What is Alpha?

Do you know about Alpha?

That question was asked of me four years ago and my answer was, "Why no. What is it?"

It turned out it was a 10-week program designed to answer questions about christianity for people who either don't believe but have questions, or nominal believers who really don't know what to do with their lives.

That seemed to describe me at the time. I was raised since childhood in the Methodist church. It started for me with Bible School in the early 1950s at East Marion Methodist Church. The church had existed since the teens on Baldwin Avenue, and the chairs were so old they were still stamped with the old Methodist Episcopal South legend. Now that was before my time. And, just a few years later the Methodist church merged with the another denomination and that's where the "United" in the modern name for the denomination came from.

That's where my faith walk began, as it did for many children of the Baby Boom. Our parents had come through World War II and the Great Depression, so their faith had been tested and they had survived. Now it was time for them to start families and careers, and for most it was a time to go to the neighborhood church.

East Marion Methodist Church was located in the East Marion community, just outside the corporate limits of Marion, North Carolina. My mother would drag me, my sister, and my baby brother to church. My father would remain at home. He had been raised in some mountain church community, but after what he had seen in the war he wasn't too interested in going to church. I guess one might say he had lost his faith. I don't know what to think of that as he died just a short time later from a stroke. That was 1953. He was 49 years old (we think, there was always some mystery about when my Dad had actually been born), and I was 6 years old, getting ready to start school.

Life in the mill village took on a different look for us when my Dad died. This was still a time when textile companies owned the houses and land and the workers rented from the mill. In 1953, the company was selling the properties to the renters, but not to my mother. It was still a time when women were discriminated against, and as a result we had to move. That took us just a short distance away, to an area between the mill villages of East Marion and Clinchfield. East Marion was a J.P. Stevens factory and Clinchfield was Burlington Industries. But the area we moved into was called Stump Town.

Stump Town got its name from the clear-cutting that went on there during the 1920s, when all the trees were cut and only stumps were left. It was an area where union organizers and those who signed on to be union workers would gather to avoid being seen in the mill villages. East Marion was the scene in 1929 of one of the more notorius shootings at the mill gate. It actually resulted in the deaths of several workers and organizers, and the village was locked down by the National Guard send in by the governor to protect the mill owners and their property. It just happened to happen at the same time strikes were underway in Gastonia and other more notorius locations. But Stump Town became my home for the next decade as I grew up.

Church remained the place we went on Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and at mid-week with Wednesday prayer meetings. Unlike today, we didn't feel unusual by going. Everyone, it seemed, went to church. The Methodist church was usually filled for Sunday School and church, and the Baptist church up the street was filled much more than we were. Most of my friends and school mates through the years went to one of four churches, either East Marion Methodist or Baptist, or Clinchfield Methodist or Baptist. It wasn't until I got to high school that I saw anyone who went to other churchs. Certainly the Episcopalians were viewed like strangers in a strange land. The Presbyterians were off by themselves and we didn't know many of them there were. It wasn't until years later that I found out my barber was a Presbyterian. Certainly we knew no one at First Baptist or Methodist. Those were townies and townies kind of looked down on the mill workers who enriched their bank accounts.

But I've kind of gotten away from my original question and train of thought. Alpha, devised in Great Britain and now utilized around the world to reconnect people with God, or to connect those who haven't a clue about God with Him, brought me back to the church. It hasn't answered all my questions, but it certainly has me asking and looking for answers. Before Alpha I wasn't asking. I certainly wasn't looking. But now I am.