The Alpha Course

Nicky Gumbel is good - in fact Nicky Gumbel is VERY good - and Alpha, being his creation in it's present form, is equally good. The figures speak for themselves: there are now in excess of 17,000 courses being run in over 118 countries world-wide and few can doubt that Alpha has, to a surprising extent, helped stem the flow of worshippers away from the pews. This is against the backdrop of studies which predict the effective demise of the church in Britain within the next 40 years.

Alpha started at Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) Church in Knightsbridge west London, in 1979. Originally it was seen as nothing more than a brush-up course for Christians who had become rusty in their faith, but that was before both the Toronto Blessing (4) and Gumbel had arrived on the scene..

The Toronto Blessing first happened at a church next to Toronto airport on January 20th, 1994 when most of the congregation were gripped by some kind of mass hysteria. People fell to the ground in convulsions and started 'speaking in tongues' and when news of these strange events reached Britain Gumbel was quickly on the scene to witness the phenomena for himself. On his return to HTB Gumbel spoke passionately to his own congregation about what he had witnessed and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it wasn't long before they too were soon dropping to the floor like flies. Word spread and soon people were queuing to attend HTB, desperate to witness and to share in this strange phenomena.

HTB has never looked back and, with an annual income in excess of £5 million, has become Britain's richest church. Under Gumbel's leadership and fired with his charismatic vision, Alpha thrived as well with attendance at courses rising from 100 people in 1992 to nearly 27,000 two years later. Gumbel is now reputed to be more influential than the Archbishop of Canterbury and HTB employs so many staff that some have to be housed in a Potakabin sited within the two-and-a-half acre grounds of the church.

Gumbel's brainwave was to change the focus of the course away from existing Christians who needed their faith brushing up - though they are still more than welcome to attend - to those who appear to have little or no faith to begin with. It's a fact that most Christians are astonishingly unprepared when it comes to presenting true arguments for their faith, but the arguments are there and they are nowhere near as weak or unconvincing as some atheists would have people believe. Gumbel didn't think up these arguments - they have been presented many times before by people such as C.S.Lewis (1) - but he has presented them to an entirely new audience and in a refreshingly lively format.

So what exactly is Alpha? Alpha consists of 10 weekly meetings during which people are introduced to some of the basic arguments for Christianity. The format of the course is strictly controlled wherever it is being presented - Alpha is actually copyrighted - and videos of Gumbel's speeches at HTB are used to ensure complete consistency. The first meeting presents the historical basis for a belief in the Bible and Christianity and the following weeks gradually lead people to a point where the Holy Spirit is invited to come down and to enter the attendees.

Gumbel says that he has been accused of using hypnosis to convert people, but he refutes this charge by claiming that he doesn't even know how to hypnotise people. Well, Religious Truth does know something about hypnosis and can assure Gumbel that not knowing how to hypnotise people does not release him from the accusation because, unconsciously or not, hypnotism and the consequent mass hysteria that it can generate are exactly what his happy, clappy, version of Christianity is all about. It is doubtful whether the Jim Jones or David Koresh actually knew anything about Hypnosis, but can anyone doubt that it played a major part in their success?

Most people see hypnosis as a means of forcing people to act against their will, but in fact nobody can be hypnotised into doing anything that they do not want to do or have not given their consent to doing. It therefore follows that, if hypnotism is a force behind Alpha's success, the atheists and agnostics who attend and end up becoming born again Christians were anything but atheists or agnostics in the first place. Alpha is not cutting a swathe through the defenses of thousands of unbelievers, but it is offering a beacon to attract those who already have, albeit unconsciously, the desire to be convinced. (2)

But Alpha has much more to offer than just hypnotism and Gumbel has prepared his arguments in ways which would make even the most die-hard of atheists pause in their tracks. Two important ones can be presented thus:

Firstly, Gumbel argues that although faith is required to become a Christian, "...it is not a blind leap of faith, but a step of faith based on firm historical evidence." (3)  The New Testament has, he argues, far more historical evidence to prove it's authenticity than the works of people like Herodotus. The history of Herodotus was written between 488 and 428 BC, but we have only 8 copies still in existence, the most recent of which was written in AD900. This represents a 'gap' of roughly 1,300 years. Contrast this against the New Testament, fragments of which we have dating back to AD130, full manuscripts from AD350 and thousands of copies in Greek, Latin and other languages.

Equally as convincing is what Gumbel says about those people who have been martyred for their faith. Some of these people knew Jesus personally and to such a degree that they must have known whether or not he could truly perform miracles, whether he had really been crucified until dead and whether he had actually risen again three days later. Take Saint Peter (pictured) for example: Bishop Eusebius (circa 260-340) quotes earlier authors to give us amazing accounts of the martyrdoms of both Peter and his wife: 'We are told that when the blessed Peter saw his wife led away to death he was glad that her call had come and that she was returning home, and he spoke to her in the most encouraging and comforting tones: "My dear, remember the Lord".' Peter himself was crucified upside down at his own request as he felt himself unworthy to die in the same manner as his Lord. Ask yourselves honestly whether people would have died like this for a man who they knew - or should have known - to be a fraud?

These arguments are good, but not good enough by any means. I doubt that any historian sees Herodotus' works as being an infallible picture of the places and events depicted by them. They are merely a guide which can be superseded at anytime by archaeological evidence. Even then, finding the actual place where events are reported to have taken place can hardly be seen as proof that those events actually took place. I can take a map and point to the Bosphorus Strait as being the place where Jason and his Argonauts passed through the clashing rocks and into the Black Sea on their epic quest for the Golden Fleece, but does the existence of the Bosphorus Strait mean that the rocks did once close on passing ships, or that the Golden Fleece was real? Does it even prove that Jason was a real person?

Take also the trial of Jesus before Pilate: Archaeology has given us the actual place where Jesus must have stood when he was asked if he was the king of the Jews, but does finding the setting for the trial actually prove that the trial took place? In fact the account of the alleged trial is so full of political bias against the Jews that it is difficult not to dismiss as being unreliable. It is so steeped in prejudice that it is meaningless as historical evidence for the life and death of Jesus.

The truth is that Jesus lived during a time of both hope and pain for the Jewish people, a time when more than one 'messiah' walked the middle east and a time when preparations for the bloody insurrections against Rome that were soon to come were being made. No notable personality or document from that period could fail to be tainted by this political backdrop. Monty Python's much criticised film, The Life of Brian, actually goes a long way towards accurately depicting the fractious and messianic mood of the Jewish people during this period, and the New Testament cannot be viewed accurately without taking this mood into account. What we are then left with is an historical document of dubious reliability.

If we need any further evidence as to man's willingness not only to rewrite history against all the facts for his own ends, but to do so while the truth is still well within the scope of living memory, then we have only to look at attempts by the political far right to deny the Holocaust during the second world war.

The martrydoms of first century people who knew Jesus are no more difficult to explain away. Are the accounts of the deaths of Peter and his wife accurate, or are they simply wishful thinking by people who, in the absence of any first hand accounts, simply filled in the details themselves. Bear in mind that this is not the only fanciful story associated with Peter. In the apocryphal 'Acts of Peter' the story is told of how someone was converted to Christianity after Peter sent him a message through a talking dog! Even if these accounts are accurate, our own recent history is full of verifiable stories of people who were willing to suffer awful deaths in the service of leaders who they believed to be divine when common sense should have told them that they were not.

Not many ordinary people will have heard the tale of Peter and the talking dog, but then Christianity is always fairly quiet about the more fanciful myths associated with Jesus and his followers. For instance, Gumbel and Alpha devote a great deal of time to 'proving' the truth of the crucifixion and subsequent resurrection of Jesus. We all know the story: Jesus is crucified, he dies, the sky turns black and a Centurion comments that, "Surely he was the son of God!" (Matt 27:54) Most of us probably know that the curtain of the temple was torn in two, but do we really believe all of the description in Matthew 27:51-53? "At that moment the curtain of the temple split in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus' resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people."

And why are these 'unusual' events only mentioned in Matthew? For the record, lets set out just what each Gospel does and doesn't say about the moments before and after the death of Jesus. Mathew, Mark and Luke mention the curtain in the temple being torn, whilst only Mathew mentions the dead being raised and an earthquake, only Luke mentions the sky going dark and the only accounts of Jesus' last words are in Luke and John and they totally conflict! Christians will come out with many and various excuses to explain why their 'reliable historical document' is so inconsistent, but is it really possible that Mark, Luke, John and all the other people that they spoke to had forgotten that there was an earthquake, that tombs split open and that the dead rose and walked into the city?

Nicky Gumbel is good - in fact Nicky Gumbel is VERY good - and Alpha, being his creation in it's present form, is equally good. But they are not THAT good and the only people who are likely to be convinced by Alpha are those who want to be convinced in the first place. There are some interesting arguments both for and against Christianity and it is as much an act of faith to truly not believe as it is to believe, but Alpha is unlikely to achieve many road to Damascus type conversions amongst true atheists.

1. Here I am particularly thinking of Lewis' book, Mere Christianity, which can still be obtained from bookshops or online, and which just about sets the standard on this topic. I would argue that any Christian who cannot back up at least some of their beliefs with Lewis' arguments is likely to be a fairly ineffectual Christian, and I would further argue that any atheist who's opinions are not developed sufficiently to refute these arguments is likely to be a fairly ineffectual atheist.

2. I can offer a very good example of this technique in action;  The Guardian newspaper published an article based upon the experiences of one of their writers, Jon Ronson, when he attended an Alpha course at HTB (4). Ronson refers to a conversation with Gumbel in which they discussed who was the most likely amongst the group to become a Christian. Gumbel opted for the most hostile attendee, the one who, to Ronson's untrained eyes, seemed the least likely to be converted. Naturally Gumbel was proved right, but this was nothing to do with the power of God or Alpha. It had everything to do with the fact that the person in question turned out to have had a previous 'bad experience' with Christianity and was using his hostility to hide the fact that he desperately wanted to be a Christian again.

3. 'Questions of Life', by Nicky Gumbel. Kingsway Publications. ISBN 0 85476 348 1. This is one of several books that Gumbel has written to accompany Alpha and of which over a million copies have been sold.

4. More information, both for and against the Toronto Blessing, can be found here.

© Religious Truth 2001