John Quinn Personal Profile
Jason Osborne
Most people know Alpha as a series of sessions exploring the Christian Faith, open to those of all faiths and none. With each talk designed to explore a different question concerning faith and with the intention of creating conversation, it caters perfectly to the truth-seeking mind. However, it does so much more than this, as John Quinn, National Coordinator for Alpha Online & Marriage and Parenting assures me.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic, he reveals what Alpha embodies for him: “For me, Alpha is that moment of experience. Alpha is that invitation for someone to step into a place of trust.”
Coming from a “pretty general upbringing” in South Dublin, the Faith was a notional aspect of John’s life for much of his youth: “I was involved in doing things around the church, like reading at Mass and that kind of thing, but I never really felt like I owned the Faith.”
Drifting slightly during his university years before getting into filmmaking, John enjoyed a couple of years doing work he was passionate about before the recession hit: “The recession hit and it was pretty difficult work, but I enjoyed it and was passionate. I thought it was what I wanted to do. Tell stories to people about ourselves. I always wanted to dig deep on why people do what they do.”
University
“Then I got a call to say that my best friend from university had taken his own life, and it was one of those moments where everything just falls apart. I got this sense as to, and I know a lot of people think this when suicide is involved, ‘Why didn’t they come to me?’ That was the first question that came up.
“Then after thinking about it a little bit longer, I was actually, kind of, relieved that he hadn’t come to me because if he had of sat down and said, ‘Okay, I’m struggling here, give me one good reason to live’, I don’t know if I would have been able to answer that.
“So, I began a process of then trying to figure out why should anyone live. Yeah, I knew I wanted to, and I knew I was happy out doing what I was doing, but I had to start asking the questions. Those questions led me back to my Faith, and the only answer, the only thing that makes sense, is Jesus. I was very fortunate to have an experience of the Lord such that everything started to make sense. I knew I wanted to try and help people when I knew that God was the answer and that Jesus was the answer. I knew I wanted to try and help young people who might’ve been struggling and asking questions as to why they should live.”
I started to see that here was a chance to bring young people to an understanding of the Faith…”
The depth of these experiences, and these questions, prompted John to take a different path to the one he had originally set out on. “I got into doing youth ministry and I was looking for jobs in Ireland, but there was nothing really that came up, so I went to the UK where I was a youth minister,” he recalls. “I was learning more about my Faith as I went on, and while I was there I was doing young adult ministry and teen ministry, trying to build strategies and figure out how you can best reach people.”
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John’s relationship with ministry was only beginning, and before he left London, a door opened that would lead him to where he finds himself today: “I went along with one of my young adults who had started work in Alpha, and I went along to HCB in London and experienced Alpha there.
“It was an amazing experience and I started to see that here was a chance to bring young people to an understanding of the Faith because what I realised when I was running the Confirmation programme was that you had an awful lot of young people who maybe were ‘sacramentalised’, you know, been for the Sacraments and maybe a little bit of catechesis, but actually hadn’t heard the Good News…didn’t know that it was possible to have a personal relationship with Christ.”
Touched by the work Alpha did, he got his relationship with the group underway by running an Alpha course himself in his post with the Presentation Brothers upon his return to Ireland. Based around a meal, a talk designed to stimulate conversation, and the conversation itself, Alpha is rooted in the experience of people meeting each other where they’re at.
It’s a totally different world and we need to be open to that. We can’t be working out of the old model”
Progressing from simply hosting Alpha sessions to working for Alpha, John’s passion for the group’s vision and work runs as deeply as ever: “What I realised was that it was experiential. And so, what you do is you bring people along and experience. It’s all well and good having arguments with people about why God exists, and why they should believe certain things, and trying to catechise them, but unless you have that experience, unless you bring them into a personal relationship with Christ, it’s just information.
“When I was growing up, everyone was Catholic. You were born and you were Catholic and that was it.
“Now, it’s a totally different world and we need to be open to that. We can’t be working out of the old model, we need to be working out of the new model, and that model needs to be mission. We need to be driven by the very reason the Church exists, which is to evangelise.”
To learn more about Alpha, visit their website.