So Mount Shoop, associate pastor for discipleship and spiritual development at First church, Libertyville, Ill., about 40 minutes north of downtown Chicago, came up with her own plan.
She took the basic questions around which Alpha is built — questions about Jesus, prayer, reading the Bible, the nature of evil and the church, the Holy Spirit and healing— and she wrote her own lectures, more or less in the same order as the Alpha program. “I would call what I did more Beta,” Mount Shoop said laughing. She also stressed the spirit of “we’re open to question, this is a place for people at any spot in their faith, where they want to have free and open conversation” about the basics of Christian faith.
Over time, the program has been changed some — it’s now called “LIFT,” for “Learning in Fellowship Together.” People gather each Wednesday for a catered meal (“everyone throws in five bucks, it’s kind of no-hassle eating,” Mount Shoop said) and for fellowship and community-building. Then there’s a presentation on some of the fundamentals of Christian belief, and time to talk about what they’ve heard in small groups.
“I think what really connects with people is it is kind of a multi-layer approach to what people come to church for, that’s to get to know people and feel like they belong, to feel safe enough to ask questions and for there to be not (just) answers given, but some response to those questions and some give and take,” Mount Shoop said. “They’re actually growing in their faith and learning something … It provides some information for people who are looking at the church or have been in the church for a long time but are too embarrassed to ask, because it’s so basic. Like who is Jesus Christ and why do we say he is the Savior?” Or “how do we read Scripture? What’s biblical authority? … Why are we supposed to respect the Bible?”
People are happy, she said, to have a place where they can ask their honest questions — and to know that they’re not alone in wondering. At a retreat, one person said, “I’ve been in the church for 30 years and I’ve never gotten to ask these questions,” Mount Shoop said. “And I’m so happy to see that someone else in the group — who’d been in the church for probably 20 years – was asking the same kind of questions too.”
