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Alpha International Highlights
NO. 52INTERNATIONAL NEWSPAPERDECEMBER 2010 – MARCH 2011
WELCOME TO INTERNATIONAL ALPHA NEWS
International Alpha News is published twice a year to keep church leaders and congregations up-to-date with the spread of the Alpha course and associated ministries. The Alpha Course is an introduction to the Christian faith which has seen extraordinary success at stimulating faith among those who are not churchgoers and also given a new dynamism to many existing Christians. The number of registered churches worldwide at the end of each year since 1992 was:
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Year Courses Attendees
(cumulative)
1992 5
1993 200 4,600
1999 14,200 2 m
2000 17,000 2.7m
2001 19,800 3.8m
2002 24,400 4.7m
2003 27,340 5.7m
2004 29,051 6.7m
2005 31,167 8m
2006 32,592 9.3m
2007 35,092 10.8m
2008 35,385 12.3m
2009 44,365 14m
2010 46,940 16m (est)
Number of registered courses in some countries:
Australia 2,268
Canada 700
France 602
Germany 1,472
India 7,864
Indonesia 525
Japan 350
Kenya 281
Nigeria 286
Ireland300
Romania 552
South Korea 4,794
UK 8,742
USA 10,659
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PAGE 1 - Articles taken from Alpha International News Dec10 – Mar 2011and distributed by Alpha Irelandwith permission
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Nicky Gumbel Addresses4,000 Leaders at CongressonEvangelisation
“100,000 Prisoners in UK alone have done Alpha”
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Alpha pioneer Nicky Gumbel was one of the main speakers at the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Cape Town, South Africa in October. The Congress was attended by 4000 leaders from more than 200 countries to confront critical issues of our time such as poverty, HIV/AIDS, and persecution. It was also looking at how they relate to the future of the Church and world evangelization.
First held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, the Congress was the brainchild of America n Evangelist Billy Graham.
Designed to help further Graham’s vision of total evangelisation of the world the Congress met for a second time in Manila in 1989. As a result of Lausanne II in Manila, nearly 350 partnerships were formed between churches and agencies around the world. It is hoped for an even higher number of partnerships after Cape Town 2010. The ten day event featured seminars on various issues facing the spreading of the word, such as how to use the media to the best effect and how best to communicate the truth orally. Nicky Gumbel addressed the Congress on the penultimate night and spoke about Alpha. A Global Link enabled more than 600 sites around the world to interact and communicate with the conference. The Conference ended with the Cape Town Commitment - a call to action and a message of love sculpted by senior evangelical theologians from around the world. To watch videos of speakers and interviews from Cape Town 2010 go to:
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WHAT NICKY SAID….
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One of the most inspiring things about this conference is to hear the stories from parts of the Church where you are persecuted for your faith. But you know we in the West who have much less to fear than you have, are often tempted to be ashamed just because of the ridicule and the criticism that Christianity is in some way irrational... And the Gospel is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes, that’s the second thing. The third thing is that the Gospel is both words and actions..
There are thousands, well 100,000 in the UK alone who have done Alpha in the prisons;we meet them at the prison gates, we help to find them a place to live, we help to find them a job and the churches welcome them with open arms into their communities. We’ve placed 1,000 already, 34 in our own church and since 1994, only two out of those 34 have reoffended and that is way down on the reoffending rate generally because Jesus transforms people’s lives...
All Christians believe in the Gospel, but not all Christians believe in the urgency of the Gospel and the Gospel is urgent. Only Jesus can meet the deepest human needs in every human being. He met my deepest human need, he met yours and he wants to meet the needs of everyone out there, and he has entrusted us, the Church, with the responsibility of taking that message out to the world and it’s an awesome and an amazing responsibility.
This is an exciting time to be a Christian and my appeal is that we as Christians, we as the Church of Jesus Christ entrusted with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, should stop fighting one another and unite together to take this message to the world. Because, St Paul wrote: ‘I’m not ashamed of the Gospel because it is the power of God, for the salvation of everyone who has faith
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PRISONS EVENT IN GHANA
Over 100 delegates attended an Alpha for Prisons Global Alpha Training event in Kumasi, Ghana in July. The event was opened by Michael Kofi Bansah, the National Director General of Prisons who said, ‘My administration takes profound interest in using the Alpha course as a means of spiritual and moral transformation of inmates and officers alike.’
Alpha’s Prison Ministry Pastor Emmy Wilson said about Mr Bansah’s words: ‘This was an incredible demonstration of his support for the GAT and its vision. In his address he said that after the GAT training he expected:
- That all Prison Chaplains would be well versed in running the Alpha course and that
- The Alpha course would be included in the curriculum of the Prison Officers’ Training School to inculcate Christian virtues.
New UK web design proves big hit
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Alpha’s annual UK advertising campaign was led this year by a series of web initiatives which resulted in a 40% increase in visits to the Alpha site during the first week of September. There were also Alpha advertisements, dominated by the slogan ‘The Meaning of life Is —’, on buses and at tube and railway stations. Local churches held events across the country and an evening with TV adventurer Bear Grylls in London.
Alpha have put together a new website, and amongst the normal viral videos on YouTube (which incidentally Mouse thinks are great) we also now have a blog widget to find a course, a Twibbon to add to your Twitter avatar and the website promises an iphone app soon.’
On top of that the website is packed with useful resources, videos and even animations which can be used in your church to support your Alpha efforts, with the Alpha Friends website providing great opportunity not just to download resources, but to engage with the central team or other Alpha practitioners. ‘It seems to Mouse to easily be the most sophisticated marketing that the Church has produced. ’Bus advertisements could be seen in the four capital cities: Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast and London. There were also digital screen adverts on central London underground platforms including Victoria and Oxford Circus stations at rush hour times in the morning and late afternoon. Three animated viral adverts were also launched online.
PAGE 1 - Articles taken from Alpha International News Dec10 – Mar 2011and distributed by Alpha Irelandwith permission
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PAGE 1 - Articles taken from Alpha International News Dec10 – Mar 2011and distributed by Alpha Irelandwith permission
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AMERICAN JEFF SCOTT ON ALPHA’S HUGE IMPACT IN NICARAGUA
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“Alpha is doubling churches”
I attend north ViewChurch in Carmel, Indiana. We are a large independent Christian church of about 4,000 members.
Our Missions and Outreach pastor, Doug Ehrgot, was returning from nicaragua in 2005 and found an alpha newsletter full of alpha stories in the seat back of the chair in front of him on the plane. He read it and saw that there was an alpha conference that weekend in Texas. Doug went to the alpha training and came back very excited asking if I would help him start it in the church. I agreed straight away. We saw there was another alpha conference in Chicago about three months later, but there was a big problem.
I own my own business and was an expert witness in a case that I had been working on for a year and a half. The trial was scheduled for that weekend and so I said, ‘Doug, I just can’t … I’m not going to be able to do it’. Doug replied, ‘I’m believing you can go. I’m buying you a registration packet.’
I said, ‘If I can go, I want to go.’ The day before the conference my case settled out of court and I came to the alpha conference to learn about alpha. We brought a small group with us and went back and started our own alpha programme at north View, which was an immediate success. We’ve now had 25 alpha courses at north View.We run six alpha courses a year where we’ve seen many lives transformed.
Our church has sponsored missionaries in Nicaragua for over 20 years but up until about 2005, I had no interest in going to a foreign country. My wife was invited to lead a women’s ministry trip to Nicaragua and I didn’t want to stay home. I thought how bad can it be? I went and God broke my heart for Nicaragua. We fell in love with the country and as we built relationships with pastors in Nicaragua, I was invited to come back and teach the lay people in their church. Pastor Belcer is a senior pastor in Nicaragua who has 19 churches that we have helped support for 20 years.
He invited me to come and teach in his churches. I invited Pastor Belcer and the two other pastors involved with the Nicaraguan resource network (that is our church mission) as well as the senior pastors of the two largest evangelical churches in Managua, to a lunch where I did a taste of alpha for them using the alpha model. I told them it is one of the fastest growing church movements in the world and was a new way of doing evangelism. at that stage we’d only been running alpha for two years at north View but it had made a big enough impact on us that we thought we could use it.
Also, prior to going to Nicaragua, we had responded to a request from alpha England to go to India with My Hope India, and so we had done two Gats in India, so we had experience there. In Nicaragua they liked the sound of alpha and they invited us to come back and to teach them how to do alpha, so we did the first alpha Gat in January 2008. We trained 68 people and which represented about 35 churches. a number of those churches started alpha. My friend Pastor Belcer started his first alpha and had 26 small groups with eight to ten people in each group. The people were from outside the church and his church has expanded rapidly. Pastor Belcer’s church was about 225 people I think and he now has over 500 people in his church, all through alpha.
Pastor Oscar has the same story. The church has doubled, Because of alpha, there are many churches that have doubled. Now there are so many churches wanting training that one of the things that we have to focus on is going back with follow-up and additional training.
Now we have trained over 500 churches in five Gats in the last two years. There are now hundreds of churches running it. Initially we were shipping resources in from the United States but alpha in England became aware of what was going on and jumped on board to come to our aid because we really needed help with this overwhelming desire and interest in alpha.
And so we’ve set up and we’re now printing the materials that we need in Nicaragua all are in Spanish of course. We’ll go back later this year. So far we’ve done three Gats this year and we’ve just committed to go back and we’ll do another Gat this fall. We could fill the stadiums with the people that want to learn how to do alpha, but we want to keep it small and so that we don’t lose the personal interaction. So we’re looking for teams that will come and help us train churches in Nicaragua....
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1,000 ATTEND NICKY GUMBEL INTERVIEW WITH TV’S BEAR GRYLLS
Bear’s Alpha launch
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More than 1,000 people packed alpha’s home church holy trinity Brompton to see TV adventurer Bear Grylls interviewed by Nicky Gumbel. the star of Discovery Channel’s ‘Man vs. Wild’, which is watched by more than 1.2 billion viewers around the world, spoke about his work, his family and his faith he spoke of how he and his wife Shara went on an alpha course and recommended it to others he said, ‘I think faith’s really personal and we all have our own different roads. Sometimes it’s difficult to express. ‘Shara and me actually did an alpha course when we first got together and it really helped us.
It helped us find a really simple faith that wasn’t churchy and wasn’t complicated and wasn’t irrelevant ‘over the years a lot of stuff has happened on Everest we lost four climbers, a lot of stuff happened in the army, a lot of the Man Vs Wild narrow escapes. ‘I’ve learnt that it takes a proud man to say he never needs any help. It’s been a real quiet strength for me and a real backbone in my life. It’s just helped me a lot and it’s been a good thing for Shara and me. Nicky Gumbel asked, ‘Is it something that you’ve always had? Was it something that you were brought up with? Bear replied, ‘as a really small kid I remember having a really natural faith and it wasn’t questioning, it wasn’t complicated, it wasn’t clouded. It was just a feeling that I was loved and held and that was that. ‘When I went to school suddenly church was forced on me and suddenly somebody was saying God is actually about looking marvellous in the cassock and reading in Latin. ‘I met lots of kind of Christians who kept telling me not to smoke and I just thought ‘I’ve got the whole deal wrong, God’s not like I knew as a kid it’s actually much more formal and less personal’ and I kind of left it. ‘It’s taken me a while to realise that faith is not about being forced to go to church.
It’s about being loved and it’s about being held, it’s about being forgiven, it’s about finding home and it’s about finding peace. I don’t meet many people who don’t want that in their life.’ Nicky Gumbel asked, ‘One of the things that you did when we were in the States was you went into a maximum security prison and talked about your faith there. What was that like? Bear said, ‘Yeah it was intimidating, but it was also amazing. It was amazing because there’s no pretence. It’s very raw and there’s something powerful about being able to bring a message of reconciliation and a message of forgiveness and a message of hope to people that society have really slammed the door on and I really wasn’t prepared for that.’ You know it was quite an emotional thing and it was, in many ways, church as I’d always hoped church would be in the sense that it was very honest.
Nicky Gumbel pointed out that his picture is currently all over the buses in Australia. He said, ‘Well that’s to support the Alpha stuff over there. I think its part of wanting to do something half decent with the platform I’ve been given and I do very little. ‘I spend a lot of my time dodging press things and I don’t do a load of these sort of events. I do probably a handful a year, I can count them on one hand. ‘But I do them because I think I’ve spent quite a lot of my younger life stumbling around in the dark and faith has helped me find myself and it’s helped me find home and I’m really grateful for that.’
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….AND CANCER SUFFERER JOZSEF MEETS HIS HERO AMID EMOTIONAL SCENES
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A sick Hungarian boy’s dream came true when he flew to England to meet his hero Bear Grylls during the Alpha event at Holy Trinity Brompton. Jozsef Szabadics, 13, was diagnosed with a brain tumour in Jan 2010. He underwent months of radiation and chemotherapy as well as a stem cell transplant. Throughout his illness, it was watching Bear’s ‘Man vs. Wild’ programmes on Discovery Channel that kept him going. Before Bear spoke, Jozsef was ushered into the vestry with his father Zoltan and translator, where Bear, who had been told beforehand, enveloped him in a bear-hug amid emotional scenes. Bear then gave Jozsef some signed gifts and answered his questions through the interpreter Jozsef had a number of gifts of his own for Bear, including a bottle of Hungarian wine. Also among the gifts was a DVD of what he has done since being diagnosed to inspire other patients like him to live life to the full. Jozsef’s trip was made possible by Wonderlamp, a wish-granting foundation based in Budapest. Back in January, Jozsef had been playing in the snow at home and when he came inside he couldn’t stop his hand shaking. His parents took him to the hospital where an MRI scan revealed the tumour on his brain. During his sickness, Jozsef felt a connection with Bear when he heard that he survived a parachute jump and went on to climb Mount Everest, Jozsef was inspired to be a survivor too. HTB clergyman Jamie Haith had a time of prayer with Jozsef and his father before he left for home.