Alpha speaker Nicky Gumbel was invited to be a keynote speaker at a major Roman Catholic symposium on parish evangelisation in Rome in January.

He was the only non-Catholic speaker. Other speakers included Cardinal Camillo Ruini, general high reverend of the Archdiocese of Rome, and Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, Archbishop of Vienna.

The Symposium, attended by around 80 priests and church leaders from around the world, was organised by the Emmanuel Community in collaboration with the Pontifical Redemptor Hominis Institute.

In his talk, Nicky said, ‘I came to encounter Jesus Christ in my first year at university, and through reading the new testament.

‘Ever since then I’ve wanted to communicate this to other people. We tried every form of mission evangelism and it was largely unsuccessful in my own experience.

‘And then we stumbled upon the Alpha Course, which was already existing and has been running in the church. I had a small group of people who were outside of the church who came to faith in Jesus Christ, and suddenly we saw this was a gift from God that could be used for people who were not Christians, people who were not even baptised sometimes.

‘They could come to faith in Jesus Christ, they could be filled with the Spirit, they could get excited about Jesus, go out and tell their friends and bring them to the next course.

‘And so to our astonishment we started to see Alpha in our church growing from a hundred people to a hundred and fifty, to two hundred, three hundred.

‘On our current church course we have over 600 people. The majority of these are people outside of the church, some who have never even been in church.’

After telling more of the Alpha story and giving an overview of the theology behind the course, he answered a wide range of questions.

Nicky spoke after Cardinal Schonborn, who he first met five years ago when the Cardinal invited him to speak at an International Congress for New Evangelisation in Vienna hosted by five European cardinals. They met again last year at the Congress in Budapest.

Cardinal Schonborn told the symposium about the importance of parish life for Catholics. He compared it with that of the new movements and communities growing around the world.

Speaking in French to his mainly French audience, he said, ‘We need to love the parish.

‘A lot of people complain to me in my diocese that I love the new movements, the new communities, too much. I don’t know if it’s true or not.

‘However, I have to say that my great joy and at the same time my personal misery and difficulty is the parish because it is not a community the people have chosen.

‘It is a mix of different people, old and young. Some people are very active, some people are very slow to get involved, some people can be very conditional and others have more recent and new ideas.’

l Nicky and Pippa Gumbel had a 90-minute meeting with Cardinal Walter Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, in Rome in December. They had met at an interdenominational conference in Stuttgart last year and the Cardinal had invited them to Rome to talk more about Alpha.