For the past few years, Whitehouse has been running the Alpha course. It is a ten week course done in the middle of the week where people who don't have much to do with church, have lots of questions, or just aren't sure about their faith can come and have a meal, listen to a short talk on an aspect of Christian faith, then freely ask questions and discuss in small groups without having to hold back anything. Whitehouse has had tremendous success with running this course in the past, not just with helping people understand the Christian faith more, but leading people to a much stronger relationship with God and committment to their faith. Most of the younger leaders in Whitehouse came to Whitehouse through the Alpha course.
Because of that, as soon as I got here last September, the church was hoping I could lead a Youth Alpha course for our youth. I have to admit, I wasn't particularly excited about the idea at first. Evangelism has never been the area I've been most passionate about or which has came easily to me. And I didn't know anything about running a Youth Alpha course. I helped out a little bit with our Alpha course in the fall, but Youth Alpha is very different, and I had never seen even one session of it before.
So I went into Youth Alpha feeling very unsure about it and wondering if we should be running it at all. The one thing that really convinced me that we should do it was our minister telling me how much she wanted the youth to at least know the basics of the faith. I personally have met so many Christians who can't explain their basic beliefs and understanding of the Gospel that I shared that interest. I realized I didn't want our youth growing up in church and youth group witout knowing why they were there or what the point of it was.
Since the very first week, though, I've seen the rewards of going ahead with it. The church community really helped it go smoothly. Every week, we had a different group from the church making us dinners. We had lots of people praying every week for the course to make a difference in the lives of our youth. And the youth themselves took huge initiative by inviting as many friends as they could and opening up to a lot of ideas that were very new for many of them. Our youth group that averaged about 10-12 in December blossomed to over 20 the very first night of Youth Alpha. The youth were inviting friends who didn't have any associtation with any churches, but who were intrigued enough to come along.
For most of the time I believed many came just becaue their friends were there, but as the weeks went on, I started to realize they genuinely wanted to hear more about the Chritian faith. During our group discussion times, they would ask incredibly good and important questions, many of which I had trouble figuring out answers to. And other youth would continually chime in with answers when one or more of them had trouble understanding something. During the first couple of weeks, it was obvious most of them weren't comfortbale opening up, but by week three or four, it seemed like all of the youth were opening up, asking questions they honestly were struggling with, and talking about very personal parts of their life and faith. Even youth who never spoke the entire fall and early winter, invited friends to it and started talking to everyone much more, not afraid to share what they felt. As Youth Alpha has gone on, I've seen our youth become much closer and more open with each other and more passionate about their faith. It has been an incredibly encouraging experience for me.
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