Success
Proponents and detractors alike indicate the open and friendly atmosphere of the Alpha course where a participant can ask any question coupled with the freedom to attend select talks or leave without a follow-up is a major factor in its success. The only restriction placed is that everyone respects everyone else at the table during discussion. In addition while there has been some restructuring of the format of the Alpha course in the last two decades, it is presented in the native tongue almost unchanged when run in different parts of the world. Usually an Alpha course involves 'previous course guests' inviting new ones, and a large number of published testimonies of guests around the world attribute this success to their discovering an apparent relationship with God through the figure of Jesus Christ while attending a local Alpha course where they could proceed at their pace and freely converse about any topic.
What Alpha offers, and what is attracting thousands of people, is permission, rare in secular culture, to discuss the big questions - life and death and their meaning. The Guardian, London
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Famous quotes containing the word success:
“He saw, he wish’d, and to the prize aspir’d.
Resolv’d to win, he meditates the way,
By force to ravish, or by fraud betray;
For when success a lover’s toil attends,
Few ask, if fraud or force attain’d his ends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise ... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.”
—Allan Bloom (1930–1992)
“The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)