Alpha Visit

Any Questions?

Year 11s had the opportunity to experience the Alpha course in their GCSE RS lesson this week. David and Nathan from Preston Minster run the 11 week Alpha course as a way for people who are curious about the meaning of life to see if Christianity offers suitable answer. This week they came to Ashton to recreate an Alpha session to help students more fully understand this method of evangelism – spreading the Good News about Jesus.

Alpha was developed as a short course at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, London in 1977. In 1990 Nicky Gumbel took over running Alpha and found that many people outside of the church wanted to explore the Christian faith. Alpha now runs in every part of the global church, including the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church and all mainline Protestant denominations.

The session went really well, and students were able consider questions of meaning from, ‘what would you do if you only had 24hrs to live?’ to, ‘if you could ask one question of God, what would it be?’

Anyone interested in the Alpha course can contact Preston Minster by following this link or the alpha.org site by following this link.

The response from students was that it was really good to experience the Alpha session.

Harry said, “It is one thing reading about things but experiencing a session first hand just expands knowledge and understanding.”

Ashleigh said, “The Alpha course was very interesting, it wasn't all about Christianity and Jesus. It was thinking about what life is about. Only the last question we were asked was to do with God.”

Julia said, “I found Alpha very interesting because different points of view were explored and talked about. The questions were also interesting because we got to talk about different things that we wouldn’t usually think about in our day to day lives.”

Alfie said, “The Alpha people where nice, they didn’t just give us a lecture, they let us explain our views, it was an interesting experience.”

To top it all, David and Nathan also brought donuts to share as we chatted. The Ashton RE department offers its thanks to you both for you time and efforts.