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Nicky Gumbel: The ‘Greatest Injustice in the World’ Is Never To Hear About Jesus

“If any of your listeners right now had been the only person on the planet, Jesus would have died for you. That’s how much he loves you.”

“Sometimes in the church in Italy, where Father Raniero Cantalamessa comes from, at the end of a service, you turn to your neighbor and you say, ‘You must come round to my home.’ But it said with no expectation that the person will come. And he said, ‘When we pray, Come Holy Spirit, it shouldn’t be like that.’”

“The culture changes all the time. And seven years ago, eight years ago, it was all atheism. You know, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Grayling. We always had people who were atheists. That’s completely gone in the U.K. People saw that was a complete dead end. Now there is a huge amount of spirituality.”

“Everyone on the planet is looking for purpose. It doesn’t matter where we’ve traveled to…Korea, Japan, Vietnam, India, China, Latin America. It’s the same everywhere you go, right across Europe. Everyone is looking for purpose.”

“Everyone is looking for love. One person in our online group said, ‘I’ve been looking for love all my life, but I’ve been looking in impossible places.’”

“It’s so interesting, the questions that [Gen Zers are] asking…they drink less, they don’t drink, they don’t smoke, they’re much less promiscuous. But they’re, they’re into all kinds of different things like polyamorous relationships or…ethical non-monogamy. And it’s just, they want to be ethical, but they don’t want to be monogamous. They want spirituality without cost. I mean, it’s just, it’s a fascinating generation that’s coming through. But they desperately need Jesus.”

“For some churches. Alpha is like an app. It’s like you do connect groups, you do jam making and you do Alpha. But for us, Alpha is the operating system because we’re focused on the Great Commission: ‘Go and make disciples.’”

“I’m not committed to Alpha. I will continue doing Alpha while I find it the best way. But if I find a better way, I’ll drop Alpha and do the better way because I’m committed to doing what Jesus told us to do because I love Jesus and I try to follow Jesus, and I want people to encounter him.”

“So very early on—I think it was about 1992—a Catholic priest in disguise came on the Alpha course. And at the end of the course he said to me, ‘There is nothing in Alpha that is contrary to Catholic teaching.’ He said, ‘There are things we’d want to add, but that’s true of every denomination.’”

“Every Christian is a son or a daughter of God—that makes us brothers and sisters. Every Christian loves Jesus—that unites us. Every Christian has the Holy Spirit living within them. So we are united by the Trinity, not by our doctrine, but by the Trinity, by our relationship to God, the Father; God, the Son;  and God, the Holy Spirit.”

“Bishop Ambrose, who opened the first Catholic conference we did at Westminster Cathedral, he said, we need this in the Catholic Church…because many Catholics have been sacramentalized but not evangelized and we need to evangelize our own people.”