“It was this unique partnership between youth pastors and their students.”

Ilana Reimer
Special to Spur Ottawa

The three high school students sat in the empty classroom as the lunch hour ticked by. The stack of pizzas they had bought—enough for about 20 people—was getting cold. It was their first week leading Alpha Youth at their school, and no one had shown up.

“You can just imagine how heightened your insecurities could feel in that moment,” says Luke Haggett, lead pastor at Chapel Ridge Free Methodist Church and one of the leads for Ottawa’s Alpha Youth initiative.

But the three girls did not admit defeat. Instead, they walked the halls of Earl of March Secondary School handing out free pizza and inviting students to come the following week. This time, 12 people showed up.

Kevin Gay, a youth pastor at Community Life Church, helps facilitate Alpha at the high school. “When I run events that don’t get the attendance I thought they would, I get discouraged,” he says. “It was very neat for me to see these students not have that attitude.”

“God confirmed that this is what we should be doing.”

Earl of March is not alone in having Alpha Youth. Across Canada, the number of schools with Alpha Youth running in them has risen to more than 200, since 2017. Of that number, close to 50 schools are in Ontario, and about a dozen are in Ottawa. Interest has grown so much that Alpha Canada posted information on their website to help students who want to run programs in their schools.

The trend follows a major international outreach campaign to build Alpha in 2017. Haggett and the other members of the local Alpha Youth team decided to run a local youth initiative on the heels of the larger campaign’s success. They did not realize their vision was already becoming a trend across Canada.

“God confirmed that this is what we should be doing. We’d already formed the team and had this idea,” says Haggett. “But it was clearly not my idea; it was God’s idea.”

The team spread the word through the Exousia Youth Network, encouraging youth groups to run Alpha Youth starting in the fall. Once students became more comfortable with the material, they started leading their own groups at school.

“It was this unique partnership between pastors and their students where, really, it has to be the students who go first,” says Haggett. “I can’t walk into a public school, as a pastor, and say ‘I want to run Alpha Youth, will you let me?’ It’s not going to happen.”

“It creates the opportunity to talk about faith and provides an introduction to Jesus in a non-intimidating way.”

Haggett says most school groups seem to have a steady attendance of 10 to 12 students each week—from Christian, Muslim, and atheist backgrounds. He adds that running Alpha right in the schools makes it more accessible and less threatening for non-Christians, rather than inviting them to a church youth group.

“It’s going to where the people are, instead of saying, ‘Hey come to where I am,” Haggett explains.

Ted Hurley, another lead for Ottawa’s Alpha Youth initiative, says the Canadian-made program is a valuable tool for equipping future leaders. Their goal is to start a trend that continues year after year, with Grade 12s mentoring younger students to take their place.

As the director of family and youth ministry at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Ottawa, Hurley focuses on bringing Alpha Youth to the Catholic high schools. He says Alpha Youth’s strength is in the way it brings together both believers and non-believers.

“It creates the opportunity to talk about faith and provides an introduction to Jesus in a non-intimidating way.”

Gay has witnessed this first hand as he watches the students at Earl of March build relationships with those coming to the weekly meeting. He says the kids seem to find the Alpha approach refreshing and accessible.

“It’s not the same as the rhetoric we’re getting in the rest of the world, which is very aggressive,” he says. “It’s much more about exploring something than trying to push something on you.”