Prison Alpha

As we keep saying, you can’t go anywhere in South Africa without coming up against the stark reminder of the universal truth that the poor always suffer, always get the rough end of already rough deals. It’s just the way life is. If you come from a background of relative wealth (and if you’re able to read this blog, then you do) then life will be easier for you – even in the difficult times.

Take Pollsmoor  Prison – Cape Town’s largest. It’s huge – an admission wing (where prisoners await trial or a move to other prisons), low, medium and high security wings as well as a women’s block. The admission wing was built to house just over 1,000 inmates. The problem is, that those from poorer backgrounds don’t get the bail they would otherwise benefit from  – their loved ones can’t afford it. This means that the admission wing currently holds over 4,000 men. Think about what that means for the days, weeks, months, years you can wait there for. Never tell me prison is easy.

Anyway, it’s into that context were running an Alpha course. I’m not doing it ‘on behalf’ of St Peter’s; in fact I’m doing it in under the leadership of our good friend Jeremy, the Associate Minister at Christ Church, with a small team of others.

The Alpha course is surely the most widespread evangelistic tool of the last 50 years. For those who don’t know, it emerged out of Holy Trinity Brompton church in London. It’s 10 weeks long, with a day/weekend away in the middle. It’s an introduction to the Christian faith, covering everything from Jesus and His death, the Bible, church, prayer, seeking guidance, the person and work of the Holy Spirit and how to resist evil. The essential ingredients are food, a talk and a no-holds barred group discussion guided by a group leader who isn’t going to give ‘the right answer’ but just allow discussion to flow. Alpha has since spread all over the world – there are 7,000 courses running in the UK alone. You can see more if you click here . As this other website shows, it’s prevalent here in South Africa too.

The fruit of Alpha in prison has been well recorded. It’s my first time in being involved in a course in prison – though one of the best experiences of my ministry was the week’s placement I spent with the chaplaincy team at Belmarsh prison in London while training for ordained ministry. At Pollsmoor we’ve just had the second week of the course, where the subject is ‘Why Did Jesus Die?’. I gave the talk to 24 men in one of the medium security wings of the prison. It’s hard to describe the power of the experience. We’re aided by a team of prison evangelists trained up by the man responsible for the spiritual care of the wing. I should mention that all these evangelists are inmates. Awesome.

I gave a very similar talk to that which I usually do on such a week of the course elsewhere. Talked of punishment for sin, and God taking it for us. Talked of our slavery, our addiction to sin and the freedom that’s bought for us. Talked of how we’re all equally guilty; orange-suited inmate, English preacher or ‘law-abiding’ citizen … that to Jesus the angry word is as bad as murder, the lingering lustful glance as adultery. In well-behaved suburban England that would often provoke violent disagreement from long-standing Christians and church members. In an old shower block in a prison on the tip of Africa all I saw was nodding heads and moist eyes. And double-figures numbers of people committing their lives to Jesus.

Tell me, then, why we find it so difficult to believe that God has a special love reserved for the poor, the marginlalised and the vulnerable?

I’ll blog some more about this later in the course

Dave

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