Alpha Again?

Having had a mixed time with my first Alpha experience I've been ask to lead another Alpha course this time with a twist, no Nicky Gumbel. The idea is that we'll do the presentations ourselves. I know this is a very unalpha approach but I'm keen to try it. Will let you know how this progresses.

Alpha and Evil

I've lost count which video this one was but it's the Alpha talk about evil. As regular readers might be suspecting I struggle to believe in the "the devil" (see this post for some background). Particularly "the Devil" as many Xns present him and Nicky Gumbel's starting explanation that God is behind good and therefore there must be someone or something behind evil wasn't a convincing start for me either.

Some of the notes I took during the video were...

• Spiritual Forces of evil can be an excuse for human evil.
• The existence of evil doesn't necessarily equate to the existence of demons or a devil. (NG suggested other wise)
• Inner battles and temptations can exist without a devil. (NG suggested other wise)
• A couple of times (John 10:10 being one example) Nicky to quotes about evil and read the devil into them making it sound like the devil is mentioned way more in the NT than it actually is.
• I'm not sure if I've heard an adequate explanation for how Satan came into being.
  

So what do I think? I don't know I'm trying to work this one out. I'm stuck on the idea that the devil is the personification of evil rather than an actual thing. In Dear Kim this is what I believe Bill Loader says...

For me, to say Jesus is human means I believe that he was not a walking encyclopedia, knowing everything from his birth onwards. He was a human being of his time, living under usual human limitations of knowledge and education. He doubtless believed in a world populated by demons like his contemporaries and probably believed the world was more or less flat, with the sky as a dome in which the stars and moon shone by night and the sun by day, the common Old Testament picture. His expectations about history were those of his time. He lived in a community which thought history was soon coming to an end. His healing practices reflect the methods of his world.

At the moment this is a summary of what I'm thinking, a work in progress if you will...

I don't think that Satan really exists in the OT certainly not the kind of Satan most Xns think of. I think most of the OT is about worshiping the one God Yahweh rather than chasing after other gods like Baal for example. Like Bill Loader, I don't have a problem with devil's and demons being mentioned in the NT. Some of them take up the OT motif of other gods like Beelzebub (or Baalzebub) from the god Baal, others are not. Often when when Paul talks about powers and principalities or when Jesus talks about "the thief" in John 10:10 we tend to read devils and demons into this when it is not necessarily there in the first place. This is not to say that the world is all sweetness and light. To the contrary the world is full of evil and I think it is humans and not some supernatural force that is the cause of that. To me (at the moment) Satan I think is a personification of that evil, rather than a character.

Again, during the discussion part of the night I didn't have the courage to stick up my hand and say "errr... I'm not sure I believe in the devil" especially when everyone else was happy with what Nicky had said. Maybe I'm a wuss or maybe Alpha makes it harder for boat rockers to have a say, not sure. Both could be true.

Alphalpha weekend

The Alpha weekend was a bit of an aha moment for me. Although, I have tried not to be too skeptical about the whole course the "holy Spirit" weekend was were I was most skeptical. I Knowing that a whole page of the manual was dedicated to speaking in tongues (and most Bibles dedicate less than a page to the phenomenon) didn't help. Well, with all that as a forerunner I was pleasantly surprised that the weekend was far more about connecting with God than speaking in tongues, and probably a key reason why alpha is more popular than other evangelism courses like Christianity Explained, which is even more dry and modernistic than alpha. Not only was the weekend about connecting with God (through the holy spirit) but it was some serious connecting with each other with a weekend away. Unfortunately I left the weekend early and was sick during the weekend so I didn't get to do enough of this.

A few alpha advocates had said to me things like "I don't know why this works, it just does". I think I might have started to work out why this alppha thing works. For many of the people in my group I would guess that really they had made some kind of in principal decision to become a Xn. What the Alpha course has done has acted as an introduction to Xy to make sure they're happy with what, in principal, they've already decided. Rather than like what Mark had suggested in my last alpha post.

So am I an alpha convert? Not quite, but I'm certainly starting refine what I don't like about it.

Firstly, I don't think Alpha is a very good as an evangelistic tool (so to speak). Although Nicky Gumbell often talks about people who seem to be invited almost off the cuff to an Alpha course, I doubt that really happens too often. I certainly wouldn't sign up to ten weeks of anything unless I really trusted the person I was going with. Most people are going because of someone they know so in a sense the evangelism has already been done, what alpha really is is an overview for people who are thinking about joining up.

Secondly, since it's really an introduction to Xy rather than evangelism I wonder if there are better ways to introduce people to a faith other than 8 hrs of watching a video of some guy talking.

Thirdly, I feel like Alpha often oversimplifies Xy. I understand that any kind of summary of the Xn faith will involve some kind of simplification, but I think Alpha goes further than this by not really opening the door to the depth and variety found in the Xn faith.

I'll post a fuller review at the end of the course.

Doing Alpha and don't think you're a horrible sinner?

The Alpha course I'm doing is having a two week break right now but in the last session I found myself writing notes to my wife, kind of like two naughty kids in high school. Although not particularly respectful it is just a video and the video does take up a huge chunk of time in the Alpha format and I was bored. While alpha is not my cup of tea many people in the group seem to love it. None the less I have recently heard of someone who struggled with the underlying "your a really horrible sinner who needs to ask for forgiveness" message that she got from the course. As much as I know that advocates of the course would say there is more than just that. I think this is still the basic starting point of the Alpha message.

My guess is that for many people who just don't feel like they are horrible sinners, it's not that they are arrogant and would not claim to be perfect. If they were to be put on a scale with Mother Teresa at one end and Hitler at the other even if they put themselves in the middle they would definitely want to be more like Mother Teressa than Hitler. Further more to the best of their ability they are trying to do that. Sometimes Xns have responded by saying things like perfection is like jumping off the Sydney harbor bridge to reach New Zealand no matter how hard you try your always going to fail. Leaving many people feeling like God makes us failures and then damns us for being so and expects us to come crawling back to him grovelling for forgiveness. And, they find it hard to square that with a loving God.

Perhaps it's time to start reframing things. I feel like I'm sounding like a broken record having posted about this a lot before (It's time to Substitute Substitution,A New Analogy for Atonement?, Why did Jesus die? Part 1, Why did Jesus die? Part 2, Relooking at Sin and God is just like the Gestapo?) I feel there is something about the way that Xns often communicate the brokenness of our world and our broken relationship with God that stops people from becoming Xns and it is far more than people's ability to realise their own imperfections and brokenness (sinfulness). Maybe it's as simple as we are asking people to consider themselves as "filthy rags" when they see themselves merely as "flawed creations of God".

God is just like the Gestapo?

Night 3 of Alpha I found kind of disturbing. It was probably the first time during Alpha where I found myself thinking "do I really want to identify with this?", "Do I really want to be implicitly saying I'm a Xn just like the way the video says".

My thoughts started when Nicky Gumbel told a story of a Nazi death camp where a priest steps in and offers to be killed instead of a family man which the Gestapo agree to. Nicky then went on to explain that we are like the family man and Jesus is like the priest, which is all fine and dandy until you realise that God is therefore the Gestapo and that the priest died so that the family man can be friends with the Gestapo. To be fair Nicky later explains that The Gestapo and the priest are really the same person (not using this analogy) but none the less you end up with a sadomasochist God rather a Gestapo God. Both I find pretty unsatisfactory.

I've wrestled with this before in my new analogy for atonement post. My thoughts about Jesus death at the moment go something along these lines.

1. We start life outside the Garden of Eden and dislocated from God
2. The only way for that connection to renewed is for God to become human
3. As a human (Jesus) God shows us a new way of life, a life where we choose love the result of which is suffering and for Jesus is suffering on a cross.
4. The cross is where we get a new perspective on life it's the point on the journey where we think everything will end but instead in the resurrection we see a new reality. A reality where love and justice prevail and sin does not.

Of course with no one else in the group bringing up the issue of God being equated with the gestapo and the speed of my brain it meant I didn't say anything. Maybe I will next week, but maybe I won't. The whole Alpha thing seems to be working for most of the group, just not for me.

Relooking at Sin

Tonight was week 2 of the Alpha course I'm doing and as one person shared how they felt it was difficult to get over the idea that if they had done one thing wrong that they were just as bad as a mass murderer, I started thinking that's actually not only a hard thing to believe but perhaps a pretty silly thing to ask Xns to believe. This attitude we project onto God that, a small sin of someone trying to be good is as bad as all the sins of the world’s worst mass murderer is an attitude we wouldn't accept from our friends or our legal system. So it would be understandable why many wouldn’t accept it from God. I wondered if this might be a better way of looking at it...

Sin is evidence of separation (or disconnection) from God.

This definition would mean that the average try to be nice to everyone kind of person isn't "just as bad" as a mass murderer. It just means that perhaps they've got less evidence that they are not connected with God.

Just a thought.

10 Weeks of Alphalpha Coming Up

This week I started an Alpha course and it's the first time I have ever done alpha or anything like it. I've always been a little bit sceptical of them but I'm going in with an open mind. My first three initial reactions to the introduction session are

1. Nicky Gumbell is a complete dag. That's not a bad thing as he does not try to be otherwise, in fact it makes him kind of pretty ordinary or normal which is probably quite a good thing seeing this alpha is appealing to such a mainstream audience.
2. The first presentation was really similar to the "Burn Your Plastic Jesus" seminar a friend and I used to do in high schools. Our presentation has video, live music and discussion groups half way through but none the less I think both presentations looked at the question of wether Xy is irrelevant, boring and untrue. Nicky had his anecdotes and we had the video and music and compared quotes of Kurt Cobain & Marilyn Manson favourably with Jesus and quotes by Fred Nile favourably with the Pharisees. So kind of different but kind of similar.
3. The whole gist of the presentation was very much like the "God Shaped Hole" talk that one of my youth group leaders used to do when I was young. The message was that like the famous toy (see below) he had a God shaped hole in his life and no matter how he tried to fill it with cars, work, sport or girl friends none of them would fit and he needed God to be complete. I realise this is how a lot of suburban people probably think so I might learn something about reaching out to people in my new suburb, but most of the non An people I've known are already aware of the God shaped hole in their life and are trying to fill it with other spiritual things. So, I hope these kind of people get addressed eventually.

My other initial reaction is that Nikki Gumbell says "Jesus Christ" in exactly the same way as the boyfriend of Mr Garrison, Mr Slave (below) from South Park.

Anyway, more reflections in the future I'm sure.