Using Video Classes to Personalize Christianity

As an Episcopalian minister explained recently, there is a distinctly Southern California appeal to the Alpha Course, a sort of Christianity 101 centered on videotaped sermons.

“You can sit in a classroom situation, which is not confrontational, and over the 10 weeks you have home-cooked meals with these strangers, who you get to know,” said the Rev. Rand Reasoner, pastor of Prince of Peace Episcopal Church in Woodland Hills. “You can wonder in a sort of nonthreatening way.”

Reasoner was among the first clergymen to bring the wildly popular religious course to California about three years ago. His own church is now sponsoring its ninth presentation of the series, which over time has attracted as many as 80 participants and as few as nine, mostly from outside his church community.

“The main thrust is an evangelical effort,” he said. “To reignite someone’s faith or to introduce them to the Christian faith.”

Reasoner said that, in the past, it was common for even lapsed Christians to know basic Bible stories such as that of Noah and the Ark or other such references. But now, the separation between daily life and faith has become so broad that that link often is lost and hard to regain, especially in urban centers like L.A., where people don’t know their neighbors and can be uneasy in public.

“I once lived in New York, where the Alpha organization is based, and there are real similarities” between that city and L.A., he said.

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The course, which originated at an Anglican church in London, has spread rapidly throughout the United States and the world in the last five years. In addition to the nonreligious, Christians in all the major denominations have taken the course: Baptists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Pentecostalists, Presbyterians and Roman Catholics.

So far, 276 California churches who have held the program, including the pastoral operation at the California Institution for Men in Chino, have added their names to the Alpha registry Web site.

The courses are free, and Alpha is nonprofit, said Alistair M. Hanna, executive director of Alpha North America in New York City. Hanna volunteers his time to the organization, as do hundreds of other Alpha hosts around the world.

“My conviction about why I want to do Alpha so much: I want to give others the opportunity to come into a friendly, seeker-sensitive, non-pressurized environment that’s an easy place to come but that doesn’t have to be a church,” said David Fritz of Ellicott City, Md., who along with his wife, Allison, has been a host for the program.

Last year, 118,000 people took the Alpha Course in the United States and Canada, up from less than 4,000 three years ago, Hanna said. It also is offered in more than 100 countries around the world, he said.

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The first Alpha videotape is called “Christianity: Boring, Untrue and Irrelevant?” Others include: “Who Is Jesus?”; “Why and How Should I Read the Bible?”; and “Why and How Should I Tell Others?”

Each participant receives an Alpha Course manual that contains quotes from the Bible, suggested readings, space for notes and advice on how to write a moving testimony about the role of Jesus in his or her life. The booklet is illustrated with playful cartoons and the Alpha symbol, a cartoon man struggling under the weight of an enormous red question mark.

During a recent evening with the Fritzes, the group debated whether God always answers prayers, whether God gets angry when people ask for material things and whether God is comforting, like a friend, or demanding, like a patriarch.

Mostly, Prince of Peace’s Reasoner said, the purpose of the program is to talk about God and to “ask anything.”

* The Baltimore Sun contributed to this report.

* More information is available at https://www.alphana.org.