Francesco Toppi

Francesco Toppi was born in Rome on 1 January 1928, the only son of Gioacchino Toppi, a cobbler by profession, and his wife Gina. Toppi spent his childhood and early adolescence in Rome, following his parents to the first local congregation of the Pentecostal community founded in Rome, which met in via Adige.

On April 9, 1935, the Fascist Regime decreed, via the Circolare signed by Guido Buffarini Guidi that the public and private exercise of Pentecostal worship was prohibited; it was the beginning of a difficult period of persecution for the Italian church which continued formally until the revocation of the Circolare in 1955. On June 6, 1943, when Francesco was fifteen, his father Gioacchino, his mother, his grandmother, along with other believers, were arrested during a raid by the fascist police, in a house where they clandestine services. They were held in prison for twenty-three days (Cardarelli 2014, pp. 2-5); their release would always be remembered by Francesco as one of the defining experiences of his life.

From 1945, during the post-war period, pentecostal evangelistic activities resumed in an atmosphere of relative religious freedom (Iovino 2014, pp. 33-34). Though the Circolare was still in force until 1955 (Rinaldi 2018, p. 43), whilever American forces were in Italy, there was a grudging acknowledgement of the constitutional rights of Italian citizens to freedom of religion. It was in this period too that, during a special series of meetings with the visiting Swiss pastor, Herman Parli, at the YMCA meeting rooms in Via Curtatone (near Termini), that the 17 year old Francesco received the experience of the new birth. Paolo Arcangeli, later pastor of the Genoa community and editor of the magazine Risveglio Pentecostale, also converted during the same meetings.

Toppi completed his accounting qualifications at high school (the Second Cycle of Education of the Second Degree Secondary School) and decided to pursue theological studies: he enrolled in the International Bible Training Institute (IBTI) then based in Leamington Spa, in Great Britain, under the direction of Frederick H. Squire. Toppi began the course of studies in 1947 and finished in 1949. During his stay at the Biblical School he was baptized in the Holy Spirit. He subsequently completed a teaching degree (pedagogia) at the La Sapienza University of Rome. It was while he was away in England, therefore, that at its 1947 National Convention, the Assemblies of God (Assemblee di Dio in Italia, or ADI) was established in Italy, as an affiliated (but fully independent) fellowship in connection with the American Assemblies of God. (Introvigne 1998, p. 101).

After a brief period in Scandinavia, Toppi returned to Italy and was enrolled on the ADI's General Register of full time Ministers on 21 December 1949 to be engaged in the evangelization of Southern Italy: in Salerno (1950), in Calabria (1950-1951) and in the province of Avellino (1952-1953). In 1954, the same year of foundation of the Scuola Biblica italiana in Rome (with the support of the American churches), Toppi was elected member of the General Council of Churches. He was pastor in Turin, from 1953 to 1959, where he met Annamaria Ferretti whom he married on June 14, 1959.

After seven years spent pastoring in Turin, Francesco Toppi returned to Rome, where the ADI Leadership were supporting the expansion of the Istituto Biblico Italiano under the direction of pastor Roberto Bracco. Toppi was inducted as Secretary-Treasurer of the Biblical School and left almost immediately for a six month fundraising and delegation tour of the United States, inviting North American Churches to support the building of the projected new headquarters building at Via Prenestina 639.

In 1961 Toppi was elected pastor of the key church of Rome (Via dei Bruzi) which counted about 800 members: he would remain its pastor until 2007.

At the Naples Convention of 1977, Toppi succeeded Umberto Nello Gorietti as President and legal representative of the “Assemblee di Dio in Italia”, a position Toppi would hold continuously until 2007. Gorietti had led the ADI into formal legal existence as an Ente Morale di Culto (under the Decree of the President of the Republic no. 1349) on 5 December 1959. Toppi's organizational vision represented real change in the Italian pentecostal environment, where almost all churches had been anti-denominational (Introvigne 2004, p. 29). During the period of his presidency, the ADI grew to include some 168,000 believers, 1100 churches, 490 pastors, and various others institutions, such as radio and television stations, a family home, a CERT, and three retirement homes (Burgess, Van Der Maas 2003, p. 1149). Toppi preached, taught, and wrote so as to connect the Pentecostal movement to its roots in the traditional evangelical revival movements, tracing the historical and theological roots of the ADI to the Methodist revival (Rinaldi 2017, p. 25) and the "third Protestantism" (Stretti 1998, pp.91-101).

In 1980 Toppi helped found Cristiani Oggi, a fortnightly journal of evangelization and information that he directed until 2007.

On 29 December 1986, at the Palazzo Chigi under the Presidency of Bettino Craxi, the ADI signed a formal intesa with the Italian government, which was finally approved by the Italian Parliament after years of negotiation, as the “Legge 22 novembre 1988, n. 517”. The agreement gave pastors the right to visit hospitals and prisons; provided legal recognition of university equivalence for the diploma of the Istituto Biblico Italiano, and the right to collect tax-deductible offerings. For historians, Toppi's decision to establish an Historical Archive for the incorporated body (including documents from 1946 to the present) has been an enormous boon for the study of Italian pentecostalism (Esposito 2013, p. 20).

Toppi himself became, over the years, one of the movement's key historical writers. In 1989 he published with David Womack Le radici del movimento pentecostale (an expanded Italian language version of Womack's The roots of the Pentecostal movement) (Womack, Toppi 1989), but it was mainly from the second half of the 1990s that Toppi intensified his work for the preservation of the historical memory of the Italian Pentecostal Movement by publishing a series of volumes through the movement's publishing house, ADI-Media. These were contributions (as prof. Giancarlo Rinaldi has noted) which mainly focused on the internal story of the ADI (Di Iorio, Esposito, Iovino 2017, p. 7). Among his numerous titles were: E mi sarete testimoni (1999), Madri in Israele (2003), the biographies of Luigi Francescon (2007), Pietro Ottolini (1997), Giuseppe Beretta (1997), Giacomo Lombardi (1998), Pietro Menconi (1998), Massimiliano Tosetto (1998), Michele Palma (1998), Michele Nardi (2002), Umberto Gorietti (2004), Vincenzo Federico (2006). Toppi edited the column “Ottantennio pentecostale” in Cristiani Oggi where he provided biographical profiles of many of the main figures in the history of contemporary Italian evangelicalism, including Salvatore Anastasio and Aurelio Pagano (Iovino 2008, p. 75). Toppi also published a number of books on Christian education and training, including A domanda risponde, Il Vangelo secondo Giobbe, and Il battesimo, perché; he was responsible for the translation for the Italian Pentecostal church of numerous hymns and canticles from the English language, most of which flowed into the hymnbook Inni di lode which was used in the ADI Churches. A compendium of some Toppi's rarer contributions was published by prof. Rinaldi in 2019 (Rinaldi 2019, pp. 71-84).

Francesco Toppi spent his last years in a small village about twenty kilometres from Rome, together with his wife Annamaria and daughter Lucilla. He died on 14 August 2014.

Salvatore Esposito

[v. 20 January 2020]

Sources

Burgess, Stanley M. and Eduard M. Van Der Maas, International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan, 2003.

Cardarelli, Eliseo, Francesco Toppi, in «Risveglio Pentecostale», agosto 2014.

Di Iorio, Dayana, Salvatore Esposito, and Alessandro Iovino, Liberi per servire, EUN, Marchirolo (VA) 2017.

Esposito, Salvatore, Un secolo di pentecostalismo italiano, The Writer, Milano 2013.

Introvigne, Massimo, I Protestanti, Elledici, Torino 1998.

Introvigne, Massimo, I Pentecostali, Elledici Leumann, Torino 2004.

Iovino, Alessandro, Salvatore Anastasio, Guida, Napoli 2008.

Iovino, Alessandro, Alfonso Melluso, Edizioni GBU, Chieti 2014.

Rinaldi, Giancarlo, Una lunga marcia verso la libertà, Edizioni GBU, Chieti 2017.

Rinaldi, Giancarlo, Bibliografia ragionata sulla storia del Movimento pentecostale in Italia, EUN, Marchirolo 2018.

Rinaldi, Giancarlo, Avviamento allo studio della storia del Movimento pentecostale italiano, EUN, Marchirolo 2019.

Stretti, Eugenio, Il movimento pentecostale, Le Assemblee di Dio in Italia, Claudiana, Torino 1998.

Womack, D. A. and F. Toppi, Le radici del movimento pentecostale, ADI-Media, Roma, 1989.