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Alpha International Highlights

NO. 52 INTERNATIONAL NEWSPAPER DECEMBER 2010 – MARCH 2011

WELCOME TO INTERNATIONAL ALPHA NEWSInternational 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:

Year Courses Attendees(cumulative)

1992 51993 200 4,6001999 14,200 2 m2000 17,000 2.7m2001 19,800 3.8m2002 24,400 4.7m2003 27,340 5.7m2004 29,051 6.7m2005 31,167 8m2006 32,592 9.3m2007 35,092 10.8m2008 35,385 12.3m2009 44,365 14m2010 46,940 16m (est)

Number of registered courses in some countries:

Australia 2,268Canada 700France 602Germany 1,472India 7,864Indonesia 525Japan 350Kenya 281Nigeria 286Ireland 300Romania 552South Korea 4,794UK 8,742USA 10,659

Nicky Gumbel Addresses 4,000 Leaders at Congress on Evangelisation

“100,000 Prisoners in UK alone have done Alpha”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

PAGE 1 - Articles taken from Alpha International News Dec10 – Mar 2011 and distributed by Alpha Ireland with permission

Alpha International Holy Trinity Brompton, Brompton Road, London SW7 1JA Tel: +44 (0) 845 644 7544e-mail: info@alphacourse.org website: alphacourse.org

ALPHA IRELAND | www.alphacourse. ie | a lphaire l@eircom.netevangelical theologians from around the world. To watch videos of

speakers and interviews from Cape Town 2010 go to:

http://conversation.lausanne.org/en

PAGE 2 - Articles taken from Alpha International News Dec10 – Mar 2011 and distributed by Alpha Ireland with permission

ALPHA IRELAND | www.alphacourse. ie | a lphaire l@eircom.net

WHAT NICKY SAID….

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

’

PRISONS EVENT IN GHANAOver 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 hitAlpha’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 3 - Articles taken from Alpha International News Dec10 – Mar 2011 and distributed by Alpha Ireland with permission

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AMERICAN JEFF SCOTT ON ALPHA’S HUGE IMPACT IN NICARAGUA

“Alpha is doubling churches”I attend north View Church 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

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

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....

PAGE 4 - Articles taken from Alpha International News Dec10 – Mar 2011 and distributed by Alpha Ireland with permission

1,000 ATTEND NICKY GUMBEL INTERVIEW WITH TV’S BEAR GRYLLSBear’s Alpha launch

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.’

….AND CANCER SUFFERER JOZSEF MEETS HIS HERO AMID EMOTIONAL SCENES

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.

ALPHA PRISONS MINISTRY LEADER PAUL COWLEY INTERVIEWED BY BBC

Alpha’s prison ministry leader Paul Cowley was interviewed by Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman alongside Home Secretary Theresa May at the Conservative Party conference in October. He was attending the conference to speak at a fringe meeting with Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt when he was approached by the BBC and asked to appear on Newsnight. The interview came on the day Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke announced that prisoners would be expected to work in prison.

Mr. Paxman began, ‘I want to bring in the Revd. Paul Cowley... You are an ex offender, you’re now an Anglican vicar, you run a charity ‘Caring for Ex Offenders’. What do you make today of what was said about Penal Policy? Paul replied, ‘Well I’m not a politician but just as a practitioner, if you look at the profile of an offender, it’s not rocket science to see why they offend. ‘I wasn’t always an Anglican vicar, I got in trouble as a young man. Expelled from school, my parents were alcoholics, I lived on the streets for a while, got in trouble with the police, probation, magistrates bound over to keep the peace and I went to prison for a short, sharp, shock – treatment which worked, frightened the life out of me. ‘But when I came out my parents and my home life had just dispersed, they’d gotten a divorce. ‘So I joined the military for the next thirteen years. I tried to do something better but for me my past life just followed me through.’

Paxman then asked, ‘When you hear Ken Clarke talking about the need to provide people in prison with education, with a means for getting free of drugs, does that chime with your experience trying to care for offenders when they get out?

Paul responded, ‘Well the reoffending rates speak for that – anything from about 40-80% reoffend in two years’ Theresa May said, ‘What we need to do is make sure we’re getting sentencing right, but also make sure we’re getting prison right.” Paul said: ‘If someone doesn’t meet them at the gate and help them then someone from their past usually meets them. So we use the volunteer sector, which I think this government’s trying to do... ‘The charity that we started has 4,500 volunteers at hand. They’re all amazingly resourced people.’Ms May then said, ‘It’s no good to those individuals and indeed to the rest of society if what is happening is as Paul says: that they’re reoffending as they’re met from somebody from their past who just takes them off and takes them back to the sort of lives they’ve been leading with other people becoming further victims of that life.’ Paxman: ‘I was thinking that if I had my car stolen, I want someone punished for it.’ Paul said, ‘Yes, well they should be punished. I’ve had my own car stolen from where I live in London. ‘I have a twelve year old daughter whom I’m really worried about letting out on the streets. ‘I want society to be safer; I want the streets to be safer. And the trouble is with 85,000 people in prison, most of those will be released.‘We need to do something with them when they come out or they’ll end up committing crime.‘What we need to do is meet them, help them, try reintegrate them back in and the faith based community have got the resources and the volunteers to do that.’

a lot of churches have already accepted.

MARRIAGE BOOK PRINTED IN CHINANicky and Sila Lee invited to China to run a two day marriage conference

The Marriage Course has been approved for use and to be distributed throughout China. The news came as Marriage Course founders Nicky and Sila Lee were invited to visit China by Robert Glover, founder of the charity, Care for Children, which has pioneered foster care in China.

Nicky and Sila ran a two day Marriage Conference in Beijing in October. Nearly half the delegates were government employees involved in

selecting and training foster parents for Care for Children’s National Foster Care Project, currently working with 38 projects in 27 provinces

across China. To date the charity has worked with the China Association of Social Workers and the Ministry of Civil Affairs, it is

estimated that up to 250,000 orphans have been placed into local Chinese families. Nicky Lee said, ‘Robert Glover’s vision to use The Marriage Course to train foster parents has created an extraordinary opportunity for The Marriage Course and Marriage Preparation Course to be used in China. National and local government are interested in using the courses to strengthen marriage and family life across the country.’Mrs Zi Wei Li, General Secretary of the Beijing Association of Marriage and Family Department, and Mrs Ping Li,

Deputy General Secretary of the China Association of Social Workers, requested a meeting with Nicky and Sila Lee. Mrs Zi Wei Li said at the outset, ‘A strong society depends on strong families and strong families depend on strong marriages. That’s why we are interested in your work.’ There are currently over 1.8 million divorces each year in China.The Marriage Book, written by Nicky and Sila Lee, which has been translated into Mandarin, has also been approved for sale and distribution within China.

FOUR FEATURE TESTIMONIES FOR A COPY OF THE FULL TESTIMONIES PLEASE EMAIL – ALPHAIREL@EIRCOM.NET

David Joseph Born in England, David Joseph, 51, moved to America when he was four. As an adult, he became a successful drug dealer, later serving nine years in prison during which time he came across the Alpha course. Eighteen months ago he was deported to the UK with nothing – and went in search

of the Alpha offices. He says, ‘I destroyed a lot of lives – people got killed, overdosed and all this stuff. I had a hand in all that. But God has forgiven me and I’m a changed person.’ Here he tells the full extraordinary story:

Brian Arblaster From a family of spiritualists, Brian Arblaster, 63, of Ontario, Canada, had a fascination with the occult. He was an angry man who would lash out at Christians at work. Here he tells his story:

Tracy Hall Model agency founder Tracey Hall, 43, of Belfast, had her business burgled, split up with her boyfriend and her grandmother was rushed to hospital all in one week. Then she went on an Alpha course and life began to take on a new perspective. Here she tells her story:

Josephine Arispe Unregistered at birth, Josephine Arispe, 44, of Michigan,

USA, had a childhood dominated by her father’s sexual and mental abuse. Forced to work from the age of five and unschooled up to the age of 11, she later lived with a succession of foster parents. Many years later, she was in need of food and a friend suggested she go for the meal

at a local Alpha course. Her life totally change. Now she has people coming to her saying, ‘I was sexually abused, I was mentally abused’, and I can say, ‘I’ve walked in your shoes, can I pray for you? Would you like to come to Alpha?’ Here she tells her extraordinary story:

NICKY GUMBEL –Why does Unity Matter So Much to Jesus?(Full talk on Alpha Ireland website)

Why is Christian unity so vital? In this talk delivered to delegates at Alpha’s 2010 EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) week, Nicky Gumbel explains...

‘...I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.’ John 17:20-21

The gospels frequently tell us that Jesus prayed. We read of many, many occasions when Jesus went off into the mountains and prayed. But very infrequently do they tell us what he prayed. In fact, on only one occasion in the entire New Testament are we told in any detail what Jesus prayed and as you well know that is in John chapter 17. In this prayer we see lots of things that Jesus prayed for. But right at the heart of the prayer of Jesus is one overriding theme: I want to draw out four things about unity that we see from Jesus’ prayer here.

1) The first is this: that unity comes from the Holy Spirit. He prays that ‘I myself may be in them.’ This is the most extraordinary truth of the New Testament – that Jesus comes to live in you and in me by the Holy Spirit. St Paul writes to the Christians and he says, ‘Do you not realise that Jesus Christ is in you?’ Let me ask you that question today: Do you realise that Jesus Christ is in you? Do you believe that? Jesus lives in you and in me by his Spirit. That’s what happened on the day of Pentecost – the Holy Spirit came to live in every single follower of Jesus. Jesus came by his Spirit to live in you and in me. We have such an extraordinary privilege that Jesus is living in us. This gives us tremendous power, the power of the Holy Spirit living within us. We also discover – if you are anything like me – that it is possible to grieve the Holy Spirit. We have to be very

God comes to live within us. When I say something negative about another Christian or another church, I always feel bad. Something in my spirit (and this time I think it is the Holy Spirit) is grieved by that. And even if the person or church apparently deserves to be spoken about badly, the Holy Spirit doesn’t seem to like it.

2) The second thing about unity is unity is based on love.

3) The third thing about unity is unity should be visible.Invisible unity of course is wonderful. St Augustine I think was the first to speak about the ‘invisible unity’ of the Church. But Jesus didn’t pray for invisible unity. He didn’t pray that we might be ‘almost united’. He prayed that ‘they may be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me’. In other words, he’s saying he wants it now. He wants the Church to be united – completely, visibly united. Of course, we hope that one day that will take place. But in the meantime, I think sometimes God gives us a glimpse of what visible unity would look like. I think this event [EMEA week] is an example of what visible unity looks like. As we look around this church today, we see a foretaste of visible unity. One thing that we’ve discovered is the truth of what the psalmist says: ‘Where brothers and sisters dwell together in unity, God commands his blessing.’

4) Unity is linked to Mission. Jesus prayed for complete unity so that the world may believe. I don’t think there’s any doubt that one of the greatest barriers to belief is disunity in the Church. One of the saddest things in any society, is disunity. When churches fight each other, people are not interested. But the other side is also true: when churches unite it is so attractive.

The outpouring of the Spirit is not just so that we have a great time, but so that we go out and change the world. God has given this gift of Alpha to us as the Church. The statistics are that 15 million people have now done the course and it’s accelerating at a very rapid pace. Twenty-three per cent more people did it last year than the year before... Two million people did the course last year...But these are just statistics until you read the stories. Someone yesterday handed me a piece of paper and I just put it in

my pocket. I got it out of my pocket this morning. This is so typical of the kind of stories that I hear and I wish I could tell you all of them, but obviously I can’t. I’ll just read you this one that comes from a church in Sevenoaks in England and is about someone called Sue who was in her mid 50s and who was not a Christian. It says this: Sue was attending a rehab clinic for people with severe respiratory problems. She had COPD...I Goggled COPD and it says this: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; chronic bronchitis and emphysema, shortness of breath.

It’s not reversible and it gets progressively worse. The clinic meets in our church building. She arrived for her clinic, but there was no one there. She’d got the wrong date. She waited around and had a look through Alpha News and the flyers for our next Alpha Course. A couple of weeks, she turned up for our course on the Wednesday evening. She soaked it all up and was full of excitement and interest. She came to the church on Sunday and was back again on the Wednesday, week two of Alpha. It suddenly clicked for Sue that Jesus is God – a huge piece of the jigsaw for her – and she gave her life to the Lord. Dramatic. She called her sister to tell her that she’d become a Christian, and her sister was in the middle of a meeting with a friend to pray for Sue. She’d been praying for her for 25 years.

The following Sunday, she came to church and came forward for prayer for healing and was remarkably healed of her COPD. Running up and down the stairs at home, off her medication, etc. She met with her physio at the rehab clinic, who was astonished at what had happened to her, the remarkable difference.

She’s been healed and has since prayed for and seen others healed including one of cancer! On 30 April, Sue was baptized and brought over 150 friends and family to celebrate with her – 95 per cent of them not Christians with no church experience. She is having a huge impact on people, evangelising to anyone who will stand still long enough to listen. Isn’t that amazing? Just one woman. That’s what Jesus sends us out to do: to unite in order that people like Sue will believe; in order that churches will be renewed, cities transformed, and nations transformed by Jesus.

ALPHA AROUND THE WORLD

Snippets from Alpha Invitations taking place in different countries...

USA: Alpha attendance doubles in the USIn this year’s USA Alpha Invitation 537 cities and 979 churches were involved, of this number 262 churches were new to running the Alpha course. To help advertise the Invitation running teams joined local organized runs (5K, half

marathons, full marathons) wearing red Alpha T-shirts to promote Alpha and raise money for the advertising. Alpha was also advertised on billboards. In Portland by chance one Alpha sign was put up next to a strip club, the Alpha banner said ‘Is there more to life than this?’ After 33 Invitations from 2007 – 2009, the average growth in the Invitation areas is a 54% increase in churches/organizations running the Alpha course and a 100% increase in guests.

South Africa: 100 churches in Cape Town InitiativeMore than 100 churches in the region around Cape Town, South Africa supported an Alpha advertising campaign in September. It was the first initiative of its kind ever in Africa. Advertising asking the question ‘Does God Exist?’ was put on street pole posters, outdoor billboards, church notice boards and social networks. one poster in a commuter area had approximately 1 million pedestrians pass it per day. Also on mobile phones the word ‘Alpha’ could be texted to the number 33009 to receive a link to where the nearest Alpha course could be located. A trailer with an Alpha advertisement was driven around different locations in Cape Town from 7am to 5.30pm and parked in prime locations.

Germany: Alpha banner flies in GermanyA German Alpha adviser with a pilot license flew over Baden-Württemberg with an Alpha banner in September. The creative advertising was part of the first Alpha Initiative to take place in Germany with launch parties taking place simultaneously in 120 churches. The Initiative is taking place in the most south-western federal state of the country, Baden-Württemberg. The air-banner was able to cover the entire state in three flights, the first having taken place on 3rd September and being accompanied by another plane with a pilot (an Alpha Adviser) and a leader from the Alpha Initiative both praying for the initiative.

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