Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Alpha at VzB

Verizon Business is one of the largest telecommunication businesses in the world, altough little know over here, it seems that they've bought up every third advert on US TV. Today was the atart of an Alpha course there run by RFC. God's clearly been working at Verizon in the last few months as we've had two people saved on the last Alpha course we ran as a church. This was also the first time RFC had done anything like this, so it was pretty exciting.

I'd dressed 'as a Greek' for the day, figuring that my own brand of student/hobo chic wouldn't go down too well in an office environment. Smart shoes, trousers, a polo, a sweater and a blazer. very Greek!

We had three guests. I'm never sure whether to be disheartened by the fact that we had three visitors out of an office of hundreds, or to be amazed and thankful that anyone came. I've got no idea why non Christians come to stuff like this, but i'm glad they do! Our guests were one woman, who grew up as a Christian and describes herself as a spritualist, one guy who's married to a Christian and plays music in church but came along to find out what Christianity was all about, and our final guest, a welsh guy who converted to Islam twelve years ago and more or less broke my heart. BeThinking is going to become by homepage over the next few months it seems.

Anyway we all sat down to watch lovely Nicky Gumbel tell us why Christianity wasn't 'irrelevant, boring and untrue.' I don't think i've never noticed before how little he deals with sin in this talk. In fact i don't think he mentioned the word at all (we were using the Alpha express version) but it was a good way to kick off our discussions, which were broadly discouraging, but not surprising for a first session. I'm looking forward to next week.

2 comments:

Ben Stevenson said...

I think the lack of emphasis on sin is one of the reasons some churches prefer Christianity Explored to the Alpha Course as an evangelistic course. However, it is good to hear that people going on the course are being saved.

Ed Goode said...

Aye, personally i much prefer CEx particularly the Bible Study element...