St. Augustine (Piacenza)

The history of the Confessional Lutheran Church in Piacenza began three years ago, when Pr. Tyler McMiller came into contact with a young Lutheran family of Chilean origin who had immigrated to Italy.
Piacenza, a crossroads of people and commerce due to its location on the banks of the Po River and in the center of northwestern Italy between four major cities: Milan, Turin, Genoa, and Bologna. Piacenza, the "city of a hundred churches," had one of the largest and most powerful Catholic dioceses in the Middle Ages, with the Abbey of San Colombano, one of the most important monastic centers in Europe, the last founded in Italy by Saint Columbanus in 614 in Bobbio. It was famous between the 7th and 12th centuries for its Scriptorium, whose catalog in 982 included over 700 codices and preserved 25 of the 150 oldest surviving manuscripts of Latin literature.
The Protestant Reformation also reached Piacenza at the end of the 16th century and gained so much support that it gave rise to a circle of scholars and wealthy laymen, which was soon closed, however, so as not to antagonize the Farnese nobles, the lords of the city.
Today, God has established an evangelical community founded on the Word of God, prayer, the forgiveness of sins, and the eternal life that Jesus gives us without merit. Despite the diversity of ethnicities and languages, Italian is the language that unites the faithful and in which the word and sacraments of the Holy Mass are celebrated.
The community lives its vocation as the proclamation of the Kingdom of God in the hearts of men and in the diffusion of Lutheran theology and culture in its own context.
Our Confessional Lutheran Church (St. Augustine) originally met in the homes of its members. Today, it has the great blessing of using the former church of Saints Nazarus and Celsus, which commemorated its thousandth anniversary in 2025, to celebrate its Masses. The church also served as the temple of the adjacent hospital and is located in the city center, at Via Giuseppe Taverna 41 in Piacenza (PC).