I Was a Bit Disappointed Until...

Alpha Canada recently upgraded their program for reporting statistics on Alphas running in Canada.

Late last year, when sitting down to forecast for 2016, and establish targets, I settled on what I thought was a challenging, yet fully attainable target of seeing 450 Alpha's running in Alberta by the end of the year.

I felt I had worked hard throughout the year, yet never seemed to be keeping up with my self-established target. I kept running a report based on number of courses run and Organizing Church name.

Late last month my friend and Alpha for Catholics coach in Calgary, Mark Richards, asked me to give him a list of all Alpha for Youth courses being run in Alberta in Catholic contexts. So I ran my report with those criteria and sent it to him. He replied, "What about, (such and such Catholic School), I know they're running one there."
I ran and re-ran the report but couldn't get the course in question to come up. Finally I resorted to asking someone who actually knew the program, Brandon at Alpha Canada, why this course was not showing up in my report.

It turns out I was limiting my statistics by using, "Organizing Church" as one of my criteria. If I just ran the report to find, "courses" I would get courses where the Course Administrator had not specified a Church name.

So I did.

And quelle surprise! Suddenly, even after removing duplicate registrations, there were 650 courses reported! (And that's just year to date. There may be more come online, although it is getting near the end of the year)

What was the difference? Well, courses are being run in prisons, schools, basements, living rooms, pubs, restaurants, business places, youth groups, all of which have not been reported as affiliated with a church.

And I know there are more. Because I hear of them. All the time. If I may say this, in love, youth pastors are the worst at not registering their courses. And God bless 'em, they are so concerned and single-focused on shepherding their kids that they often just go ahead and run an Alpha for their Youth without even thinking to tell us about it.

But God knows, and as much as we like to see numbers, the ultimate numbers may not be known until that day we are gathered, from every tribe and tongue and nation, around the throne of grace in Heaven.

Blessings,

John

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