We're almost at the end of our 10 weeks of Alpha, enough that I have some preliminary thoughts on the experience. In our group, each week we had light refreshments, listened to a video by Nicky Gumbel, and then had a small group discussion.
For some American background: In this country, about half of Episcopalians came to the Episcopal church from another religious tradition -- in most cases, another Christian denomination. If you think about it, that says something really good about our ability to attract members, and something really bad about our ability to retain the children who are born into our churches. In the area where I lived when I first became Episcopalian, many of us were former Evangelicals, and that's my background. In the area where I live now, many Episcopalians are former Roman Catholics.
Our group contained two former Evangelicals (the priest and myself), one cradle Episcopalian, and three former Catholics.
Negative:
The chief negative for me was the apologetic arguments made by Rev. Gumbel in the early videos. Many of them were flawed arguments -- famous flawed arguments that have been discussed at length, and that I wrestled with in my teens and twenties -- and, for me, that distracted from the positives of his message. I kept wanting to argue with him, to talk about the flaws, though I kept my mouth shut for the sake of the other group members. It's better for people to accept Christ for flawed reasons than not to accept him at all. I think.
Slight negatives that turned into positives:
1) Our priest skipped a couple of videos that went farther into charismatic country than our parish is comfortable with. Last week's video did, however, mention charismatic gifts. In our group discussion, it turned into some really interesting conversation. Several of our members had no idea what speaking in tongues was about, and we talked about the charismatic movement and its history for a while.
2) Rev. Gumbel almost-but-not-quite made a very conservative statement about marriage toward the end of last week's video. This led us to a great discussion afterwards. It turned out that several of us are strongly supportive of LGBTQ Christians, and I think our discussion may lead us to take some positive actions in the future of our parish.
Positives:
1) Making a commitment to Christ: I think it is good and important for every Christian to make an explicit, conscious commitment to Christ, even if (as may be the case with people who grew up in the church) it's a decision to continue to follow a path that one has already been following for years. It's important to acknowledge that we have sinned, and that through Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection our sins are forgiven, and that we are now choosing to live in the way that Jesus taught.
The former Catholics and the cradle Episcopalian had never heard the elements of the faith presented to them in those terms, that one should make a commitment to follow Christ in this way. That's really a big omission, if the Catholic and Episcopal churches of their childhood never got around to saying that. (It's there in the liturgy, we say it every Sunday, but maybe it's easy to let the words fly by without even listening to them.) I assume, by the way, that this has something to do with our problem retaining our children in the Episcopal church; if our children hear an explicit salvation message from the Baptists that they never heard from us, well, thank you Baptists, but we Episcopalians have messed up.
So I think several of our group members heard what I think of as the basic salvation message for the first time in our Alpha group this fall. That is good and important.
2) The small group: I very much enjoyed getting to talk about elements of the Christian faith with a small group of people, in a setting where we were able to take time to listen to each other and think about new ideas, without the feeling that we have to rush off to lunch or coffee hour. This is the aspect of the program that I hope we can continue into the future, in some form.
Our Alpha group is going to talk about what we liked and disliked about our 10-week experience in our upcoming, last meeting. I'll probably have more thoughts after that meeting.