According to the Alpha official website, ‘Alpha is an 11-week course that creates a space, online or in person, where people are excited to bring their friends for a conversation about faith, life and God’.

Like all good straplines, this description gives a sense of what Alpha is about, but there is so much more. The first thing is that you don’t actually need to have faith, or believe in God, to participate in Alpha. All Christians know from the scriptures that God’s love for every one of His children is unconditional and so it really doesn’t matter how you feel before you come along. What is really important is curiousity: have you ever felt a need to understand the nature of your belief (or indeed, disbelief)?

Tim Clapp will be leading our 11-week course, which – if past Alpha courses are anything to go by – will be fun and engaging. The most important thing is to forget the church buildings and ceremony and engage with your spiritual self and identify that which is interesting to you and that which is not…

When I attended Alpha a few years ago I must admit I thought ‘what is this trendy claptrap?’ I attended because I wanted to be sure my preconceptions were well-founded and that indeed it would be ‘claptrap’. The reality was completely different andeveryone who attended the course felt different afterwards. If nothing else, the Alpha course helps us to put things into context and understand why some people feel their faith strongly, whilst others might be apprehensive or even dismissive.

Why not come along to Alpha? I promise you will find it engaging. It is free for all-comers and it might just change how you think about everything…

Please contact admin@itchenvalleychurches.org to book a place.

Hope to see you there (I will be supporting Tim)

Dan Day-Robinson