Advancing the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God.
Franco Iacomini
I wanted to be an eyewitness to Brazil’s history. Instead, God made me a witness to his work in the world.
When I was 26, I fell in love with a girl I met in the newsroom. From my desk as a journalist for a daily newspaper in Curitiba, Brazil, I saw her walk in for her job interview. I couldn’t help wondering who she was. When she began working a few steps away from me, I was elated. Her name was Marli.
A short while after, Marli’s best friend started dating a friend of mine. The two often asked Marli and me to come along on their dates, so that’s how we began dating too.
Marli was a Christian, and I was an atheist. By her invitation, I started visiting her Baptist church. I thought the services were boring and wondered why there was so much singing—but it was a small price to pay for a few more hours with my girlfriend.
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I had thought evangelicals were narrow-minded people manipulated by greedy pastors on television. I was surprised, then, that the people at church were so nice to me and that the pastors were so clever and wise. But my surprise didn’t lead to much else. Church was purely social for me.
Franco Iacomini
Franco Iacomini
Around the same time, I began working at Veja, a leading Brazilian magazine. Somehow, at an outlet that rarely covered religion, I kept getting assigned to write pieces that involved evangelical Christianity.
First, I was sent to interview a pastor who led a prison ministry. Then I met a group of women who took a two-hour bus trip every week to pray with inmates in a state penitentiary. I covered recovery homes for drug users run by Pentecostal churches and wrote about Christians organizing a samba parade at the annual Carnival.
I couldn’t seem to escape Christ-ians. Even when my reporting trips had nothing to do with religion, believers were there—like when I was at a country fair to write about rodeos and a man approached, introducing himself as a pastor. Each encounter eroded my previously negative perception of evangelicals. I acknowledged that I must have been wrong and left it at that.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, Marli’s whole family was praying for me to meet Jesus.
My father arrived in Brazil in 1953 as a 9-year-old immigrant from Italy. His father, Enea, had made a living producing and selling plaster images of Catholic saints, a tradition in Casabasciana, his mountain village in Tuscany.
So I was raised Catholic, spending much of my childhood enrolled in Catholic schools. But I was never committed to my faith. When I reached my teenage years, I decided to distance myself from the Catholic church and identify as an atheist.
Franco Iacomini
Franco Iacomini
At university, journalism became my equivalent for religion. I was seduced by the idea of becoming an eyewitness to history and that my work could somehow help consolidate Brazil’s young democracy. I started to see everything through the principles of objectivity, impartiality, and truthfulness that are basic to my profession.
So when Marli and my unexpected encounters with Christians began eclipsing my world in 1996, my first instinct was to analyze the church. I separated myself from what was happening around me, as a good journalist should.
One afternoon, I was driving in Curitiba with Marli when I read a bumper sticker on the car in front of us: “In case of rapture, this vehicle will be out of control.” At first, I didn’t understand it, and Marli laughed at my curiosity. I knew it was some kind of joke—and quickly realized the joke was on me. In that moment, it was as if God said to me, “So you believe in distancing and objectivity? Let me take you for a ride and show you what I’m doing.”
That same afternoon, Marli brought me to her sister, who shared with me God’s plan of salvation. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, came to earth out of love for all humankind, died on the cross to redeem us from our sins, and rose again so that those who put their faith in him can have eternal life. Then the two women dropped the big question: What would I do with this information? Would I be willing to give my life to Jesus?
True to my nature, I turned to logic: If there was no God, I would gain nothing by saying I believed in Jesus and I would lose nothing by saying no to him. But if there was a God, my answer would have consequences. Yes meant salvation; no meant condemnation. So reluctantly, I said yes.
“If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved,” says Romans 10:9–10. “For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.”
For me, saying “I believe” and repeating a prayer that day seemed hardly consequential. It was a calculated response born from a tiny faith, surely smaller than a mustard seed. But from then on, God took my life into his hands.
A few days later, I went away on another reporting trip to write about the growing evangelical population in the Brazilian Amazon.
God had said he would show me what he was doing, and that is exactly what happened. On the banks of the Madeira River, I met missionaries who had left the Netherlands and Norway to work with the riverside people living in villages scattered throughout the Amazon rainforest.
The missionaries had left their lives behind to do what no one else was doing in a region where even the simplest things—like getting an ID card—could take hours of travel by boat. They ran blood tests to detect diseases like malaria, taught people how to prepare healthy meals and avoid water contamination, and performed eye exams and gave glasses to those who couldn’t get to an optometrist in a faraway city. Above all, they presented the message of Jesus, to whom every life is precious.
Franco Iacomini
Franco Iacomini
Intimidated by them, I held back from sharing about my recent conversion. I only mentioned attending a few services with Marli, who was now my fiancée. But during one night of conversation, one of the missionaries turned to me and told me that I would also be a missionary someday. I couldn’t tell if he was prophesying or just trying to provoke me. I responded with a nervous laugh.
Shortly after I returned from the Amazon, Marli and I got married. I began going to church more regularly, curious to know more of Jesus and his Word. By 2000, I was finally ready to be baptized.
We were living in São Paulo then, and we joined a small group while in the midst of grieving the tragic murder of a friend. My faith was deepened as I felt how God was with us in our sorrows. I began editing devotional books, which sparked a deeper interest in theology and led me to study at seminary. God guided my family and me to plant a church in metropolitan Curitiba, where I was ordained as a
pastor in 2014. In 2021, we became missionaries in Portugal for 15 months, exactly as the Amazonian missionary had predicted.
Even with these incredible changes in my life, I never stopped being a journalist. My profession depends on exposing truth and exercising freedom, and as a Christian, I am called to share the Good News. God made me an eyewitness to his work in the world and in my own life, and through that, I have learned my true calling: to tell of the truth and freedom I find in my Lord and Savior.
Marli and I have been married for 28 years now. During those years, I have learned again and again that my life is no longer mine but God’s.
When Jesus invited me to follow him, there at Marli’s sister’s house, he wanted to teach me to love him with all of me.
This article appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of Christianity Today as “Testimony”.
Stef Reid
Lucian Mustata with Sara Kyoungah White
Nina Maksimova
Antoine Davis
Joshua Broome
As we enter the holiday season, we consider how the places to which we belong shape us—and how we can be the face of welcome in a broken world. In this issue, you’ll read about how a monastery on Patmos offers quiet in a world of noise and, from Ann Voskamp, how God’s will is a place to find home. Read about modern missions terminology in our roundtable feature and about an astrophysicist’s thoughts on the Incarnation. Be sure to linger over Andy Olsen’s reported feature “An American Deportation” as we consider Christian responses to immigration policies. May we practice hospitality wherever we find ourselves.
View issue
Kyle Dugdale
Review
Matt Reynolds
Matthew Hirt
News
Daniel Silliman
Lanier Ivester
Review
John G. Turner
Review
Rick Ostrander
Review
Brian Key
Text by Ann Voskamp and Photos by Esther Havens
Mark D. Bjelland
Qualms & Proverbs
Karen Swallow Prior, Kevin Antlitz, and Kiara John-Charles
Photo essay by Andrew Faulk
View issue
View All
Isabel Ong
Three experts discuss whether the popular concept has a future in missions discourse.
Andy Olsen
A Colombian couple prayed with neighbors and raised their children in one of America’s most influential churches. What did we gain from their deportation?
Chris Howles
UK mission mobilizer wants to rethink “unreached people groups” amid changing migration patterns and a digitally-connected world.
Deborah Haarsma
The heavens declare the glory of God in the person of Jesus Christ
Nicole Massie Martin
A letter from Mission Advancement in our November/December issue.
Samuel Law
Singapore-based missiologist argues that the term “unreached people group” is a misnomer and can feed a romanticized notion of missions.
Kyle Dugdale
A monastery on Patmos builds silence in a world of noise
Kirsten Sanders
Our therapy culture has made us too comfortable with God.
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