Alpha Friends

More than 1200 church leaders from 77 countries and 28 denominations are attending Alpha's week for leaders from Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Holy Trinity Brompton this week.

The conference was opened on Monday by the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres. Here is what he said:

"It's thrilling to be here. It's marvelous to see all the delegates and it's really good to be thinking globally as Christians because I sometimes think there are parts of the church that have insufficient spiritual ambition.

That is something that the Christian movement throughout the entire world has really got to develop and increase in this century; proper spiritual ambition for the sake of Jesus Christ.

This is a very turbulent world, this is a world where we're facing huge promise and huge peril and unless the followers of JesusChrist have spiritual ambition and a real burning zeal to present Jesus Christ as part of the truth that will bring to fulfillment the promise of the 21^stcentury then things will look dark indeed.

You come to a mission zone. You come to London. One hundred years ago, the missionary conference that was convened in Edinburgh in 1910 looked out across the world and naturally thought that it was operating from a Christian culture, a Christian shelter and looking at the influence ofJesus Christ radiating throughout the world.

Now the situation a hundred years later is very different and I'm moved and grateful that so many have come here to London to help us in what is a major mission field.

 I had the most thrilling encounter connected with Alpha exactly two weeks ago. I went to a parish in the centre of London. It was a parish I had visited five years ago when it was literally un-joinable. There were five very faithful, good people left in the congregation.

There was faithful ministry, but there was understandably a great deal of weariness. In fact, one of the people said to me very sadly at the church which was also falling to pieces.

She said 'you know Bish (because I'm terribly sorry brothers, we are very informal in some parts of the diocese of London but I do try to repress it) it's only inertia that keeps us going' and there was a profound truth there.

But two weeks ago I went to the church there - It now has 350 members. It runs six Alpha courses a year. People come to a living faith in Jesus Christ there. There was in fact a group sent out by the pastors of this parish by Sandy, our bishop in mission, (you can tell that because he'swearing a sort of bush shirt) who sent out this fabulous group of people to Shadwell.

And we now have a beacon in the area which is full of the love and the spirit of Jesus Christ and is immensely attractive. So I'm not here merely out of theories. I'm here because I've seen the capacity of the method you're going to be looking at to produce results.

We've just done some research in London, some interesting research about how many Londoners actually passionately want to convert fellow citizens to their world view.

Thank God the largest group that want to do that call themselves Christians. Hallelujah! Thanks be to God!

The third largest group are the Muslims, who have a burning zeal to see London as one of the great Islamic capitals of the world.

But, the second largest group, and this is astonishing, the second largest group of people with a burning zeal to have others adopt their world view were the agnostics and the atheist.

Agnostics who believe passionately with utter sincerity and certainty that nothing can be known at all. And yet they have a zeal to convert. And I think that is a very important part of the missionary picture, that there is hope here.

Somebody who is one of the leading scientists of the country, a self-professed Atheist .

He has been part of the Royal Society, Lord Robert May. He said that such was the scale of the challenges facing the human race 'God might be needed because it was the only answer big enough and adequate to the problems and challenges we face'.

 And of course it a perfectly respectable scientific was of proceeding. You posit a hypothesis and you see whether it helps you to make sense of how any system coheres. And it's a perfectly respectable way of going on.

The responsibility however is ours. Robert May stands for so many people who understand the huge promise that the discoveries the scientific knowledge has given us but also the huge peril in which we stand.

I believe passionately that if the reference to God as we see him in the face of Jesus Christ is edited out of our world view, then this world becomes a flat land in which the only truth is competing human desires.

It becomes a theatre of competing human desires and aterrible flat land where people live faster and faster and faster in them is apprehension that they can get more out of this short life.

We come to regard ourselves as 'gods' and our wills as sovereign and we no longer really have a sense of ourselves as participating in a creation and dominance is substituted for connectedness in our relationswith the world around us. Jesus Christ, the human face of God came in the formof a servant.

He came to convey the truth that the first step inbecoming a human being is to refuse to be a little god and to look instead tothe only God who exists.

The God whom we did not create but who created us.The Lord and Father, the source of life, the Father of Jesus Christ himself.

As we meet here, we are invited I believe in the faceof this huge promise and peril, to a renewed and deeper sense of our responsibility but also with a huge humility like his, close to the earth, close to service because our faith has to embrace a care for the frail and poor of the world and a detestation of every form of slavery and oppression.

Genuine conversion to the way of Jesus consists inprecisely this: Turning away from making a god of our own desires. Turning away from life as a consumer of the world. And turning towards being a communicator, a citizen, a contemplative.

This is a thrilling agenda for the 21^stCentury. This I believe is the heart of what we're gathered here to be and do together.

I thank God for this Alpha movement. For a movement which could have become diverted into becoming just another sect, just another sub group, inward looking. Instead we have here what I believe is part of the generosity of a God who so loved the world that he gave.

It is a method which I've seen with my own eyes and you have to realize that I'm speaking to you not as a curly headed enthusiast. I would look ridiculous quite frankly if I were to try to emulate the corybantic ecstasies on the stage.

So you can believe me when I say: I've seen it, itworks. I praise God for it. I love being here, it's wonderful to see you and with the greatest formality I can muster at this stage I declare the conference open!