Make Alpha a part of your summer fun day!

In a nutshell	Chesterfest, a group of three local charities and 22 partnership churches in Chester, decided to have a summer celebration week in July as part of their HOPE activities.
Who has done it?	Chesterfest and Churches in Chester
How did it work?	The week culminated with a free entry Funday which over 12,000 visitors attended, so they decided to have an Alpha tent and give an invitation to every person at the event to a city-wide Alpha celebration supper. The supper took place on September 25th at the Queen Hotel – a high-quality venue with good food, live music and an interesting speaker. They booked a function room that could hold 200 people and set the room for a banquet with tables of 10, each with a host.  They decided to do a table plan and encouraged people to book in and give their names so that they could allocate the tables and evenly spread the non-Christian guests with the Christians. They charged only £5 per ticket (which was a third of the actual cost for each person) to encourage more people to come.
The Outcome	Coordinators said, ‘Leading up to the evening was quite stressful particularly as 10 days before the event we had only secured 25 bookings! After a week of frantically ringing round our partner churches and much prayer, on the evening we had 211 guests at the event of which 50% were non-Christian! It was a great success and as a result we have over 40 people on Alpha courses running across the city, plus a number of the guests on the evening were individuals who had done an Alpha course in previous years and so we have 12 people on a follow on course.   ‘It was quite an expensive evening to run, but we were blessed to have a local Christian underwrite the event financially, so this gave us some breathing space in our planning and budgeting for the evening. The greatest challenge is still the need for Christians to invite and bring non-Christian friends or family, but we did have quite a few guests, some via the link with the Chesterfest summer celebration week.’