HOPE - Nicky Gumbel

The Anglican Vicar's speech on Friday, September 21st.

The subject of hope is a vital one. For many years I had no hope. I was an atheist. I was not brought up as a Christian. Neither of my parents went to church. My father was Jewish by race, agnostic by religion. He had escaped from the Nazis and came to England where he met my mother who was a non-practicing Anglican. So I did not have a Christian upbringing.

But when I went to university I met a group of people who had a real faith in Jesus. So I decided to do some thorough research on the subject of Christianity. I happened to have a rather dusty copy of the Bible on my shelves, so one night I picked it up and started reading it. I read all the way through Matthew, Mark and Luke and halfway through John’s gospel. I fell asleep. When I woke up, I finished John’s gospel and carried on through Acts, Romans and 1 and 2 Corinthians. I was completely gripped by what I read. When I finished reading the New Testament I came to the conclusion that it was true. Immediately I became excited about Jesus. and I longed for other people to experience this hope too.

As we look around us, many today are without hope. Maybe their marriage is in tatters, or their work situation is just desperate, or their children are far from God, maybe they are struggling with disappointment, loneliness, emptiness, grief etc. They are asking: Is there any hope?

We look at the world around us, at Iraq, at Zimbabwe and we may feel a sense of hopelessness. On the news recently, Zimbabwe was described as ‘a land devoid of hope’. We look at the extreme poverty, at AIDS, at climate change, at wars and violence, homelessness, churches closing down, marriages breaking up. Is there any hope?

In the church we talk a lot about faith and we talk a lot about love, but not so much about hope. Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the Preacher to the Papal Household, spoke at our church holiday a few years ago and he told this story:

‘The three theological virtues are like three sisters: two of them are grown and the other is a small child. They go forward together hand in hand, with the child hope in the middle. Looking at them it would seem that the bigger ones are pulling the child but it is the other way round; it is the little girl who is pulling the two bigger ones. It is hope that pulls faith and charity. Without hope everything would stop.’

Paul said, ‘The faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven’ (Colossians 1v5). Dostoevsky said, ‘To live without hope is to cease to live’. Emil Brunner said, ‘What oxygen is to the lungs, such is hope for the meaning of life’. And Pope John Paul II said, in his letter to the Church in Europe, ‘Man cannot live without hope: life would become meaningless and unbearable.’

False Hopes

The world’s hopes are so often false hope; hope that leads to disappointment. St Paul says, ‘Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain but to put their hope in God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.’ (1 Timothy 6v 17).

In other words he says, ‘Look, the world’s hopes are based on what is seen, it looks concrete because you can see it, you can see money and the things that money can buy, but what you don’t realise is that those things are very, very uncertain and actually they don’t last’. He says that to be separate from Christ is actually to be without any ultimate hope in this world and without God. So the world has a kind of false hope.

Firm Hope

Yet we as Christians have a firm hope, which is the opposite of the world’s hope. The world’s hope is based on what you can see, whereas our hope is based on what you can’t see. Sometimes we might wonder ‘Are we mad? What are we worshipping? There’s no one there’. We can’t see the person we’re worshipping, but we know he is there. The world’s hopes can be seen, but are uncertain, whereas our hopes can’t be seen but they are totally certain. So the writer of the letter to the Hebrews describes the hope that we have in Jesus as ‘an anchor for the soul, firm and secure’ (Hebrews 6:9).

What does the New Testament tell us about this hope?

1. Study the reason

First, study the reason. Peter writes this, ‘…always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have’ (1 Peter 3v15).

What is our hope based on? It’s based on Jesus. Pope John Paul II opened his letter to the Church in Europe saying this: ‘Christ is the source of hope for Europe and for the whole world…Jesus Christ is our hope…’

The name of Jesus

Our hope is based first of all on the name of Jesus: ‘In his name, the nations will put their hope’ (Matthew 12, v21). The name Jesus means Saviour. He’s the one who died for us to make it possible for us to be forgiven, to have a new life.

The resurrection of Jesus

The reason for our hope is based secondly on the resurrection of Jesus: ‘Praise be to the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade’ (1 Peter 1 v3-4).

Father Raniero Cantalamessa says, ‘The object of Christian hope … is the resurrection from death: “He who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also” (2 Corinthians 4 v14). Christ was the “first fruits” (cf 1 Corinthians 15 v20) and the first fruits promise a full crop which must follow.’ So Paul says, ‘If only for this life we have hope in Christ we are to be pitied more than all people.’ (1 Corinthians 15 v 19).

The hope that we have is not just for this life. Again Father Raniero writes this,
Easter is the birthday of Christian hope. The word ‘hope’ is missing in Christ’s preaching. The Gospels report many of his sayings on faith and charity but nothing on hope. On the contrary, after Easter, we witness a literal explosion of the idea and feeling of hope in the teaching of the apostles. Hope takes its place beside faith and charity as one of the three components that make up the new Christian life …Christ in rising, broke the seal on the source of hope; he created the object of theological hope which is a life with God even beyond death. What in the Old Testament had been perceived and longed for in only a few of the psalms and that is “to be continually with God” (Ps 73v23), to find “the fullness of joy in his presence” (Ps 16v11), has now become a reality in Christ. He has opened a breach in the awful wall of death through which we can all follow him.

Paul says, ‘I stand on trial because of the hope of the resurrection of the dead’ (Acts 23 v6). This is what the early Christians preached.

The Spirit of Jesus

Thirdly, our hope is based on the spirit of Jesus, ‘…the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory’ (Colossians 1v27). Paul says, ‘This ultimately is the ground of your hope: Christ in you. The spirit of Christ comes to live within you when you put your faith in Jesus’. In Romans 8, Paul writes this, ‘And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then that same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies’. In other words, it’s the Holy Spirit living in us that is the evidence that when we die, what happened to Jesus will happen to us.

People today need to understand that there are reasons for hope. What we are trying to do with the Alpha course is give people hope. Let me just give you a little background.

When I first experienced the hope of Jesus, the hope of the resurrection, the hope of salvation, the hope of the gospel, and the hope of the Holy Spirit - I longed to tell other people about Jesus; that he had died for my sins, had been raised to life and that I could know him today. I longed for other people to experience this hope too.

But most of my attempts at telling people about Jesus were disastrous! Ever since then I’ve been looking for ways in which ordinary people like me, who aren’t naturally gifted evangelists, can communicate their faith with friends, family and colleagues without feeling fearful or risking insensitivity. That is why I was so excited to discover Alpha. One simple definition of Alpha is that it is ‘evangelism for ordinary people’. I say ‘discover' it because I did not invent it

Alpha was started at our church in 1977, and many people have been involved—a million people around the world are now involved in the leadership of Alpha. Alpha is something that has come out of a community. We do not say that Alpha is the only way of evangelism or even that it is the best way of evangelism. But in our experience it is one way of evangelism that seems to be very effective. We have experienced hundreds of people from outside of the church coming to faith in Jesus and joining a Christian community. And then other churches started to get interested, and we held our first conference in 1993. Alpha is now running in over 33,000 churches around the world and it has been translated into seventy different languages.

The Alpha course is a parish tool for evangelisation. It offers people a practical introduction to the Christian faith. It is designed for those who would not call themselves Christians and for those who would not go to church. The course is run over a period of 10 weeks; people come for a meal, they hear a talk and in small groups they discuss the topic covered in the talk (for example ‘Who is Jesus?’, ‘Why did Jesus die?’, ‘How can I have faith?’, and ‘What about the Church?’

What we are trying to do is to present the reason for people to believe. We appeal to the mind because our hope is based on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We seek to persuade with every argument we can muster, just as Paul did on so many occasions (for example Acts 18:4). We try to teach only what we can establish from the Bible and we point people to the biblical text. We do not expect anyone to take a ‘blind leap’ of faith. Rather, we hope they will take a step of faith based on reasonable grounds. I love the Papal Encyclical Fides et Ratio: Faith and Reason, because John Paul II showed, as a professor of philosophy, that faith and reason were not opposed to each other but that they complement each other.

Our hope is also based on the Holy Spirit. St Paul writes that the love of God “is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). That is why we have a whole weekend on the Alpha course devoted to the person and work of the Holy Spirit, and an opportunity for people to experience the love of God being poured into their hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Pope John Paul II, speaking to young people in Italy, asked them this: ‘If your faith is not based on experience, how can you account for your hope to yourselves and others? How can you overcome the doubts and crises that are so characteristic of your age? Open the doors of your hearts to the experience of the Lord.’ The gospel involves both the rational and the experiential and it impacts both those from an Enlightenment background who need to experience God and those from a more post-modern background who have sought experiences but who need to understand the truth about God.

So our hope is based on the name of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, and the Spirit of Jesus. How do we know? The New Testament’s answer is this, ‘If you’re feeling you haven’t got hope, if you want to know the reason for your hope, this is where you find it’. We find this hope in the scriptures; ‘for everything that was written in the past was written to teach us so that through endurance and the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope’ (Romans 15 v 4).

2. Guard the unity

Secondly, guard the unity. Paul says:

‘Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and father of all, who is over all and through all and in all’ (Ephesians 4 v3-6).

Unity, in other words, is not ultimately around doctrine, it’s around a person. It’s around the person of Jesus, who is the ground of our one hope. We all share this one hope.

Pope John Paul II said this:

…the gospel of hope is also a forceful summons to conversion in the field of ecumenism. In the conviction that Christian unity corresponds to the Lord’s prayer “that they may all be one” (Jn17v11), and that it is essential today for greater credibility in evangelisation and the growth of European unity, all the Churches and Ecclesial Communities need to “be assisted and encouraged to see the journey of ecumenism as a ‘travelling together’ towards Christ” and towards the visible unity which he wills…the power of the proclamation of the gospel of hope will be all the more effective if it is linked to the witness of a profound unity and communion in the church.

We have been privileged to experience this Christian unity through our work with Alpha. We have been astonished by the way that the Alpha course has spread through all the different parts of the church (it is running in Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox churches). I think this is because the course is centred on what unites us as Christians – the person of Jesus Christ. And what unites us is infinitely greater than what divides us.

We have also been astonished by the way that Alpha has spread through all the different cultures; among the rich and the poor, black and white, among every different part of the body of Christ.

I remember the first conference that we did in Zimbabwe in 1994. I discovered that Alpha was not only running among the English-speaking white Zimbabweans but also among the Shona-speaking people in their own language. Zimbabwe has a population of just over 10 million people: there are 90,000 whites in Zimbabwe but 90 per cent of the black population speak Shona. While I was at the conference I met a man called Edward Ngamuda. He had originally done Alpha in English but then thought that he would like to run the course in Shona. A couple who had become Christians on Alpha owned a farm with 900 workers. They asked him to come and run the course for those who worked on their farm. Thirty people came on the first course and fifty came on the second. I asked him whether these people were Christians when they came on the course. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘we had a Muslim, a witchdoctor and a polygamist come.’ I asked how the polygamist happened to be there and was told that his first wife came on the first course, and that she had brought him and the other two wives on the next one! Edward assured me that Alpha worked better in Shona than it did in English.

We need all the different parts of the Church, because together they make up this beautiful body of Christ, and we have to guard our unity. We have loved working together with the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Pentecostal churches. Every time we come together we sense the Spirit of God with us, a special sense of the presence of God when we unite together. Paul says, ‘make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit’ because ultimately there is only one hope, it’s based on one Lord, Jesus Christ.

Europe will never be re-evangelised by a divided church. It will only be won by a united church. Pope John Paul II said in his letter to the Church in Europe, ‘We give thanks to the Lord for the great and consoling sign of hope which is the progress made in the journey of ecumenism under the standard of truth, charity and reconciliation. This is one of the great gifts of the Holy Spirit for a continent like Europe which gave a rise to tragic divisions between Christians during the second millennium and which still suffers from their consequences.’

3. Live the dream

Thirdly, live the dream. As someone has said, ‘You cannot live well until you can die well’. But the other side of that is also true. If you can die well, then you can live well. Dying well means that you have this hope. Everyone has this hope. St John says, ‘All who have this hope in them purify themselves, just as he is pure’ (1 John 3v3). They say ‘We want to be like Jesus, just as he is pure’. This hope is also joyful. Paul says, ‘Be joyful in hope’ (Romans 12v12). We have to fix our eyes on Jesus. Thirdly, this hope gives us great boldness and confidence. ‘Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold’ (2 Corinthians 3v12). If we know that our future is utterly secure we can be bold. This is what we see on Alpha, the hope of the gospel gives people a boldness and a confidence to share their faith with others.

The way that Alpha works is that people who are not Christians, people who are outside of the church, come to faith in Jesus Christ, they are filled with the Spirit, they get excited about Jesus, and they go out and tell their friends. Most of their friends, if they’re people who are not Christians, will not be Christians. And hopefully some of them will come on the next course and come to Christ and be filled with the Spirit, get excited about Jesus and bring their friends. And so you get a snowball effect. It’s a form of ‘come and see’ evangelism.

This works particularly well among young people. Young people around the world are asking the question ‘Is there more to life than this?’ They are searching for something outside of this material world: for transcendence, for purpose and for community. This quest has led nearly ten million people to come on an Alpha course in 168 countries around the world.

We have been running Alpha at our Anglican parish in the centre of London for thirty years now, and we have found that the more we run the course, the more we reach the eighteen to thirty-five year old age group. We might call this age group ‘the post-modern generation’. This graph shows the age range on Alpha courses at our parish:







You will see that the youngest person attending the course is fifteen; that the line rises very sharply at eighteen; it peaks between twenty-five and twenty-seven; and it tails off at around thirty-five. 75 per cent of people who come on our Alpha course are aged between eighteen and thirty-five. Alpha can work with any age group but the generation with which it works best is that of eighteen to thirty-five year olds. Those are the people who bring their friends. Those are the people that have friends! And this is where we see the snowball impact. But it is important that the course is run over and over again.

4. Use the weapon

Fourthly, use the weapon. Hope is a weapon. Paul says, ‘The hope of salvation as a helmet’ (1 Thessalonians 5v8). The Catholic Catechism says, ‘Hope is also a weapon that protects us in our struggle’. There are bound to be battles in life. In the New Testament, we see that trouble and hope are very closely connected. Father Raniero Cantalamessa, again, says this,

There is a close link between trouble and hope, but it is a one-way and not a two-way link. If it is possible to say that the more we experience troubles, the greater our hope becomes, it does not follow that if our hope increases, our troubles will increase too. It is not hope that causes troubles to come upon us, but our troubles that give us opportunity to hope.

Recently Father Raniero spoke at a Sunday service at our church. In conversation with Father Raniero afterwards, I was very interested by something that he said. He was going back to Rome to join a debate on religion, at which he was the only Christian on the panel. The three other intellectuals speaking were all anti-God. Father Raniero was the only person who was prepared to go onto that panel and speak for Jesus Christ. We were discussing the debate and I asked him how he thought it would go. He replied, ‘I don’t know. But Jesus can be glorified even in failure’. I thought this was an incredible insight; it’s not so much about whether we succeed or whether we fail, but it’s about Jesus being glorified by how we are and how we live.

Paul says this, ‘…we also rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character hope. And hope does not disappoint us. Because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us’ (Romans 5v3-5).

Sometimes people ask of Alpha, ‘Well, is it all a success story? Does every person who comes on an Alpha course come to faith in Christ, get filled with the Holy Spirit, get excited about Jesus and invite twenty of their friends on the next course?’ The answer is: sadly, no, it doesn’t work like that. We have a drop-out rate; somewhere between 20 and 30 per cent of the guests drop out during the course. Alpha is full of disappointments. I often say that being involved with Alpha is one of the most disappointing things that I have ever been involved in. There is such disappointment when guests on the course don’t come back. We don’t put any pressure on people to come back to the course the next week (we only invite them to come to the first night) but of course we pray that they will come back! But the Holy Spirit is at work in the guests who do come back and that's what makes it so exciting. It is also the most exciting thing I have ever been involved in because we have seen thousands of people come to know Jesus Christ.

5. Spread the fire

The fifth point about hope in the New Testament is: Spread the fire. Paul writes, ‘If you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel.’ (Colossians 1v23). The Gospel is all about Jesus. We must offer people the opportunity to know Jesus. There is an urgency about the Gospel. I was talking to one of the Archdeacons of the Anglican Church in London recently and he said to me, ‘You know, most Christians believe in the Gospel, but not every Christian believes in the urgency of the Gospel’. There is a difference.

Global poverty is also urgent. There are millions of people today who are dying of hunger. There’s a whole generation growing up without any primary education. There’s AIDS, and there are preventable diseases.

So there’s an urgency about feeding the poor. There’s as great or even greater urgency about feeding the spiritual hunger that is out there amongst the poor, the prisoners, the homeless, but also the rich person who lives next door to you. Rich, that is, by the world’s standards. There is an urgency of getting the message of Jesus to people who without Christ are without hope in this world. Pope John Paul II said, ‘By returning to Christ, the peoples of Europe will be able to rediscover the hope which alone can give full meaning to life.’

Hope for the young

The Gospel brings hope for the young. Father Raniero Cantalamessa says, ‘There is no form of propaganda that can do what hope manages to do. It is hope that animates the young…to give hope to someone is the most beautiful gift that can be offered.’

I was very struck by something that Mark Russell (the youngest ever Chief Executive of Church Army, a leading home mission agency linked to the Anglican Church) said a few weeks ago about a homeless man called Matthew, aged 21. Mark had met Matthew on the streets, offered him food and led him to Christ. He asked Matthew ‘What one piece of advice would you want me to give to the Church of England today?’ Matthew replied ‘The Church’s job is to stop arguing and to bring people hope’.

Hope for the prisoners

Alpha started in the prisons in 1994, and it has literally swept through the prisons in the United Kingdom. It started with two gangsters who did the course, a father and son called Michael and ? Emmett. They were at the top of the criminal tree, and the criminal world is very hierarchical! They were associates of the Kray brothers, so when they told the other prisoners to ‘do Alpha’ they did Alpha! Alpha is now running in 80% of the prisons in the UK and in prisons right across Europe and around the world. It seems to be working extraordinarily well in the prisons. I’m told that the Weekend Away is particularly popular!
Whenever the media ask about Alpha for Prisons they always make a little joke and say, ‘Is it because it’s a captive audience?’ But actually I don’t think that’s the reason it’s working so well. What’s fascinating to me is that the average age of people in prisons in the UK is twenty-three. Looking at the age graph of guests on our course you see that’s where there’s this huge spiritual hunger. People are looking for meaning, for purpose in their lives. And often they haven’t got any of the Christian background, but equally they haven’t got any of the baggage. They’re very responsive to the Christian faith.
We have also set up an organisation to care for ex-offenders, which is now offering support to thousands of ex-offenders in the UK and internationally. For any person who has done Alpha in prison, the hardest moment comes when they are released. They step outside the prison gate and now all the temptations of the world are there again before them. What we do, if they would like this, is we arrange for someone from a church that is running Alpha to meet them at the prison gates. They have a common link, and then that church will help them find a job, a place to live, and help to integrate them into the Christian community. We have fourteen ex-offenders in our own congregation and I think only one has re-offended.
Let me give you one example of someone whose life was changed by experiencing a relationship with God through Jesus Christ on an Alpha course.

Gram Seed is a giant of a man – he must be about six-foot-five, weigh about eighteen stone. He said this: `I spent nearly all my life in jail. I was a skinhead, I was a football hooligan, I was in the rave scene, I was charged with murder. But I was searching for love all my life and I couldn’t find it. My mother gave up on me when I was twenty-one. She said I was “the son of Satan”. She said I was evil like my father, who I’d never seen. He used to rape and beat my mum up, and he went to prison. She said, “You’re more evil than your dad, and I don’t want nought to do with you. You’re dead as far as I’m concerned.”

`I grew up with my nana and my granddad. My nana was drinking and taking drugs all the time. I lived in the roughest part of Teesside. I didn’t have hope. I didn’t know what it was, but I was always trying to fill this hole inside me with things—drugs and alcohol and sex and violence, and drugs and alcohol and sex and violence. It went round and round and round. It was a vicious cycle of prison and outside, prison and outside. Then I ended up in a coma in 1996 and it looked as if my life was over. My mother was summoned to the hospital by the authorities to sign the papers to switch the ventilator machine off that was keeping me breathing.

`And she turned up at the point when these lads who’d been trying to tell me about Jesus on the streets turned up at the hospital. That was August 1996. They said to my mother, “Can we pray for your son?” and she said, “Yes, but you know they’ve given up on him.” And they said, “We know someone who loves him and wants to help him.” So they came into this room in intensive care and prayed for me. They said: “In the name of your Son, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, give this man new life.” And I woke up and started breathing, myself.

`Four days later, my mother told me about them praying to Jesus, and I said, “What does Jesus want to know about a scumbag like me for?” So I heard all these stories about Jesus. When I came out of hospital I wanted to look into it, so I went along to this Alpha course at the church, I attended on the third night and I remember being there and swearing. I had four front teeth missing and I was a right rebel! I hated myself, and I remember saying, “Jesus, if you’re real, come into my life. These people tell me you can change me and give me hope and set me free. On this course they’ve told me something about it, and if you are real come and show me.” And I had my hands out like this. And I fell back and started crying.

`From that day on I was totally transformed. I had a desire to tell people about Jesus. I said to Jesus that day, “You’ve given me hope. Help me to give other people hope.” Three years later I started a ministry in our church called Emmanuel Prison Ministry. I was asked to go into the prison that I was released from in 1995. I spent ten years of my life in jail trying to get out, and now every day I’m trying to get in!

`Ever since I was a kid I’ve always wanted a family. When I met Jesus and I had a future and a hope, I started praying for a wife. And three years later in London I met this girl called Natasha, who was a dream come true, really. Two years and two months ago I became the proud owner of a boy, and he was born eleven pounds, two ounces, and two foot long. The consultant held him up to me and said, “Do you know what, Gram, this isn’t a baby—it’s a toddler!”

`I’ve run Alpha now back-to-back in seven prisons in the North-East.’ He’s got a new boss. He’s now living in the hope of Jesus Christ.

Hope for the local church

In March 1998 at the US Bishops’ Ad Limina address, Pope John II said that ‘the parish will necessarily be the centre of the new evangelisation’. We have experienced this. The Director of the Alpha Office in Sweden said to me recently that ‘Alpha is giving hope to the church in Sweden.’ We have found the same thing in our parish church in London.

Hope for the UK

We have experienced this hope too for the UK. In the UK Alpha is running in over 7000 churches of every denomination. This year is the tenth year in which we have had a national advertising campaign for Alpha, which we call the Alpha Initiative. For ten years, every September we have invited the whole nation to come and find out more about the Christian faith, with advertising on billboards, taxis, the backs of buses, and in the underground asking the question ‘Is there more to life than this?’. This year we will have two weeks of national advertising in cinemas and on television.

Each year more and more people in the UK have heard about the Alpha course and courses across the country attract younger and younger guests, people who are often far from the church. Alongside the advertising churches of every denomination are coming together to pray for the re-evangelisation of our nation and the transformation of our society.

Conclusion

I think that sometimes we may be tempted to ask: ‘Will darkness and evil prevail? Will terrorists keep wreaking havoc? Will AIDS only continue to spread? Will poverty only increase? Will violence and war persist? Will there always be hunger and homelessness? Will churches keep closing down? Will marriages keep breaking up? Will depression continue robbing people of joy? Does it have to end like this?

But in Christ it most certainly doesn’t have to end like this. Our message is the only message in the world that can give people what their hearts need most: Hope. Hope that sins can be forgiven, that prayers can be answered, that broken relationships can be reconciled. Hope that the sick can be healed, and that dead churches can be resurrected. Of all people, we must claim that hope, live in it and radiate it to others. We must proclaim that message of hope to everyone around us to bring about the re-evangelisation of our nations and the transformation of our society.

George Weigel., the official biographer of Pope John Paul II, and the author of Europe’s Problem and Ours said this:

‘The long term answer to the demise of Europe will only be found in a revitalization of Europe’s Christian roots and the rebirth of Christian conviction in Christianity’s historic heartland. Europe, in other words, needs something like a Great Awaking… a rebirth of life-transforming and culture transforming Christian conviction.’

(2007.09.21.)