Alpha

the transformation of establishment Christianity

The story of Alpha starts with laughter in court. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, a former prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, set out in 1960 to prosecute Penguin books for obscenity when it published DH Lawrence’s novel *Lady Chatterley’s Lover* and on the first morning of the trial, setting out his case for the novel’s depravity, he asked the jury, “Is this a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” Some of the jurors laughed out loud at this.

Even at the time, this rebellious and incredulous laughter was understood as a critical moment in the collapse of the old English governing order. Until some time between 1939 and 1972 the country had run by men with good war records and servants and wives who read what they were told and the Church of England on their side. Griffith-Jones, before Nuremberg, had served in 8 Commando.

What was to become of this governing class now the lower orders laughed out loud at them? What was to become of their church? Alpha, and HTB, are best understood as answers to these questions.

In 1964 Griffith-Jones’ chambers were joined by Scot from a comfortable landed family: Sandy Millar’s father, a major general, was engineer-in-chief in a newly independent Pakistan’s army; his grandfather was a professor of law, and his great grandfather solicitor general for Scotland. He is the only man I know who refers to his ancestors as John Buchan might have done — as “my people”.

As a young, conventionally ambitious barrister he had taken up a post as an HTB churchwarden as one of his social obligations: it was the smartest church in Kensington. But came actually to believe in the gospel story after a weekend house party in the Home Counties organised by a young woman who sent postcards to 30 of her friends urging them to bring a Bible and a tennis racket for the weekend. Reader, he married her.

He learned to speak in tongues. He left the law and studied for ordination. He became a curate, and then the vicar of HTB. Laughter came back into the story. But this was the laughter of the charismatic movement: the helpless giggling inspired by the holy spirit. Inspired by American evangelists with names like Lonnie Frisbee and Rufus Womble, the younger members of of conservative evangelical congregations began to experience — as they supposed — the fervour of the apostolic times and the desire to convert the world.

Millar’s views social conservatism aligned with Griffith-Jones’s: he preached that liberalism “is as old as the devil himself”. In sermons he warned his congregation against oral sex, lest it provide an entry point for demons; abortion was denounced as “the wholesale murder of endless babies”, and homosexuality could be cured by the Holy Spirit as well as by therapists. But none of this mattered so much as the ability to talk to God directly, and to hear back from Him, which charismatic experience seemed to offer.

The movement would transform HTB — and its section of the British upper classes — from formality and convention to informality and rather different conventions. The charismatic revival unstiffened the upper lip, releasing it to laughter as well as babbling in tongues.

The ability to admit deep pain without fear and shame was the great gift of the spirit to the generation of Eton and Cambridge young men who had been brought up to run an empire that no longer existed. Nicky Gumbel, for instance, said to James Harding in a Tortoise interview, that when he was fourteen his mother took him for a long walk and told him “Your father is a German Jew but you must never speak of this” — and after that, he told Harding, there was nothing he could talk about with his father but the weather. This was the kind of bind from which the charismatic experience delivered him.

His friend Justin Welby, whose father was not in fact a German Jew, but who believed he was, had clearly a similar emotional liberation in the discovery of Jesus who loved him unconditionally.

It also became an early and unique selling point for Alpha. If you took the course, you could expect on week six to have a direct experience of the Holy Spirit. What this meant, though, has changed over the decades. As Andrew Atherstone, the author of a history of the Alpha movement, told the Religion Media Centre, “In the Nineties, you would get a very strong emphasis on … speaking tongues, or words of prophecy or falling over. In the 2020s. that's much more softened now. Nicky Gumbel will now say the first evidence of experiencing the Holy Spirit is compassion for the poor. [Charismatic phenomena] will chase away many people and chase away many dominant denominations, but Alpha wants to brand itself usable by everyone. So it's toned down that emphasis.”

All this doctrinal shuffling has nothing to do with the truth of Christianity’s historical claims. But the truths of religion appear in the lives of believers, not in their theologies, and these lives are embedded in the society around them. The extraordinary and creative aspect of Alpha, which I don’t think anyone understood or foresaw, was that in an atomised society it offered a shared experience . By embedding Christian life in small intimate groups united around increasingly platitudinous slogans Alpha enabled it to survive in an increasingly hostile world.

To be a Christian involves the believer in two interlinked relationships: one with God, and the other with the surrounding society. The two interact in ways that can reinforce or weaken each other. Alpha was originally a reaction to the collapse of the traditional relationship between the Church of England and the officer class of the British state. The snobbishness and elitism that were so offputting and easy to mock for outsiders were absolutely vital to this early stage of growth. They provided a way for posh people to be unfashionably Christian just as Christianity itself became unfashionable among the upper classes.

Later, as more and more of the traditional structures of society broke down, and Christianity became an increasingly toxic brand, Alpha became very much less snobbish and provided a way for more and more Christians to come to terms with their own unfashionability. In this role, it is thriving all round the Western world, and especially among Catholics.

But almost all of this growth is a means of reinforcing Christian identity and practice. It is, in Alpha terms, discipling, not evangelism. But they think of it as evangelism — which would be making Christianity attractive to people who are not attracted to it. And I think that the general numerical decline of Christians in countries where Alpha is most fervently practised shows that it just doesn't work that way. Five million people have taken the Alpha Course in Britain alone, we’re told. Where are they? They’re certainly not in church. If, instead, the same million people have taken the course nine times each, that’s still a remarkable achievement. But it’s not the one the believers tell the world they have accomplished.

The closest I came to the heart of the organisation was some time in the early nineties, when I found myself sitting in the back of a Transit van driving through Transylvania, accompanied by Sandy Millar, his strapping blond acolyte Jem (or was it Jezza) and a driver from Bristol. We had spent three days delivering computer supplies to Baptist churches just emerging from the long decades of Communist persecution. Sandy Millar was also trying to spread the blessings of the Holy Spirit among reluctant and suspicious congregations. He was confident that if he could just get them to pray for gifts of the spirit, they would come. The trick was to make it seem reasonable.

The other confidence on display was Jezza’s. He was a magnificent physical specimen, tall, broad shouldered, with guileless blue eyes. He made me think of rugger fields and muddy hopeless charges into no mans land. In Budapest airport, where we met, I heard him say, almost to himself, as he wandered through the magazine stall how wonderful it was to have a personal relationship with the creator of the universe. At the time I thought this was simple Etonian snobbery: his uncle owned half Birmingham; his wife’s cousin had an estate in Sutherland, and — oh yes — his father was the creator of the universe. But this was nasty and cruel of me. Without his faith, he would never have travelled to Romania to help people who really needed. There are only two ways to get Etonians into prison — to catch them at it, or to put them on an Alpha Course so that they take up prison visiting. Care for the poor was always an aspect of upper class evangelicalism: Sandy Millar, before his ordination, worked in the evenings in a mission in the East End. You can attack this as patronising, but it is a great deal better than nothing. Even the craziest¹ prison ministries must help many men who could not otherwise be reached.

Jezza meant only that he could talk to God and — more importantly — listen and hear God back. And it is that confidence that God is speaking to them which cuts Alpha believers off from the mass of Western Christians.

Andrew Atherstone is a believer. His book is all the more revealing as a result. He quotes, fairly enough, contemporary criticisms of the Alpha project, but he never doubts that its growth is wonderful and significant. In an interview with the Religion Media Centre, he said he saw Nicky Gumbel as the heir to Billy Graham, a figure of global significance in evangelism. Gumbel now says he wants Alpha to reach everyone in the world by 2033. He may have retired from HTB, but he leaves it the most powerful church in the Church of England and probably the richest too.

The story of Alpha is full of paradox: out of the heart of the imperial establishment came a form of Christianity that can survive and indeed flourish as disestablished; out of the severest and most Calvinist wing of the Church of England came an evangelical streak that will sacrifice almost any doctrine to gain converts: Atherstone documents the progressive removal of all the traditional sexual teaching from Alpha’s material in its successive revisions, followed by a great deal of revision to make the theological aspects more acceptable to Catholics.

In this, Nicky Gumbel was far more in tune with his audience that Justin Welby. He has always led Alpha courses personally each year, which is an effective form of market research. In around 2004 he and I performed on opposite sides of a debate at the Oxford Union and on the train back to London he explained that Alpha and HTB were would take no part in the rows about homosexuality then convulsing the Church of England. He could see even then how morally repulsive the traditional teaching appeared to the outside world. Welby did not learn that lesson until 2012, when he opposed gay marriage in the House of Lords and learned that his fellow peers thought him a nasty bigot.

Atherstone’s book has one serious weakness, which is that he never talks to the people who left. It’s true that he does quote Sam Fox, a glamour model, but the overwhelming objection to Alpha among Christians who have moved away from it is not doctrinal but pragmatic: all that prayer does not produce the desired results; all those words of knowledge are simply wrong. Christina Patterson, in her review of the book, described her own experience as a member of the HTB congregation with a chronic illness, whose healing never appeared despite years of confident prayer. She decided the whole thing was a fraud. Millions of people must have walked away, if the organisation’s figures are accurate. But we do not hear from them, and the vague stories of miracles are repeated without examination.

The prayers of an Alpha group do not have to be dramatic. A London vicar told me that at one stage Alpha participants at HTB were urged to pray for everything, no matter how trivial. He saw a group of them emerge from the course onto the pavement and look around for a bus. No bus was in sight. So they formed a prayer circle, and implored the Lord to send one. They stood there on a broad Kensington pavement, in a circle with their heads bowed and their arms linked. They abandoned themselves to prayer so fervent that three buses drove right past without stopping and without the Alpha group noticing. Bus drivers and liberal vicars might still laugh at them, but if Alpha has accomplished nothing else, it has made the laughter inaudible to the believers.

1. I once heard Chuck Colson, the Watergate burglar, speak at a Christian booksellers’ convention in Blackpool. He was explaining that Christianity spread to Scandinavia through the virtues of free enterprise: the monasteries traded with the Vikings.