctrine the Roman church has practiced for 1700 years and they do not even realize it most of the time. New revelations, prophecies, visions, dreams, traditions have all been elevated to equal status as the Scripture, I say, even above the written word of God. See 1 CORINTHIANS 4:6 ; 2 TIMOTHY 3:16-17
One of the same problems that affects the church today is the same problem that was affecting the Jewish religious system in Jesus’ days MARK 7:6-13.
The greater part of the Evangelical and Protestant churches are compromising all the more their position of holiness and spiritual authority adopting the philosophies, ways and customs of the world instead of edifying themselves upon the power and authority of God’s written word.
Instead of seeking true sanctification and separation from the ways of this world, the church at large has adopted advertisement, amusement, show biz and the strategies the world offers, such as pragmatism, to attract people to the church and to present, they say but they say it erroneously, the Gospel more effectively.
Are they really joking? The Gospel is more effectively presented trying to attract the world to God with the things of the world than through the preaching of the Gospel? This is absurd and crazy! It’s an offense to God’s word and His power.
The Bible teaches that real saving faith comes by hearing, and by hearing of the word of God Romans 10:17, and never ever did Paul or the other Apostles used things of this world to attract people to God, instead the Word of God says: 1 Corinthians 1:21 ; 1 Corinthians 2:4-5
The method the church at large is adopting today is called pragmatism, this method and philosophy does not produce real born again believers it only attracts people carnally and pushes them in a false sense of security and false conversions, superficial faith, that proves to be such when tested by trials and persecutions. http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/pragmatism
The great part of the church does all it can and seeks any way to be liked and accepted by the world. Then we are surprised because in the churches there are tens of thousands of people that never grow spiritually? Are we surprised when after a period of time, many of which are false believers, stop following Jesus and stop going to church and return to their sinful lifestyle?
We deceive ourselves in believing that these people lost their salvation. No, my dear friends, they never even entered into the grace of God. There is real faith and counterfeit faith, many “believe” in Jesus with the second kind, that is not real faith. When an unsaved sinner feels safe and secure in his or her sins and in their carnal life and “accepts” Jesus as savior but not Lord in their life, they never experience any change, they do this only for their own convenience and not because they truly repented of and are sorry for their sins, not because they arrived to desire to deny themselves and pick up their cross and follow Jesus, lose their life to find Christ’s. The Bible teaches us instead that we please God only when real faith is present and exercised. We have to be in the world but not of the world, we have to be transformed by the renewing of our mind, transformed and not conform to the ways of this world ROMANS 12:1-2 .
The use of strategies and philosophies of the world to present the Gospel and to delude ourselves that we can make God known this way is a deception and a blasphemous behavior toward God, it’s blasphemy and an affront to the power and authority of His word and the power and person of the Holy Spirit, an offense to God and an attempt for man to usurp God’s glory.
However, we cannot be surprised because when the church loses her spiritual authority committing adultery with the world, she cannot do otherwise than to turn to the world and the flesh for help Isaiah 31:1-4.
Without spiritual authority the church has to do theater, dances, and all other kind of carnal, worldly activities to attract people; people who unfortunately never meets God and remains dead in their sins. What else can the church do when it does not have the authority and the power of God that is in His written word and through His Spirit?
In the Bible, in Revelation 17, we find the description of a harlot, a prostitute that is the mother of all harlots. This Scripture is really interesting and there is an entire chapter on the on line book I have written that you can find in this site.
This chapter will be available also in form of teaching, The Woman Who Rides The Beast.
In fact, there are no doubts in who the mother harlot is, it is the false church, the church of the Antichrist, the false church, the Roman church. Until here all Protestants will cheer and agree; but, there is a but, the mother has daughters. Yes, these daughters are all the churches of all denominations who will line up to her false doctrines and her ways and who are committing adultery with the world. These daughters will be the majority of the Protestant churches, Evangelical and other religious organizations, who will be subjected to the judgment of God.
Let us be careful then. Martin Luther’s reform was extremely important and fundamental to separate from the false church then, but unfortunately today the condition of the greater part of the churches is even worse than what the condition of the Roman church was back then.
This is the goal of our website and ministry, it is to call the church to embrace a new reform, that which is necessary to return to the Lord. The greater part of the church has fallen very low. We realize it will be at best difficult, improbable, to be able to convince whole denominations and churches. However, we know that by God’s grace and power we can help believers who humbly want to know and walk in the truth, even if it’s one at a time, return to the roots, the foundation of the church, to submit once again fully to the authority of the written word and to stop believing in fables, to return to the sound Apostolic doctrine, this way we will have exercised the call and ministry we strongly feel was given us.
Our work, therefore, is the same one that Paul had delineated as an Apostolic commandment and as foundation of the church (to protect, preserve and faithfully teach the Apostolic doctrines). Yes, in Ephesians 2:20, Paul says that the Apostles and the prophets of his days have laid the foundation of the church and all stands upon the cornerstone which is Jesus Christ. In 1 Corinthians 3:9-15 Paul explains how to edify the building of the church and what is the only foundation of the church. There is no other foundation other than the written word of God, even Jesus confirmed this in Matthew 7:24-27
What we strongly feel called to do, through this site and ministry as we said, is to try to help others return to the origins, the roots, to reform again and to be only guided by the written word of God, to build the edifice of the church on the only foundation which was built by the Lord and His Apostles. I feel the same call in my spirit that Paul had ordered Timothy to do, to contend for the faith, that is why the principal passage of our site is 2 Timothy 4:2-5. However, the entire charge that Paul had for Timothy is what we believe in and we want to fulfill.
Here are several passages in the two pastoral epistles of Paul to Timothy, to the real man of God, who by God’s grace places himself entirely under the authority of God’s written word and the Apostolic doctrines found in it.
This is the call to all the men of God in the church to help the church to reform itself again. I pray you will follow me in this as I follow Christ in this endeavor.
1 Timothy 1:3-7; 1 Timothy 1:18-19; 1 Timothy 2: 8 -12; 1 Timothy 3:1-13; 1 Timothy 4: 6-7; 1 Timothy 4:11-16; 1 Timothy 6:20-21; 2 Timothy 2:1-6; 2 Timothy 2:15-16; 2 Timothy 2:23-26; 2 Timothy 3:14-17; 2 Timothy 4:2-5.
Another very important goal of our website and ministry is also for evangelistic purposes, to bring those who do not know Jesus Christ to know Him as Lord and Savior, for those who know God or who at least profess to know Him, to know Him better, a thing I endeavor to do even in my personal life as He reveals Himself to me.
I will conclude with this, we will not be able to know God how He really is, unless we know Him as He reveals Himself to be in His written word and then to get to personally know Him in agreement and coherence with His truth experienced in our daily lives. Not to know or to know His written word erroneously will inevitably result in not knowing God at all or at least to get to know Him in a distorted way.
The risk is to create in our mind and our life another image of God, an image that is not in agreement with who He is and that is not the real God, this is in reality idolatry Exodus 20:3-7; 2 Corinthians 11:4 and so we need to be very careful. God wants us to know Him as He is, as He is revealed in His word. How much do we truly want to know Him? May the Lord help us by His grace know Him better more and more.