Alpha

Tonight was the first real night of Alpha (where we were actually in small groups for discussion time) and it went really well. I was nervous, especially since I didn’t have John with me but the people at our table were laid-back and I’m excited.

One of the first questions we asked tonight to get the conversation going was, “If you could ask God one question, what would it be?” Here are the answers around our table:

- Why does it have to work on faith? Why can’t he give us all the evidence?

- How well am I doing?

- What’s the point? What am I doing here?

- How do I make sure about Heaven so that all my other questions can be answered once I get there?

- Why are there so many religions?

- Why did he give us free will/choice when he knew we would fail?

I’m excited to see if and how people will feel like their questions get answered over the course of the next 10 weeks. While there were definitely some silent minutes, overall I was thrilled to have several people who were willing to talk, with only a couple quiet ones who are probably just warming up and will jump in at some point. There is a lot of potential for this group to get into some deep conversations.

Tonight we talked about “Who is Jesus”  – the evidence for his existence and for his resurrection. It was great to be reminded that, in terms of historical evidence, the New Testament far outnumbers any other ancient prose writing in the number of copies we have (5000+ in the Greek, 10,000 in Latin and 9,300 others). Livy’s Roman History has only 20 copies.

One of the things I like about Nicky Gumbel’s speaking is that he quotes a wide variety of people. Last week he quoted Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. This week he quoted some great points that C.S. Lewis makes in Mere Christianity, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg–or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.”

It’s a good reminder for me because I am so used to the idea of Jesus that I forget how extraordinary it is that he actually lived on this earth as a historical person and that matters 2000 years later.