Who we are

Agape international ecumenical centre is a place of encounter where one lives an intense experience of community in beautiful natural surroundings. Agape was and is an important point of reference in Italian Protestantism, for 50 years a place of education and development, theological exploration, political engagement, of acceptance and validation of differences. Every year many people, diverse in their religion, culture, ages, political thinking, come to Agape for one week to discuss and to be challenged, to get to know themselves and each other and to exchange experiences around a particular theme.
Agape was built after the Second World War as a sign of hope and of reconciliation between people, thanks to the voluntary labour of many young men and women; a resident group of 12 people still lives at Agape throughout the year and the dimensions of community and voluntary service remain central. The name Agape indicates the love of God for humankind that "never fails" (1 Corinthians, 13). Agape expresses a strong lay spirituality, where believers and non-believers feel equally at home.
Agape rises in the Cottian Alps nearly 1600 metres above sea level, encircled by fir trees and south-facing meadows, with an architecture that is rich in symbols. The materials are typical of the Waldensian Valleys, wood and stone, with large expanses of glass and wide open spaces. The building offers 100 beds, with bathrooms on each floor, a great hall, a modern kitchen, a fair-trade bar and a library.
Around twenty conferences are organised in the course of the year including camps, seminars and study weekends. Agape offers educational programmes to schools and is also open to individuals and groups who provide their own programme of events.

• What is Agape?


• Spirituality in Agape


• Training and teaching


• Architecture and utopia


• A culture of differences


• The international dimension


• To whom does Agape belong?

Agape describes itself as an "Ecumenical centre", where ecumenism is understood in broad terms. An encounter among believers of different faiths and denominational backgrounds certainly, but also secular in character so that those who are not believers can also feel at home. In an open dialogue among atheists, agnostics and believers, each participant comes to lose his or her presumptions in claiming to know and possess the truth.Agape is located in the Waldensian Valleys, the only part of Italy where protestants are a sociologically relevant presence. It is affiliated with the protestant world and is involved in organizing national and international encounters and conferences.
The construction of Agape began in 1947 as an initiative of young Italian Protestants under the guidance of Waldensian Pastor Tullio Vinay and with the support of the international ecumenical movement. Hundreds of young people from all over the world were involved over a period of years in the construction of Agape. For the young generation emerging from the Second World War, Agape was a sign of reconciliation, standing for collective effort in manual labour, communal life and ecumenical experience.
The name Agape refers to God's love for humanity which is reflected in the lives of believers. The Apostle Paul affirms "Love (Agape) never fails" (I Corinthians 13:8)
From the very beginning, volunteer work has been a hallmark of Agape. A resident community was formed early on to manage the practical organization of the centre but was also involved in the centre's cultural development.
The resident group is composed of women and men coming from different countries and differing confessional traditions and includes those without religious faith. Life in the community gives the opportunity to learn and grow together, enriching one another through the demanding effort of encountering others, of comparing ideas and also of disagreeing. The resident group represents the first test of Agape's challenge to create a multicultural community.
In the busy periods (summer, Christmas and Easter) a group of "work campers", both Italian and non-Italian, support the resident group. To ensure the group can feel involved in the Agape project and to avoid an experience of undefined volunteerism, much energy goes towards creating a sense of community together.

There is no chapel at Agape. The area called the "open air Church" cannot be used for services during the long winter months, and during the short summer we often prefer other places. Even so, the "open air Church" represents quite accurately the nature of the faith and spirituality here at Agape. It has no walls and echoes to the voices of those who are studying, singing or playing. This space represents the decision taken at Agape?s construction not to live with separating walls: neither those which divide people from one another, nor those which define the areas devoted to our relationship with God from other spaces dedicated to ordinary discourse -- discourse carried on as if "God took no part", only to be confronted by Him in those who carry his presence with them as a part of their lives.
Those who come to Agape seeking regular moments of meditation and encounters with the word of God and with spirituality are likely to be disappointed. However, those who wish to challeng their own spirituality, to express their desire to share the hope that spurs them to inter-personal relations, can organize, along with other men and women present, times for worship, meditation and spirituality.
Within the resident group, Christ cannot be forgotten. He is the oldest resident , here from the start.
We don?t know if He has ever left, but we certainly never asked him to go. When we meet Him, we talk together about the history of this place: He remembers that Agape was not always here but that it was built thanks to the imagination of those who dared to dream it, thanks to the sweat of the men and women whose toil raised the walls, who dedicated a part of their lives and who dedicated themselves to the project. Sometimes we talk about the Agape of today, and He wants to know all about it. He comes to the meetings, He slips into camp sessions, even those to which He has not been formally invited. It?s as if He?s afraid we?ll forget about Him.
The walls of Agape have plenty of cracks. We like these cracks because they say something about our lives here. On the one hand, its extremely concrete nature: something really must be done about those cracks, just as we must clean the staircases, put up with occasional boring discussions, accept that our relationships with one another are not always perfect. On the other hand there?s the utopian aspect. The very architecture of this place, and the symbolism expressed by it, with its main living area opening out onto the world, the open-air church, the upward tilting roofs are interwoven with our actions and our testimony. The walls supporting Agape are those who stay here, the friends who get involved in the life of the centre and who contribute in various ways to give us a new perspective, a motivation and some- times even a profound re-evaluation of what we?re doing.

In recent years the training work here at Agape, particulary the work carried out on communication and listening and on the themes of "adulthood", authenticity and the role of education, haven’t only provided an important stimulus to the camps, but have also borne fruit in self-awareness and personal growth. Women and men have attempted the difficult, contradictory, utopian -and thus never entirely successful- task of coming together for one week within a community which seeks to live the agape, by a welcoming attitude and a willingness to listen.
Listed below, in schematic fashion, are the objectives we have been trying to achieve:
1) To motivate people in the work of Agape. The difficulty lies in clarifying adequately the reality of Agape today, allowing each person the opportunity to participate in the various camps while maintaining a clear vision of the totality of the various projects which Agape stands for.
2) To teach adulthood. A great deal of effort is directed towards increasing the staff’s awareness of the difference in age and maturity between them and the children or adolescents attending the camps and in identifying the staff’s educative role towards them. This calls for intense individual work directed toward becoming as much one’s real self as possible. It’s a search for the maximum in personal authenticity, without confusing this with mere spontaneity or pure instinctiveness. It’s only an apparent paradox to state that only those who have worked long and hard on self-awareness can permit themselves to act spontaneously.
3) To teach interpersonal relations. In theory, we all agree on how interpersonal relations should be lived: in practice, it is much more difficult. One important theme in training in interpersonal relations is that of training in dealing with differences: differences in gender, social class, race and culture.
4) Teaching freedom defined in terms of responsibility. This is a key question in an educational context, particularly one which seeks to emphasize coherence and authenticity.
5) To encounter the Gospel. Once again, the chal- lenge is both difficult and intensely absorbing: to speak of God in layman’s terms, to give witness to the faith to those who have none, accepting the risk of superimposing our own projections on the Word of God. How can we prepare ourselves for dialogue with everyone, believers and non-believers alike?

People who already know Agape and are returning for their second, fifth or thirtieth time, often try to catch a glimpse of it from the road, before getting to Praly, but it can’t be seen - apart from the bell tower - not only in the summer when the foliage hides everything, but also in autumn, when the larches turn orange, then yellow and finally lose their needles: the large structure in stone and wood seems invisible,,camouflaged by the colours of the dried leaves and the earth.
Those who come to Agape for the first time and see the main block with its huge windows, the three houses, and the open-air church, are surprised to discover that the centre was built nearly fifty years ago: the novelty and frechness of the architecture lead one to immagine a more recent project.
The uniqueness of the centre is the result of an intense collaboration between Tullio Vinay, minister, and Leo Ricci, architect. It is the result of their ability to dream and to long for something. From their dreams and their capacity to make them come true, emerged the building as it is today, with its characteristic features and powerful symbols which take place here.
Let us take for example the enormous windows, or the upward-turning roofs, an architectural folly at 1600 metres above sea level: Agape’s roots open towards heaven as if to receive the grace that descends from on high; Agape’s roofs are concave in order to symbolize her openness towards the world. A horyzontal and a vertical opening.out which intersect above the ping-pong area: the world and God living together in this place, without end and without boundaries.
This characteristic, belonging to the windows, roof and walls of Agape, of opening towards Heaven and towards the exterior, reminds us of the constant reaching-out towards meetings, trascndency and the rest of markind experienced by those coming here, each with his or her own suitcase of experiences, to meet and share ideas with other people, to enrich one another, and finally, to go home carrying a larger suitcase.
In the same way, the open-air church reminds us that we don’t need intermediaries between ourselves and God, just as the voices of those of sing, play of discuss, remind us of where we are, and bring us back to the ecumenical context of the centre, where catholics, protestant, muslims, atheist and agnostics cannot ignore each other’s presence.
Even the cracks in the walls speaks of the utopia, the boldness of those who clared to visualize Agape and to trasform their dream into wood, walls and stones day by day, digging a trench, building a doorway, overcoming a difficulty.
They also speak of our projects, and of our desire not to shut ourselves up in a house, but to allow the community to take shape according to the different people that come and go; they reflect too our search for trascndency in freedom, when we experiment diffrent forms of worship, in heated discussions, late at night, in ecounters of love and in intense friendships.

In recent years, Agape has carried out its activities starting from an awareness of the rich multiplicity of the society in which we live.
A noteworthy stimulus to reflections of this kind has come through the study of women’s relationships. To give meaning to differences is one way to live our relationships better and to recognize the value of each person.
Valuing differences which are revealed in relationships means for us in the first place recognizing a relationship as the space in which personal identity is formed.
As a centre which organizes meetings and encounters, we are interested in proposing encounters where differences be come truly enriching rather than become homogenized in a kind of "Agape identity", understood as a sort of identity card for those participating in our activities.
Therefore we want to recognize those persons and groups who can bring their "differentness" to Agape and submit it to scrutiny.
It is chiefly through the awareness of the partialities that motivate our lives that we can manage to construct a new way of being a community.
Therefore we need to work on understanding in our minds and expressing in our lives the idea that no individual is either neutral or universal.
Each of us begins with the inescapable partiality inherent in our own gender and yet this necessary starting point can become fruitful and productive if it is accepted and internalized in the right way. This genderdetermined partiality can develop and change when consciously measured against the various limits given to us through our cultural, historical and social origins.
Certain people, at this very moment of history, are the spokespersons for some important challenges to civil society.
At Agape, such people are present at camps for homosexual believers, as well as those on women’s issues, political camps on the issue of multicultural society, and in general in our search for true dialogue between living faiths. But you’ll also find them in an area where Agape has a long and positive tradition, the theme of the common elements in the life experience of atheists, believers and agnostics.
Our concern with the proper appreciation of differences has also informed the development of the theological camps held here in recent years, with their emphasis on the partiality of truth.
This is the only point of departure for an encounter which recognizes the differences among the various positions of faith yet also the existential valency they represent.

Is Agape in Italy? Yes and no. It is true that the centre is situated on the territory of the italian Republic and that most of the people who come here frequently are native italian speakers. Agape, however, was not built in one of the main areas of italian culture but at just a few Kilometres from the border with France. Agape is located in a region which, throughout history, has been a site of transit and meeting between different cultures, and the language spoken by the local population, Provencal, is widely used in three countries (Spain. France and Italy) althout it has never been made an official language in any of these states. On a wider scale, yes, Agape was built in Europe, but rather than being in the centre of this continent, it is closer to the Meiterranean, an ancient centre for meetings between different cultures.
Similarly, althouth the main language spoken at Agape is italian, any visitors will realize straight away that, not only is this italian pronounced in different regional and national accents, but that it can be heard amidst other tongues. English, German, French, spanich, Arabic, Russian and many other languages and dialects too. Because of this, the Italians who come regularly to the centre often speak one of more foreign languages and they also find a way to communicate in languages of which they know only a few words.
All this as not come about merely, by chance, but has been an integrant part of Agape’s project right from the construction of the centre, which was initiated immediately following the end of the second world war, and which was accomplished thanks to the labour of volunteers coming from different countries and continents. When the Centre is defined as it is also in the etymolgical sense of the term: a center where people from all inhabited part of the world may meet. Now and then the centre also organizes meeting on topics of national or local interest, but for the most part the themes of our camps are of global aspect, even when, for practical reasons, the official language of a camp is Italian alone, as is the case, for example, in the camps for children and adolescents. Every year Agape’s programme includes a series of specifically international seminars, organized by people of different nationalities, and which ensure the translation (usually into english, german and french) of the whole camp’s activities. Every year the work-camp is international, the Resident-Group is international, and so is the General Committee.
Agape’s research is based on the recognition and exploitation of differences. One of the fundamental differenced is that between cultures, and we try to live this differences, explore it and lay it out to profit both through the formulation we give to every meeting, and through the experience of relationships we try to make possible.

Does Agape structure to the Waldesian Church? In a sense yes. The belongs to the Waldensian Church Council, one of whose members chairs the meetings of Agape’s general Committee, and the Centre comes under the auspices of the Waldensian organizational network. But if the Centre is described as ecumenical and not waldensian it is not only because it works on the dialogue between different churches. During the inauguration ceremony the symbolic key to Agape was presented to the representative of the Ecumenical Council of Churches, who accepted it, only to then give it straight back in order to indicate that the Council entristed the management of the centre to the Waldesian Church. So does Agape belong to the Ecumenical Council then? In theory that is certainly partly true, even if in practice the links between the two institutions are not always that apparent.
From a pragmatic point of view however, you could say that Agape belong to the Resident Group, who are not only responsible for the practical running of the centre, but who also coordinate the work of the various teams who prepare and run the camps. The Resident Groups also welcomes the camp’s participant and visitors to the centre, and represents the very heart of Agape life.
But the Resident Group do not make all the decisions alone of course. The general Committee, who set the general guides-lines, not only appoint the members of the Resident Group, but also elect an Executive Committee who support the residents in the management of the centre. Agape could not function without the work of those who organize and lead the camps either. But even these teams of “staff” cannot be considered masters of their own camp, which always remains part of a larger project.
In a sense it is also correct to say that Agape belongs to those who take part in her camps, not only because, far from being empty vessels who come to Agape to fill themselves up, they make an essential contribution to the life of the centre, but also because these active participants are members of the Association of the Friend of Agape, which moreover nominates three representatives to stand an the General Committee. The Italian Evangelical Youth Federation also elects three representatives to the general Committee and cooperates at various levels in the activities of the centre, and so, to a small extent, Agape also belongs to the Youth federation.
So, in short, to whom can we say that Agape belongs? The answer is that it belongs to all these institutions and individuals together, but to none if isolated from the rest. We hope, moreover, that the Lord, too. Considers Agape as something of his.
A confusing situation? At times it can appear so, but it is also without doubt a situation which allows a vast and varied richness of self-expression and production. It is for this reason that, despite the problems we often have to face, we are fond of our organizational structure and would like to keep it as it is, at least in spirit.