Alpha Ireland is setting its sights high, with an ambitious plan to have 1,200 Alpha courses running in the country by the year 2010.“When I was appointed and began working for Alpha in 2004, we ran five courses in the Republic. The following year that rose to 17. By 2006, we were up to 125, including courses running in Northern Ireland, so I don’t see our target as being too high,” Paddy Monaghan National Co-Ordinator of Alpha Ireland, told ciNews.
Mr Monaghan was speaking in advance of a one day Conference today in Clonliffe College entitled: A vision of hope for Ireland.
Up to seventy people from parishes around Ireland are expected to attend. The participants will hear how lives are being transformed through Alpha and will be encouraged to run the courses in their own parishes.
Alpha is a 10-week course that explores some of the basic truths of the Christian faith. It began in the UK and has now spread to 167 countries around the world. Much of the training material for the course is on DVD, so people do not have to invent material.
“Three or four people can get together in a sitting room with a team leader and a DVD and you are off,” said Mr Monaghan.
Currently there are 33,687 Alpha courses running worldwide including over 7,000 in Britain. An estimated ten million people have completed Alpha courses all over the world.
Among those addressing the conference today is Fr Pat Collins who will explain the principles and practicalities of Alpha courses, and the importance of following up the courses with parish ‘cells’. John Lander from the Christian Fellowship Church in Belfast, who is on his 56th Alpha course will also address the conference. Mr Lander’s church currently has 60 cell groups.
Another speaker giving witness to the powerful effect of the course, will be David, a refugee from Iran.
He was brought up a Moslem. Eight years ago his parents died and David fell into the habit of drinking and drug taking. He was disillusioned and in his despair, he began to read the Bible.
This was the beginning of his conversion to Christianity. He prayed to God to help him out of his addiction, and received the grace to do so.
David (31) attended his first Alpha course in Iran. During his second, a group of men came to arrest him for abandoning his Moslem faith. He fled, spending eight days in the back of a lorry. At one border crossing, the authorities used heat seeking equipment to see if there were humans in the lorry. Miraculously the equipment failed, and David and his companion escaped detection. He has been sixteen months in Dublin and hopes in the future to run an Alpha course for a group of his fellow Iranians here.
Recently 22 members of Alpha in Ireland attended Alpha International Week in Brompton. Over 1,000 delegates from over 30 denominations and 76 different countries (including Indonesia, Israel, Kuwait, Namibia and Colombia) were present at the event.
Among the delegates were many senior church leaders including the Catholic Archbishop of Moscow, three Catholic bishops from Peru, and three Anglican bishops from India.
One of the bishops from Peru is in charge of prisons in the country. Following the meeting he wrote to his seventy-five prison chaplains encouraging them to run Alpha courses in the prisons.
Alpha for Prisons began in 1995 and is now registered in 80 per cent of the prisons in the UK as well as running in the prisons of over 73 countries on all the continents around the world.
As a practical introduction to the Christian faith designed primarily for non-churchgoers and new Christians, the course is low key and non-threatening to prisoners.
It normally runs over a period of ten weeks, although it can be presented over a shorter period of time depending on a prison’s regime.
At each session there is a chance for chat over food and/or drinks followed by a talk on a subject central to the Christian faith. After the talk, participants divide into pre-arranged groups in which they remain for the duration of the course.
Each group has a ‘leader’ and two or three ‘helpers’ who may be ‘graduates’ from a previous course or prison staff or volunteers.
"The Alpha course has given me, more than anything else in prison, the strength and determination to lead a better life. I know that if I live with God I can, and already have become, a better person,” wrote Nigel, from a prison in Bullingdon, UK.
"My crime included a very large deception, a vast amount of money. Some people would say I had everything but I know now I had nothing. What I have now, what I feel inside surpasses anything I’ve ever felt before and you can’t buy that. All I had to do was ask, it was free of charge. Alpha really has to be the best present I’ve ever been given,” was the impression of Danny, a prisoner in Wayland, UK
Ten prisoners in Mountjoy prison have taken part in an Alpha course.
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