Luigi Francescon

Luigi (Louis) Francescon was born in 1866 in the village of Cavasso Nuovo, a small agricultural center in Udine, Italy. Difficult economic times combined with the requirement for his family to pay tribute to the village overlord. Francescon was determined to overcome these dire circumstances of his youth. Although only educated to the sixth grade, he perfected his craft as an artisan. After earning a decent sum in mosaics, he joined the military. Following a brief term of enlistment, he achieved the requisite funds to emigrate to the United States.

Francescon arrived in Chicago on 3 March 1890. Departing from his Catholic roots, in 1891 he converted to Protestantism (like many another Italian migrant to the USA) through the preaching of the interdenominational evangelist, Michele (Michael) Nardi [qv]. Together with Waldensians Teofilo Gay and Filippo Grill (who formalized and built on Nardi's work), Francescon helped found the First Italian Presbyterian Church of Chicago, where he was appointed as deacon and later secretary/ treasurer. Though deeply influenced by Nardi's beliefs and ways of evangelizing, Francescon's reading of the bible, and the influence of Giuseppe Beretta, led him to embrace water baptism by immersion, contravening the Presbyterian practices of 'sprinkling' and paedobaptism. His rebaptism by Beretta (who was converted among Free Methodists and baptized by a member of the Brethren) sparked a decision to leave the Presbyterian Church and (with his group of friends) work in a combined independent evangelical Italian congregation with those converted under Beretta's ministry. After a trip back to Italy to visit his family, from 1904 this congregation held services in various homes (including those of Vito Nicola Moles and of Francescon himself) for some time before renting a building on Chicago’s West Grand Avenue.

On 25 August 1907, during a visit to William H. Durham’s North Avenue Mission only blocks away, Francescon was reportedly baptized in the Spirit. With fellow Pentecostal pioneer Pietro Ottolini, he stood for several years at the helm of an awakening at the Italian Grand Avenue Mission, which later took the name the Assemblea Cristiana (Christian Assembly). Francescon helped steer the church through several years of doctrinal turbulence (over issues such as the Sabbath), while continuing to stand firmly against further attempts to 'organize' the work. However, when the future of the Italian American Pentecostal movement depended on it he relented to the demand to structure the church along doctrinal and missional lines. He was thus among the chief founders and original overseers of the Christian Church of North America, the flagship denomination of the movement.

In 1911, Durham reported that Francescon had left for Italy to evangelize his home region. "It was never our privilege to meet a more blessed and powerful man of God", Durham wrote, "He is certainly doing, as it were, the work of an Apostle". From Chicago, Francescon also founded congregations in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, leaving his wife and six children in the care of the Church quite often. Alongside his pioneering work on the North American front, Francescon is also counted among the most prominent of the founders of Pentecostal work in South America. Accompanied by Giacomo Lombardi and Lucia Menna from the Chicago Mission, Francescon embarked on a missionary trip to family and friends in Argentina, arriving in Buenos Aires in October of 1909. His own report, and the historical memory of the churches he founded, attest to his evangelism being accompanied by healings and various miracles (such as the healing of Angela Zanetti, whose husband came from the same region as Francescon, through the visit of Francescon's associate, Amelia Borlenghi). On a sojourn to the city of San Cayetano, Francescon endured arrest and imprisonment, standing trial in the neighboring city of Necochea. Upon his release, he was forbidden from preaching ever again in San Cayetano. While the cause of his imprisonment is not certain, given his penchant for preaching to Catholics and the regional responses to Protestant proselytizing, he causes are probably not hard to guess. Afterwards, he returned to Buenos Aires. The fruit of Francescon’s work led years later to a prospering denomination, the "Asamblea Cristiana" (the 'Christian Assembly').

Francescon’s life-defining work still lay ahead. Among the diaspora in Brazil he founded the Congregação Cristã no Brasil (Por. for Christian Congregation in Brazil, the mother church for what would grow into a global denomination). In March of 1910 he arrived in São Paulo. One of his first contacts there was Vincenzo Pievani, an atheist. Pievani brought him to his home in San Antonio da Platina where Francescon conducted a fruitful outreach among the Roman Catholic population. His success attracted the attention of a local priest. The priest reportedly plotted to have Francescon killed, sparking Francescon's escape and return to São Paulo. There he witnessed to a number of Presbyterians, Methodists, and Roman Catholics, who left their parishes and joined the fledgling Pentecostal movement. He delivered a homily in Italian at a Presbyterian church in the Italian barrio known as the Brás, urging the congregation to seek the baptism in the Spirit. The eldership fervidly disapproved of both the manner and language Francescon used to deliver the sermon. Ordered to leave the congregation, Francescon carried a large number away with him and founded an independent congregation. The church became the linchpin for the Congregação Cristã, which remains to this day one of the largest Pentecostal denominations in Brazil.

Over his lifetime, Francescon made nine trips from his home church in Chicago to Brazil. Although he made no monetary demands, the Congregação Cristã funded his last two trips. Even until his death in 1964, at ninety-six-years-old and completely blind, Francescon continued to send letters of encouragement to the Pentecostal work he founded in Brazil.

Paul J. Palma

Sources:

Anderson, Allan, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Bongiovanni, Guy, Pioneers of the Faith, Farrell, PA: Sound Ministries, 1971.

Francescon, Luigi, Faithful Testimony, 2nd ed., Oak Park, IL: privately printed, 1952.

Francescon, Luigi, Resumo de uma ramificao da ohra de Deus, 3rd ed., Chicago, 1958.

Palma, Paul J., Italian American Pentecostalism and the Struggle for Religious Identity, London: Routledge, 2020.

Read, William R., New Patterns of Church Growth, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965.

Toppi, Francesco, Luigi Francescon, I pionieri del risveglio pentecostale italiano serie, Rome: ADI-Media, 1997.