Tabatha Leggett signs up to “Christianity’s most successful recruitment programme” for the New Statesman: Inside Alpha: An atheist’s foray into Christianity.
Matthew Engelke writes for The Guardian that Christianity and atheism are two sides of the same coin. “Those of us with no faith have a lot to learn about the value of halting the normal rhythms of life and stopping to reflect.”
Giles Fraser writes in The Guardian that Our fear of boredom is simply a fear of coming face to face with ourselves. “The Sunday morning hour, like the therapeutic hour, is a place to contemplate our capacity to deal with the fear of emptiness.”
Andrew Brown writes in The Guardian that Evangelical sex activists are no better than religious moralists.
Steve Hollinghurst writes on his blog about exposing the Church of England plan to recruit Pagans using a Pagan church.
Interesting; I’ve done Alpha, but it was a ten week course, not a six week course. Also, the topics were different from the ones Tabitha mentions on the course she attended.
I wasn’t troubled by the fact that the course didn’t try to prove that Jesus existed (only a tiny, tiny minority of scholars doubt this), but I was troubled by the fact that a course which purported to be a ground-level introduction to Christianity never once actually told the story of Jesus. I think that’s a serious defect in today’s world.
I’ve never done Alpha, and reading Nicky Gumbel’s book based on it was enough to guarantee that I never will. I’ve done similar things though (Christianity Explored). I always seem to be not only the only non Christian there, but also the only one who isn’t already a member of the church running it. Something tells me that as tools of evangelism, they may not work as well as is claimed.
I would never want to do Alpha (as an Episcopalian, why would I?), but I was still annoyed by the atheist (anti-theist?) writer. Leggett’s mind was never open, not just to the contents of the course (I’d probably be similar), but to thinking of the participants as anything other than idiots. She was wasting their time and, in the essay, wasting ours.
That’s a good point, JCF. She also seemed to think that an evangelistic course would be an apologetics course, whereas of course the two aren’t exactly the same.
The genre of “I went to the Alpha course, it was a bit rubbish, some of the people were a bit damaged and it wasn’t like a tutorial back when I was up at Magdelen” is pretty much mined out, wouldn’t you say? It’s hard to imagine that they’re written in, to coin a phrase, good faith: is there anyone left who thinks that they won’t be getting a rather wide-eyed assemblage of evangelical tropes (some or all of healing, talking in tongues, young-earth creationism, a probably less than accepting attitude to homosexuality), or anyone who think that they will… Read more »
JCF and Tim, these are the people you will be dealing with when you invite complete novices to Christianity for a course to explore faith. I’m not sure how helpful it is to tell them that they don’t quite meet your standards about what questions they should be asking. I thought she was lovely. Yes, she was an atheist, but she was also clearly open to listening what the course leader had to say. The way she engaged with the course was genuine, her incomprehension real not put on for the sake of an article. Yes, she was rooted in… Read more »
Erika says, ‘these are the people you will be dealing with when you invite complete novices to Christianity for a course to explore faith.’ Actually, Erika, that’s not usually the case. The latest statistics I’ve seen for both the USA and Canada (I’m not sure about the UK) say that roughly 1.5% of the population claim to be atheists. The vast majority of the complete novices who I invite to Christian Basics courses at our church are not atheists. Mind you, I do know a couple of delightful atheists, both of whom are guys married to women in our church.… Read more »
Tim, you are probably right, the vast majority is not atheist. They are agnostic with a very very low basic knowledge of Christianity. To all intent and purposes it’s the same thing. When they talk to us with any degree of serious interest the first question is always “but how do you know it’s true”. There are many possible answers to that, some open some more closed. But saying that “this course is not about providing an apologetic” is not helpful. The biggest challenge the churches face is not to convince people who already know why Christians become Christians, but… Read more »
Tim, the 2011 UK census found that 25% of the UK population declare as atheists. There is no decimal point missing in that number.
Interested Observer, I’ve been attempting to track down that figure. I’ve been unable to discover on the official website that the question of belief in God was asked. What I see is that the (voluntary – the only voluntary question on the census) question was ‘What is your religion?’ and that 25% replied they had no religion. If that’s the figure you’re talking about, then I must point out that it’s not the same as claiming to be an atheist.
See http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census/key-statistics-for-local-authorities-in-england-and-wales/rpt-religion.html
Erika, we may be using language differently. When I talk about ‘apologetic’, I mean what an old teacher of mine used to refer to as ‘the idea that a person can be argued into genuine Christian faith’. His comment was, ‘If a clever argument can make a person a Christian, a cleverer one can un-make them’.
Reasons for the faith that is in us, yes, of course. But those reasons are usually not limited to the purely rational and intellectual.
Tim,
I agree, I’d go as far as to say that faith is never fully rational. If you expect scientific proof or nothing you will end up as an atheist.
But if I read the article correctly, Tabatha felt there was no meaningful attempt made at all to explain to her why Christian faith should be something intelligent people might consider. If that’s true, and if people did indeed only talk in self referential circles expecting someone not steeped in Christian language to understand what they’re talking about, then it is a great shame.