This is a sample article featured in the March 2006 issue of Quadrant

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    Alpha continues to grow from strength to strength! The latest estimates of total UK attendance in 2005 show a 4% increase on numbers attending in 2004, making a total of almost 2 million people in the UK who have attended an Alpha Course! Some will have attended more than once as they act as helpers or hosts.
    Nearly a fifth of a million people, 182,000, attended Alpha in 2005 throughout the UK, an impressive jump from the 175,000 who went in 2004. The Alpha Course was originated by Holy Trinity, Brompton, the church in central London which held its first Course in the late 1980s, with it spreading out, initially around the UK, from 1993.

Worldwide
Alpha Courses were known to have taken place in three-quarters of the countries of the world, 155 in all, in 2005, up from 149 countries in 2004. Three-quarters of attenders are measured by actual count, and the remaining quarter estimated from the number of churches holding courses or sales of manuals. The overall total in 2004 showed that more than 1.1 million worldwide attended an Alpha Course, and while the 2005 International figures are not yet available, it is very likely that the total will be similar. That includes attendance at specialist Alpha courses such as Student Alpha, Alpha for Prisons, etc.
    That means that in total 7.9 million worldwide will have attended an Alpha course by the end of 2005, and if the number attending in 2006 is about the same as in previous years, or even more, then by the end of 2006 an estimated 9 million people worldwide will have been to Alpha. About half that attendance is in North America.
    Some will, of course, have attended more than once as hosts for the non-churchgoing guests, but if the proportion of non-churchgoers (who might be expected to attend only once) is the same worldwide as in the UK, then nearly 3½ million non-churchgoers worldwide have been to an Alpha Course.

Church growth
Churches holding Alpha in the UK are asked what percentage of their attendance comes from those who have attended Alpha Courses. Not all of these will necessarily be new Christians. This has slowly increased from 2003 when it was 9.6%, to 10.3% in 2004 and 11.9% in 2005. If these are roughly averaged to 10%, and if the UK percentage applies worldwide, then this would mean that some 300,000 people are now attending church as a result of Alpha.

Worldwide and UK Alpha Attendance

The graph shows the steady increase in numbers attending since they were first measured in the early 1990s. Why the number attending in 2002 was not an increase on 2001 numbers is not known, but the chart shows that the numbers attending in the UK are increasing again.
This is encouraging news for evangelism in the UK as well as other countries worldwide.

Source: International Alpha Courses 2004, and The 2005 Alpha Invitation Course, private research reports by Christian Research, London for HTB, November 2005 and January 2006, quoted with permission.


Numbers for chart:

                       1994            1995            1996             1997             1998               1999
UK                 25,000         67,000         129,000        181,000         228,000          253,000
Outside UK             0         13,000         126,000         225,000         319,000         440,000

                       2000             2001             2002             2003             2004             2005
UK                 238,000        190,000        153,000        147,000        175,000        182,000
Outside UK    583,000        733,000        758,000        886,000         936,000        950,000


 

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