Alpha training is not an "evangelism solution on tape" or "evangelism in a can," but an effective tool of education and evangelism that can rejuvenate longtime church members and encourage them to share stories of faith and doubt. It is drawing skeptics and seekers to the Christian faith and into the church.
Once pejorative labels like "brainwashing" have been affixed to conversion, any church is fair game for claims of damages.
In the era of the electronic church and the born-again media blitz, the message comes through loud and clear: evangelical ministry is such that whether the preacher really believes in it or not doesn’t matter! The mass-culture media religion is so superficial that it scarcely matters whether its adherents are cynically being "taken."
A church that talks of salvation but does not battle for social justice will be dismissed as phony. A church that shuns controversy for fear of upsetting its membership has ceased to be the church and has become a club. No program of evangelism will save it.
Most Christians in Israel do not proselytize among the Jews; but a few high-keyed evangelists have created in the minds of Israelis the illusion that many Christians are actively seeking to convert Jews.
Something happens to the converted alcoholic or the converted charismatic that brings about change, sometimes a quick illumination, but often a rather gradual and increasingly insistent spiritual awakening. The spiritual conversion experienced by both of these groups is intended to carry the individual along in a "new" way of life, and it does for those who stay with it.
There is a need for thoughtful people to make some discriminations between and within religious groups -- to look for curing impulses that are latent in the faiths that so easily can spread disease.
The most pressing issue in the world today -- political, economic and moral -- is the fact that a minority of human beings pursue without limits their own pleasure, while the majority pay for that privilege with their very lives.
The churches have moved toward a new paradigm for expressing what we do in sharing the gospel with others: storytelling. Churches do not seem to be responding in two areas: 1. In the relationship of the family to evangelism. 2. No questions are being raised in the area of communications.
The spiritual hunger of present day teens is remarkable, but the challenge is to channel this free-floating, often nebulous, ethereal religiosity into genuine religious commitment.