Alpha Course Easter 24
The Alpha Course is one which is supported by many churches within the Church of Scotland. We last ran Alpha just as the Covid pandemic was starting so this year we decided to run another one, this time in Starbucks in Craigleith in April -June.
Eleven people, a few with no contact with our church, signed up for the course. We started at 7.00pm with food and we had time to chat to get to know others on the course. At 7.30 we showed the Alpha video for the night and around 8.00 with coffee and buns we broke into smaller groups to discuss and raise questions about what we had seen and heard. Questions like “Why did Jesus die?”, “Is there more to life than this?” and “How can I have faith?” stimulated lots of discussion without any one acting as a teacher to give the “right answer”. Everyone appreciated the opportunity to talk about things of such significance without being fearful of showing their ignorance or lack of clarity about these matters.
Following the 10 evenings we had an “awayday” at the Leonardo Hotel in Clermiston where we watched a set of videos about the Holy Spirit and what it means to be “filled” with the Holy Spirit. That engendered lots of discussion as well as being a time of personal challenge and contemplation.
The universal response from feedback forms we have received is how much people appreciated being able to talk about matters of Christian faith openly without friction, so much so that the group is continuing to meet informally as a “Beta Group” on Thursday evenings in the church at 7.30 to talk more about other aspects of the Christian faith.
The important thing about Alpha and its follow up is that no prior Bible knowledge or theological understanding is required in order to benefit by contributing or just listening to these conversations. We are planning to have more open discussion groups in the Autumn and there will be more about this soon.
There is also a new “Youth Alpha” film series currently being produced and we hope to encourage some of our younger members to get involved in that and share their faith with their peers in 2025.
We are confident that getting involved in Alpha is one very certain way of challenging your faith and understanding of where you are on your journey of faith and it would be wonderful if, by using this tool, we could reverse the inexorable decline in church attendance and faith in Jesus Christ.
Donald Cameron