How Fr Joe is using Alpha in a parish with an average age of seventy

We talk to Fr Joseph Owusu-Ansah about how to use Alpha to form disciples and begin the journey of church renewal in a struggling parish.

Hey Fr Joe, can you tell us a bit about your parish?

In the summer of 2020, I arrived in my parish, the Parish of the Holy Family, Thanet, which is not too far from Canterbury and Dover.

I inherited a parish that wasn’t growing. There’s been a history of nothing happening. It’s very elderly, the average age of the parish is seventy. There was about 150 Mass attendance before I came, and when I arrived, because of COVID, there were about 45 people coming.

And you have started running Alpha there?

Right now, I am using Alpha as a way to invite the ordinary person in the pew to come alongside me to fulfil the vision that God has put on my heart for the parish. I want to go on a journey with these people, to fall in love with Christ, to deepen our relationship with Christ so that we will want to give. That’s how I have used it.

So, I invited virtually everyone in the parish whom I thought was 55 years and below to come with me on a journey. There were ten of us and during the Easter season, we did Alpha. I want them to deepen their love for Jesus so that they will come along with me and work with me towards the vision because I cannot do it alone. I want them to fall in love with Jesus and seek to deepen their relationship with Him.

What effect have you seen Alpha have on the people in your church?

I’ll give you a particular instance. There was a woman I invited on this journey. She’s at Mass every Saturday evening and she said, ‘Father, if this is about getting me to do anything in the Church then forget it.’ Someone who is at Mass every Saturday evening, you can see that she’s engrossed in the Mass - fantastic, but then ‘I won’t do anything.’ 

I said, ‘just come along’. During Alpha, I started seeing a shift. After we did the Alpha session on the Bible she said, ‘I actually feel bad that I’ve not been outreaching about the Bible to people. I’ve not really talked to people about the Bible in the past.’

In the evaluation for that Alpha, she said, ‘how can we not share this.’ Someone who said, ‘if it’s about doing anything for the Church, forget it’! 

Through Alpha, there’s been able to be a shift with people who came to Mass, even in the midst of the pandemic. Maybe they were content with coming to Mass, but now there’s been a shift that they want to share the message.

Basically, I’ve attained the outcome that I wanted to attain, by the grace of God, with Alpha as a tool. I’ve done it - it’s happened. There has been a shift in people, a positive shift, a spiritual shift. One of them said, ‘When I come to church now [following doing Alpha], I feel happier, I feel calmer at church.’

So it’s actually impacted their engagement with the holy sacrifice of the Mass. Their experience of church is now different. 

When you arrived there, in a small, struggling parish, why did you think to use Alpha? Some people would think that that wouldn’t work.

I had already used Alpha in two previous parishes with young people and had seen it bear fruit. So, in 2019 I ran youth Alpha with teenagers in a parish in Dulwich. It impacted the kids, but more than anything it made them gel. When we did an evaluation, a number of the kids said ‘I’ve learned a lot of things about my faith that I didn’t know before.’ For the young adults I got together to help me, they were loving it, it brought them together. 

Then I ran it in my second parish, in Ashford and in the middle of it COVID hit. We shifted online and we lost about a third of the attendees when we went online. But it was brilliant, again I saw a shift in the kids.

So, when I came here, I thought with adults, if I want a core group to support me, Alpha will definitely help us to gel, please God they will get some basic understanding of the Christian faith, and the icing on the cake would be for them to be evangelised, to experience deeper conversion. Definitely, it’s worked.  

Is there a common thing between running Alpha for young people and adults? 

Yes, it could be the conversations, the sharing. Definitely, with the adults' one, they loved the sharing. Some of them said things like, ‘I felt alone in this experience, I thought I was the only ‘unholy’ person, but listening to others I feel I wasn’t alone in this.’ That builds connection. So a common theme with the young people and the adults would definitely be that gelling together and a feeling of having learned a lot about their faith. 

How do you find that Alpha fits into the context of your church?

I think that if you want to be in serious renovation, if you want to use the parish as an agent for evangelisation, I think your team have to be evangelised. Starting with the priest: if the priest is not deeply in love with Jesus, why would he start anything like this? But your team need to fall in love with Jesus and seek to deepen that relationship because then they will naturally want to share. You cannot fall in love with Jesus and not want to share Him.

So, I think it’s good for raising a team. For me, that’s how it fits into the parish. Let’s first seek to evangelise the team that we are going to work with. 

The second thing is not to make Alpha one of many things, one of many programmes that you run. Have a vision and within that vision, Alpha is the pipeline of evangelising people and raising up leaders.

What would it have been like to arrive at this parish not knowing about Alpha and how it can help to spark renewal?

Of course, God does miracles, but Alpha has made it easier.

God could have shown me a way, but at the moment I don’t know any tool that does it better than Alpha. So Alpha has been a real blessing in that regard. 

What would you say to someone who wanted to start Alpha but was unsure?

I would say, ‘go for it!’ It is worth it! There isn’t much work to do, if you’re doing it live, in person, the only thing is to get the food together. Apart from that, Alpha does everything for you. The videos are fantastic and you’ve got the videos there already, for the group discussion you just need to train leaders and that’s all - even the training Alpha has put together training videos for. So it’s so simple.

Go for it, it is worth it, it will give you the results, it will bear fruit! 

And for me, it’s affirmed my priesthood. I have seen fruit in it, I have seen people change, I have seen lives transformed. It’s refreshing as a priest to see lives change because I know that God can use me, unworthy as I am, to bring changes in people’s lives. It gives me hope and joy for the future. Try Alpha, go for it! It’s worth it, you will see fruit.