Into the Wardrobe

They do the Alpha course at my parish (Roman Catholic) but I haven't done it (except that we watched a few of the videos for my confirmation preparation program.) It has a large following there, and they have been doing it every year for about 5 years now.

My biggest complaint against the Alpha Course is it's intimate origins and connections with the "Toronto Blessing Movment" and "Holy Laughter" which seems frankly demonic to me, but ironically, research and concern about it led me from the Baptist Faith to the Catholic Church. Most people who are opposed to Catholicism tend to dislike the Alpha Course for it's charismatic elements which are similar to Catholich mysticism. I am completely opposed to the The Toronto Blessing Movement, the Vineyard Churches, their founders and the Holy Laughter Movement. But I am grateful to the Alpha course for leading me, along with Paladin, to the Catholic Church.

Life is strange; more so the Holy Spirit's leading. I'll provide the link to the info I found and let you decide:

Sarah N. : The Alpha Course has no place in the Catholic Church. Do the research.

Hi Sehoy:

Can I offer some constructive counsel on this statement? I think your brush is too broad. The Vineyard Churches, the Alpha Course and the Toronto Blessing and "holy laughter" are not all lumped together. The Vineyard Churches painfully ultimately asked the Toronto Airport Vineyard to leave their association of churches b/c of concern that they were focusing too much attention on phenomena, such as "holy laughter", and neglecting basics. That occurred in the mid to late 1990s. The Alpha Course, as noted above, came out of Holy Trinity Brompton, an Anglican church that was visited by John Wimber - the Vineyard Churches founding and still most famous teacher - and a team in the very early 1980s, around 1981. There were some notable miracles that occurred, and the church was positively affected - to this day.

Not claiming in any way to be a professional historian, just a Christian who tries to read as widely as I can in church history, I think that whenever God is working powerfully in people's hearts and minds, sometimes strange things happen. For example, in the great revival movements at the time of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield, or later in the 1800s with the Wesley's and others, sometimes people under great spiritual conviction were reported to shake or laugh or cry or pass out. The problem, IMO, only comes when that alone becomes the focus.

I grew up in an ethnic Baptist church in an industrial neighborhood in Chicago. They would never, ever have called themselves Pentecostal, and many members might have denied that God still does miracles as in the Bible. However, they were acquainted, too, with "things happening" when God was working in someone's spirit. I remember a man from a rough life who had a miraculous conversion that was still talked about years later. I don't know how he ended up at their evening service, but he came under such spiritual conviction from God that night that he was crying and then shaking so hard that an entire, long hardwood pew was shaking with him. (And this was not a church that practiced emotional services or long appeals.) Whatever God was doing deep inside him that night that caused those outer phenomena, it was real and the change stuck! I have vivid memories of him from when I was a child as a man with a kind, radiant and joyful face, so eager to tell everyone he could meet about Jesus Christ. When I learned, years later, that he had once been a very rough man people were afraid of, it seemed hard to believe.

Since you've joined the Roman Catholic Church, I'll mention this, too. I'm not sure how to take all the medieval saints stories, but, if they are even partly accurate historically, then there were some similar things happening with folks such as the renewal friars like St. Francis or St. Anthony of Padova. (In fact, as a teacher, I would love some day to witness God work the way it is said happened on occasion with St. Anthony of Padova, that as he was teaching the Bible, some people listening who had illnesses were miraculously and suddenly healed!)

Based on a number of years observation, I'd give the Vineyards very good scores for sound Christian doctrine, and sound practice rooted in God's authority: "Let's obey the Bible, teach about Jesus, and pray for people and see what God does".

So...hope this is useful, and I hope it doesn't sound negative. Please be careful to look for whether, in the long run, Jesus is lifted up and people are changed for life - or not. I do appreciate your root concern, there are spiritual counterfeits out there.

Interesting.

I know of course that there are radicals who call themselves Protestant who spout all sorts anti-Catholic propaganda and hatred. I have taken this sort of ugliness as an inevitable price of the kind religious freedom that the Protestant reformation has brought.

But having encountered one group of Catholic extremists who deny that Pope John Paul II was ever really a pope, and various other Catholics with intolerant opinions, it seems that this sort of ugliness has more to do with human nature than anything else. What do you think?

I know this Jehova Witness who became an anti-religion atheist. Seems to me that not much changed in his outlook: only one more religion added to the list of those that he thinks are evil. Sometimes it seems to me that the more people change the more they stay the same.

One of the most remarkable things about the Alpha Course is its palpable appeal to a very wide denominational spectrum. Thus it doesn't surprise me to hear of it being embraced by (some) Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches on the one hand, and Pentecostal on the other. I guess for the same reason, I'm not totally surprised by Sehoy's remark about its association with the Toronto Blessing movement, though he is incorrect in suggesting that its origins were intimately associated with that movement (if that's what his post was suggesting -- I'm not absolutely sure from the wording). Its originators were (and still are) essentially middle-of-the-road Church of England clergy who are conscious of the need to reach the unchurched with the Gospel in a way that is acceptable to ordinary people in the modern world.

In the UK it is not generally associated in people's minds with pentecostal or charismatic churches, except perhaps by the ultra traditional and conservative element in the Church of England who consider anything remotely suggestive of evangelism as 'happy-clappy'.

I don't know if the UK version is different from the US version. The US version encourages spiritual gifts traditionally associated with Pentecostal churches (such as tongues). For this reason, some non-Pentecostal chuches have had to make changes in the Alpha curriculum.

- Dan -

(toocat, sehoy is a she, by the way)

--Stanley