Canadian Evangelism

My roommate these last couple of days here in Calgary has been John Kreklo (another John K), our National Alpha for Prisons Director. Sometimes when speaking to people at our Alpha table at the ACOP Congress , I introduce us saying, "Hi, I'm John with Alpha Canada and this is the other John with Alpha Canada ( a la the old   Bob Newhart Show , about the 2:50 mark)) But that is not the point of this post. The real point is this: I was thinking (wait for applause). First I must give you the setup. John K (the other one) sets his alarm for 6:50. What a weird time! Nobody sets their alarm for oddball times, do they? I set mind for 7. Well, the reason, he told me, is that he has to iron his shirt. OK - makes sense. So I awake the next morning to an unmistakable sound - the squeaking/grating sound like that of fingernails on a blackboard. It's the ironing board being opened. Which got me thinking - of all the wonderful advances in technologies in almost every area of...

At least that what it was going to be. It is a 2000 Hyundai Tiburon. This is a picture of the two of us. I am the taller one. I think it looks like a toy car when I stand beside it, but I really do fit in. It was a free gift from my daughter a couple of years ago. This is the daughter I love more than I can say, but who is the only person in the world to whom I cannot say, "No." In any case, she had this car, and it was an extra one; surplus; extraneous; a spare.  You get the picture. So she said, "Dad, I would like to give you my car." I said, "Sure." "All you have to do is pay the bill to get it out of the repair shop." "Thanks," I said. It sounded like a good deal at the time. The bill was $3500.00 Well, the car was probably worth that much at the time, so at worst I got a good car at a reasonable price. In the meantime, I have become quite attached to it as we travel the Province representing Alpha. It turned over 240,000 km on the ...

  The Apostolic Church of Pentecost is the denomination. I was surprised (and so was she) that my daughter in Grande Prairie attends an ACOP Church, People's Church - a very lively church and an Alpha one.   Another ACOP Alpha church is in Slave Lake, Alberta. They also ran Alpha last fall. Pastor Syd is here at the Congress. The last time I spoke to him was in January of this year, on a Saturday, the day before his congregation was to meet for the first time in their new church building. Their original building had been destroyed in the Slave Lake wildfire of 2011. Their new building is a steel one.   This is an International congress. One of the first guests I spoke with was a woman from Taiwan. She was not familiar with Alpha, but you should have seen the smile on her face when I gave her a postcard I happened to have written in Chinese. She signed up for more information so I will pass her name on to Wando Ho, our National Chinese and ESOL Alpha Director. ...

We can only pray: I spent Saturday at YC Alberta . I'm sure I was the oldest guy there. Alpha's own Ben Woodman spoke at two sessions Saturday afternoon, to a total of several hundred young people. The first session was on sharing one's faith with friends, the second was about going deeper in a relationship with Jesus. This picture was from the first session, where Ben, at the end of his talk, interviewed some high school students about Alpha's Youth Film Series in their schools. One student was from a Pentecostal church but ran Alpha in the Catholic High School he attends. Another spoke of praying with her peers when they were organizing their Alpha, for, first 20,then 30, 40 50, guests, then thought they should stop praying because they might be asking for too much. They had 80 kids come to their first session. The third commented that the school's entire Gay-Straight Alliance came to their first session. I should have asked (but didn't) if they stayed for the...

I attended a funeral today - the father of a good friend from our church. There were a number of other fellow parishioners there as well. One of them, Garry, asked me how my week was, and I told him of my trip to Provost, Wainwright and Lloydminster. "Oh," he said, I'm from Lloydminster, and Shelley (his wife) is from 10 miles south and 3 miles west." "I was just there, " I said, "And I found this little church" (see my previous post here .) I reached for my phone and showed him the pictures I had taken. "That's Shelley's church," he said, "Show her the pictures." I did. I first showed Shelley the picture I had taken of the interior. She put her hand to her chest and gasped. She seemed rather choked up. She put her finger to the altar in the picture and said, "I was both baptized and confirmed right there!" I couldn't believe it! What a coincidence! All her forefathers; parents and grandparents are buried...

I just returned from a bit of a whirlwind tour of East Central Alberta, with encouraging visits in Provost, Wainwright and Lloydminster. My previous two posts were also from this trip. Today it was Lloydminster. Three churches there ( Southridge , LGF , and Living Faith Pentecostal ) ran Alpha in 2013, and I received very encouraging reports from all of them, plus a couple of meetings with prospective Alpha churches, one of them a brand new church. Some of the city's interesting history is here Lloydminster has the unusual geographic distinction of straddling the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan Unlike most such cases , Lloydminster is not a pair of twin cities on opposite sides of a border which merely share the same name, but is actually incorporated by both provinces as a single city with a single municipal administration. Intended to be an exclusively British utopian settlement centred on the idea of sobriety, the town was founded in 1...

A little more forceful than, "Keep off the grass," or even, "No Trespassing!" This is from CFB Wainwright, beside the highway on the way from Provost, AB.   It reads, "DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING IT MAY EXPLODE AND KILL YOU", although the most important word, "KILL" seems to have been partially erased.   For some reason, two Bible verses sprang to mind: Proverbs 14:12 and Romans 6:23 .   The first seems fairly self-explanatory - there are things we may think it OK to touch, activities we may think harmless to engage in, but doing so may have dire consequences.   The second verse then gives us hope. No matter what our past, the gift of eternal life, through a relationship with the Creator Himself, has been made possible, the doing of Jesus Christ. And what he did is done already; the only thing for us to do is accept it.   Check out an Alpha course to see if this relationship is right for you (to paraphrase the TV drug commercials).   Blessings, John ...

Taking the back roads from Wainwright to Lloydminster I passed this: I slammed on the brakes and turned around to check it out. This picture actually makes it look big. It is Holy Trinity Golden Valley, an Anglican church planted in 1911. I don't quite know how they named the location. It may be golden but there is not a valley in sight. A bit of its history can be found here.  You may be able to see a small cross right next to the building, towards the door. It commemorates the life of a baby who lived for about one week in 1914. The door was fastened with only a clip, so I took the liberty of opening the door and peeking inside. Here is the interior:   Yes, that is the entire inside of the church - 4 pews each side. Can we who may consider a congregation of 100 to be smallish imagine the worshipping community here back in the day? Can we imagine the joy of those people of faith who had it as their first and long-awaited church, or the dedication of those who b...

I have said that I grew up in a small town in Southern Ontario. My walk to and from school was about a kilometer. I remember in 1953 coming home from school and, from a distance, seeing something brand new - a television aerial on the roof of our house. My whole family had been talking about getting a TV and looking forward to it for weeks. Finally it was here. We were so excited. It was a grainy little black and white TV, as deep as it was wide, on four spindly legs, but we loved it. We got three channels. My brothers and I huddled around it watching all our favourite movies and shows. I now have a 42” colour flat screen on my wall. Larger and larger ones seem to be becoming available all the time. As much as I loved that first TV, I would never want to go back to it. To me, the Christian life is like the flat screen, and my life before knowing God in the way I do now was like that old grainy black and white. As much as we loved it at the time, I would never want ...

This is one of my talks on the Holy Spirit, adapted from Nicky's own. What Happens when we are filled with the Spirit The book of Acts has been described as Volume 1 in the history of the Church, and throughout that book, there are several examples of people experiencing the Holy Spirit. I want to look at some of them. The circumstances are different each time but they all have something in common – there is always something wonderful – something noticeable that happens. There are signs, or manifestations. Let’s check out some of these occasions;   In Acts Chapter 2 , it was unexpected .   “ When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spir...

                                                                                                                                                                  , This picture is taken at Gw...

You may have heard of the shooting incident in St Paul Alberta on Friday. I woke up to the news early Saturday morning. Three RCMP officers were wounded and one man, the shooter, killed. What came to light later is that there was another shooting victim. Police have not, at time of writing, definitely connected the two incidents, but the first man killed was a Catholic priest. His name was Father Gilbert Dasna, an assistant priest at the Cathedral in St Paul. St Paul Cathedral Parish is an Alpha parish. They were one of the churches who participated in Alberta2013. I had not met Fr. Dasna, and I hadn't made it out to St Paul for a visit yet this year. That was going to come on a trip to Bonnyville and Cold Lake. My heart is heavy tonight. Who could have known, but I wish I'd made it. Please pray for the people of St Paul and all grieving over the loss of these lives. Lift up the people of St Paul Cathedral Parish as they mourn the loss of one of their leaders. ...

Because, as the title of this blog indicates, this is a diary, it will not always contain great theological or philosophical revelations. Sometimes it will be just what a diary is - a record of my thoughts and/or activities. I have set myself a bit of a busy schedule over the next two weeks, but that's the whole point, isn't it. Even though this is my retirement career, I still treat it as a full-time job. Basically, I do my best to devote 9-5, five days a week to my Alpha duties, and Saturday and Sunday are never ruled out if Alpha stuff needs attention. So... my schedule as it stands so far for the next couple of weeks includes two presentations at St Paul's Anglican Church in Edmonton this Sunday, trips to Westlock and Morinville, AB, a Pastors' lunch presentation in Whitecourt and visits to churches in Provost, Wainwright and Lloydminster. One thing I like to do wherever I go is check out a bit of each town's history and sources of local pride. Many Alberta comm...

We launched our latest Alpha Monday night at Christ the King Edmonton . We had our team of 4 plus 7 prospective guests, plus a couple of visitors who didn't intend to join the course, but came either for the free food  or just to keep someone company. I figured: the Alberta Regional Director's church should be running Alpha, and the Alberta Regional Director shouldn't necessarily be the one coordinating it. However, I compromised on the second point to accomplish the first. Our congregation is just a year old, so there was not an overly-large talent pool of experienced, "Alphaholics" from which to pick an actual coordinator, although a couple of wonderful women did step forward as helpers. I invited a friend who was a great Alpha team member a few years back, hoping that he might join our new congregation and become, "the Alpha Guy" next time. (Don't tell him I said that - you'll give away my secret agenda.) So... at the moment we look to have tw...

Walter Martin, founder of the Christian Research Institute, put it this way: There are two possibilities; either something in the universe is eternal, or something came from nothing. If something came from nothing, we have to ask, “OK, how?” How did something come from nothing? I mean absolutely nothing - anything that was there before the beginning is not nothing. And for those who insist on proving everything scientifically, how does one explain this.   So… first possibility – something is eternal. If this is the case, we have to ask, “What is it?" Two choices - it must either be matter, or whatever created matter. I can’t see a third alternative. Either matter – that is all the atoms and molecules in the universe - have been here forever, or at some time in the past they didn’t exist and then they somehow began to exist. But that still leaves the question; if matter is eternal, where did it come from? How did it come into being in the first place? If it came into be...

Alberta2013 was a media campaign for Alpha in Alberta, Canada, in the fall of 2013. The tag line was, “Question Everything.”   I remember seeing a comment on a website to the effect that if everyone questioned everything there would be a lot more atheists, and I thought immediately, “No, there would be a lot fewer.”   I came to faith at the age of 45, so I’ve been on both sides of this theistic fence, so to speak, and recently enough to remember both sides. And I’m not stupid. Years ago I applied for membership in Mensa and fell a half a percentile short. I don’t say that as a boast, just to point out that to be a theist, to believe in God, doesn’t automatically mean one has a low IQ. Many of the most intelligent people throughout history have been theists, and I don’t think any reasonable person could accuse them of being stupid or gullible. I have a sort of engineering mind – I like to see how things work. I like to see things make sense. I like to see how things fit t...

Great video showing all the churches who participated in Alberta2013 with Alpha. I love watching this because I see all the churches I was in touch with last year. Many of the people who participated in Alpha in 2013 also enjoy seeing it, as they often know various churches or the people in them. Blessings, John

Here are final stats, now official, for Alpha in Alberta for 2013. In 2012, there were 61 churches or organizations running 111 Alpha's. In 2013, there were 325 running 911. What a difference a year, a lot of work by a great team, and the LORD's blessing make!   Blessings,   John