The first Alpha
Had our first of a very quickly cobbled together Alpha evening on Thursday. Hosted in a beautiful home and on a beautiful evening, so we started by sitting outside in the courtyard with a gin and tonic and smoked salmon. Good way to start a course, in my book.
Alpha is aimed at young, non-church people and this small group is old, church people, so I felt there was leeway for adaptation. The adaptation consisted in me summarising the rather long-winded material and us all getting down to discussion over food.
We continued in the dining room with wine and pizza, also very good! The topic was ‘Who is Jesus?’ which might be challenging for non-church people but which was less than challenging for this group. So the discussion hived off in many different directions and we had quite a good set-to over how Jesus could possibly be fully and completely human as well as fully and completely divine.
We don’t meet again for a week, but then the topic will be ‘Why did Jesus die?’ which I think should be quite interesting. Hopefully many different theories will emerge which should make us all think.
Took a baptism today in my smallest (and closed) church. There is just Frenze Hall (where the baptism family live), a few farm cottages and Frenze Church, in the farmyard. Yes, literally. When Olly Cromwell’s men came rampaging through this quiet English countryside around 400 years ago, destroying all the treasures in English churches as being too ‘popish’, the few people of Frenze covered the altar in the church with hay and wheeled in the cattle. They proclaimed it a barn and it was left entirely untouched. Or so the story goes. It’s certainly full of ancient artefacts – a three storey pulpit, boxed pews, a font from around 1200, etc. etc.
Great fun.
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