ABCs of faith: beginning with Alpha

Christian Century, March 9, 2004 by Debra Bendis

AT AN ALPHA training conference in Detroit, a dozen people came forward to testify to the power of the Alpha program. One couple had been close to divorce when they encountered Alpha. The course inspired them to salvage their marriage and become active in a church. A young man said he had tried various spiritual paths, including "the cult route," until through Alpha he found Christian friends and a direction that "fits." An Alpha leader in his 40s talked about episodes of violence, about failed marriages and about the years of estrangement from his family. When he first walked into an Alpha course, he said, he was scornful of 'all things Christian. But people didn't get upset with him. They simply acknowledged his anger, let him speak, and then invited him back. He did come back, became a Christian, and now sets up Alpha ministries in Britain's prisons (80 percent of Britain's prisons have an Alpha program).

Alpha is drawing skeptics and seekers to the Christian faith and into the church. The genius behind the program--and in front of the camera--is Nikki Gumbel, a 48-year-old Anglican priest. Since 1980 this former barrister has shared his faith, via video, with over 5 million people in 124 countries.

The Alpha course originated in 1973 at Holy Trinity Brompton Church, an evangelical Anglican church in a fashionable section of London, when pastor Charles Marnham decided to design a course for new Christians. When Gumbel joined the church's staff in 1986 he noticed that unchurched people were attending Marnham's class. He adapted the series for "guests"--people who knew little or nothing about Christianity--and recorded it as 15 video lectures.

The Alpha program advertises itself as "an opportunity for anyone to explore the Christian faith in a relaxed, non-threatening manner." An Alpha video is currently playing in one of 25,000 churches worldwide, and often to an audience of young adults. According to a 2002 survey by the London-based Christian Research organization, 22,000 people under the age of 34 attended London Alpha courses in the fall of 2001 alone. Contrast this fact with the age of the average church attender in the UK--between 65 and 74--and you can understand the excitement many have about Alpha's potential for fostering church growth and renewal.

Alpha's North American initiative is directed by former management consultant Alistair Hanna, whose wife, Nancy Hanna, has led Alpha as a pastor at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York City. Over 5,000 Alpha courses are running in the U.S. mad about 1 million people in America and Canada have participated. In October, Gumbel appeared live via satellite to North American churches that had signed up for an "Introduction to Alpha" day. Alpha's smartly designed Web site invites visitors to link to Alpha sites around the world, or to register for one of 40 two-day training conferences held in the U.S. animally. And there are Alpha posters, Alpha recipe books and sing-along Alpha music cassettes--all adding up, reports Time magazine's Europe edition, to an annual revenue of $8.3 million.

So what's special about Alpha? As an explanation of the faith and an invitation to conversion, perhaps not much. And that observation probably wouldn't bother Gumbel. "Our society has changed. We don't need to change the message but we need to change the way we put it across," he told Time (Europe edition, June 16).

The first thing a mainline church viewer may notice in the video lectures is that every member of the Trinity, including the Holy Spirit, is a "he." And evil is personalized as "Satan." The rest of the material is familiar evangelical apologetics. Affirming the resurrection as a physical reality, Gumbel takes on alternative theories--that Jesus wasn't killed, that someone took the corpse, that the apostles were imagining things--and rejects them one by one. While Gumbel admits that some prayers go unanswered, he asserts that God often responds dramatically to prayers, as be illustrates in numerous anecdotes. Gumbel prays with a list in his hand, and the conviction that "we should expect God to heal miraculously today."

Alpha puts particular emphasis on the experience of the Holy Spirit, which not all churches will find congenial. In the three lectures intended for Alpha's weekend retreat, Gumbel focuses on the power of the Holy Spirit and its bestowal of spiritual gilts. Journalist William Scholes, writing in the Anglican journal the Churchman, suggests that Alpha overemphasizes a personal encounter with the Holy Spirit, making it "a second conversion experience." Gumbel does focus on the gift of tongues, although he has said that his emphasis is meant not only to prepare Alpha students for receiving the gift, but also to prepare them to understand what they may hear around them. Less miraculous spiritual gifts, like the gifts of teaching or administration, are largely ignored.

Martyn Percy of Christ's College, Cambridge, worries that Alpha presents a privatized faith and fails to acknowledge the complexity and paradoxes of the Bible. Alpha, he says, offers no "real social mandate, no prophetic witness and no serious appreciation of theology or ecclesiological breadth and depth" (Financial Times).