Alpha Course - week 3

Alpha Week 3 brought the best food we've had at Alpha so far. Yes, I was lured there by the promise of shepherd's pie served in the Jon Ronson documentary, and finally the promise was fulfilled! I seem to have an endless stomach capacity for shepherd's pie, and I have been known to eat an entire pan of it in one evening before. The lovely people at church even served it with red cabbage, another one of my favourites:

It is potentially misleading to start writing about the food first off, because the discussion this week was excellent. The topic this week to be honest was a bit nebulous: How Can We Have Faith? Summarised down, it was the first week where we were challenged/encouraged to take the 'leap' into believing, and the talk by Andrew the Australian focused somewhat on letting the Holy Spirit become alive within you.

But as always, it is in the discussion that I found most thought provoking. Our small group is also now getting to know one another; Marc is the really staunt atheist who has been dragged kicking and screaming to come, and is a little aggressive in his defense of atheism (which I like!). Georgina's thinking is very much in line with mine: we both feel there is some purpose to our lives, but it is not necessarily Christianity, and we don't necessarily need Christianity to lead a good life. Sonya really wants to believe, in hope to passing on something to her son, but feels restricted by the overly-religious upbringing she endured back home in Austria. Dean normally sits quietly in the corner, in shorts and a beanie. Us atheists/agnostics/not yet converteds are also talking the most now, which I also like!

We raised some big big issues this week, and obviously ran out of time in the 30 minute discussion session. What about other world religions? What does it mean to believe? What is the Holy Spirit? The one topic that I'm most interested in exploring right now is how Christians interpret Christianity for themselves. I am finding it hard to reconcile the fact that each week we have a speaker, who presumably is giving us the 'official line' on each topic, but when we try to refer back to the speech in our discussion sessions, our Christian hosts not only encourage us to interpret it for ourselves, but very often, it seems that they do not believe in this 'party line'. If I learn anything from the course, I would like to change my mind about how I view this.

Just one slightly uncomfortable thing this week. In our little Alpha booklets which outlines the course, there is a section on the Holy Spirit this week, again, directly asking us to take that leap. It has one very odd question:

Which of the following changes have you already experienced in your life?
- new love for God
- desire to read the Bible
- sense of forgiveness
- new concern for others
- enjoyment of worshipping God
- desire to meet with other Christians

The fourth of these really did not sit well with me.