Most of my friends have reacted with shock when I told them I was doing the Alpha Course, the evangelical 10-week course advertised as providing a forum for agnostics to find out about the meaning of life, but really it is a evangelical exercise to convert them into Christians. Most people know me as being quite anti-religion, although I think I have mellowed a bit in my old age. I watched a documentary by the wonderful Jon Ronson about the course (you can read about a similar experiment he did here), and I was most fascinated by the methods used in the Alpha Course. During the documentary, the most staunch agnostic in the group that was filmed, a very rational Oxford psychology student, was the only one to really be converted, which only captured my imagination even more.
I was also interested because of my work with Habitat for Humanity, a Christian organisation. I am often challenged in my position as team leader as to why I wasn't a Christian, yet I lead teams in the name of a Christian charity. I have always defended that I am wholly aligned with many Christian values, and I feel it is more important to have those moral values than to have faith. At the same time, I don't want to become a "fundamentalist atheist", and wanted to learn more about what exactly is the Christian faith. So I'm going in as a curious observer, and I have no real intentions of getting converted, but let's see.
Why am I blogging about this you ask? Well, there is a tenuous link with food I guess, because they feed you at Alpha. Yes, another one of those clever methods to make you think Christians are warm and cuddly. They were having shepherd's pie at the one Jon Ronson went to, and the offering at my church was good but less exciting. Their pasta really was quite comforting though, reminded me of the pasta that was a real treat at high school:
I thought we were going straight down to business, but after the food, there are chocolates all over the table, lollies being passed around, fruit, all supported by lovely, friendly, cosy people. Then it dawned on me that there were actually more members of the church at the meeting than there were agnostics/atheists. Then unexpectedly, we were all asked to stand up and sing some hymns, led by a charismatic Australian with a guitar, with all the appropriate Christian-with-a-guitar jokes. It was like being at school assembly again, only that everyone else seems to be singing.This was followed by a lecture/talk by the vicar, this week's topic being Who Is Jesus? I actually found the content to be quite irrelevant to my own doubts about Christianity, more about trying to prove he existed, and how the scriptures are an accurate representation of Jesus, things I don't actually question. We were then split into groups to discuss the topic of the day.
I thought this was where the action would start, but disapppointingly, we were instead led through some more fluffy tea and coffee, followed by the usual painful round of ice-breaker games. This was followed by a quick round of 'why are you here', when it became painfully obvious that out of a group of about 15 of us, only about 6 are not already committed Christians. Most of the others seemed to be here because they felt there was 'something missing in their lives', or had been to church as a youngster and felt they had lapsed.
And then it was suddenly time to go home. I still felt quite uncomfortable by the end of it, and I'm not sure I really got anything out of the session, except that Christians are really quite nice, and not strange, honest! They do try extremely hard to come across as non-threatening, non-pressurised, to the extent that you feel quite guilty at not feeling comfortable in the surroundings. But I am going to continue to keep an open mind and see how it goes.
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