This term, Jane and I have been helping run an Alpha course at St Clement’s, for which we had the final session tonight.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed it more than I expected. It is a good course of material to allow people to explore fundamentals of Christianity but I’ve done it quite a few times before. there has been a fair gap since last time and the ‘film series’ strand of material we used has been produced to a significantly higher production standard. It is quite shiny, seeming polished to an upper middle class mindset, and some of the expectations seem geared to large-scale courses like they run at Holy Trinity Brompton (the home of Alpha) rather than smaller groups like ours. It is very open for discussion though – at first I was surprised how few questions where provided for the groups but this became recognised as a boon.

Now we figuring out what comes next. For those who want to carry on exploring or walking a journey of Christian faith, what will help them? Looking back though, I think I am definitely more positive about Alpha as a good set of material to use than I was when preparing for this run, so I’ve definitely done my bit of journeying too.