by Martyn Percy
Part one of a two part examination of the Alpha Course
By any yardstick, Alpha Enterprises – courses, books, conferences and other programmes – is one of the more impressive missional developments to have emerged in the last 50 years.
The original course began in 1977 under Charles Marnham, a curate at Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB). John Irvine, Marnham’s successor, developed it further, before Nicky Lee and eventually Nick Gumbel completed the evolution under Sandy Millar, the Vicar. The course is now available in over 100 languages, half the countries of the world, and its is estimated the total number attending the course exceeds 25 million in its near 50 year history.
I wrote a reasonably prescient critique of Alpha in 1997 for Reviews in Religion and Theology. This was at the high-point of Alpha, when 10,500 courses were running in the UK. Stuck for a title for the tongue-in-cheek review article, the publishers rang and asked me for a view.
I plucked ‘Join-the-Dots Christianity’ out of thin air, and the label has stuck ever since. It is faith given the painting by numbers treatment. Alpha is to mission what a Lego version of what Michaelangelo’s Statute of David might do for fine art. Once you have this in your head, you cannot unthink it.
Of course, Alpha is not Christianity. And Christianity is not Alpha. Alpha is a form of packaging that has been attractively branded, and so it should be treated as any wrapper might be. The goodies are inside. The envelope is not the point of gift, any more than the accent of a preacher is integral to the gospel.
That said, the more one might laud the wrapping, the lesser the stress on the contents become. Here, I suspect that one of the reasons Alpha resonates is that the leadership culture of the Church of England has decomposed into one where appearance matters more than reality. How the church wraps its news, sometimes to try and manipulate the media, and tries to bury uncomfortable truths is a resonant feature of its communications and public relations.
The underlying culture that gives credence to this resonance has been cooking for a very long time. For example, consider this conundrum. Are sermons and talks for training and equipping (i.e., skills, techniques, etc.) congregations? Or, are they, following Paulo Freire, for education and liberation (i.e., critical questions of belief and praxis, and the fostering of wisdom, etc)?
I instinctively recoil from the idea that sermons, talks or even church itself is a training-centred institution. But I accept that in times of duress and distress – and the churches are surely living in such contexts – a training-based focus is almost bound to emerge. Education and wisdom ceases, and its replaced by instruction and coaching.
But Alpha is, as I say, packaging. It is not the gospel, and it does not claim to be. Yet the underlying culture of Alpha does carry some assumptions about faith, God and Christian life that make it a particular type of pedagogy that the majority of Christians find uncomfortable (i.e., the number left globally when you subtract 25 million, which is around 2.5 billion), but cannot quite put the finger on why.
First, Alpha gives a free pass to pragmatism. If it looks like it works, it must be good. If we can’t see results quickly, it will almost certainly be time-consuming and expensive. This is not a helpful fundament to adhere to for valuing theology, which is a slow, slow discipline that takes decades for the seed to gestate into good fruit.
Second, Alpha is inherently mechanistic. The Bible itself is treated as a kind of instruction manual or guide book – there to fix matters when things go wrong, and to make sure other things work better. A vision for pedagogy founded on such assumptions will provide training and apprenticeships, but be suspicious of education and questions that the manual doesn’t address. Being on an Alpha Programme is a bit like being walked through a Haynes Car Manual over the course of ten weeks. I’ve nothing against Haynes Car manuals, by the way. I just don’t think I’d enjoy these being preached from the pulpit. Like the vast majority of Christians, I don’t go to church to be trained and equipped.
Third, if the goal of Alpha Programmes is training and equipping for greater growth and effectiveness, then of course, education – a pedagogy schooling students in the art of constructive dissent – will be largely unwelcome, as conformity to a blueprint is bound to be preferred to critical thinking. Sermons in training-based ecologies school congregations in compliance.
Fourth, sermons that flow from a revolutionary pedagogical model or dissenting educational ecology will challenge and disturb listeners. But hearers will learn to think, and engage in the tradition critically. The mechanistic training model won’t do that; it would be like trying to argue with the instruction manual for a broken gas boiler. My advice? Don’t.
Fifth, salvation is packaged as an individualistic, quasi-Pelagian faith. I am with the present Pope, however, who in paraphrasing Saint Francis of Assisi has often remarked that “no one is saved alone; we can only be saved together.” (cf. Fratelli Tutti, 32). We cannot be judged alone, and we cannot be saved alone.
I’ll concede the difference between training and education is a characterisation. That said, the training model will deliver mechanistic instructions and techniques, based on its assumptions of revelation and the relationship between divine and human agency. The educational model will see revelation as complex, requiring critical interrogation, imagination and interpretation.
At present, the vast majority of Church of England bishops are locked into supporting the mechanistic training model. The long-term consequences for such short-termism are yet to be seen, but are likely to result in a thinner grasp of the richness of faith amongst congregations, and a sense amongst the laity that they are only being “equipped” with “tools and techniques” to achieve certain ends, which are nominated by bishops in strategies, plans and visions.
Whilst teaching that offers techniques that are orientated in mechanistic, pragmatic, restorative, overhauling and expansive aspirations for the faith, an enormous range of teaching is excluded by such prioritisation. Perhaps this is inevitable given the pragmatics. After all, many clergy are now ordained after studying for two years, which in fact turns out to be around twenty months.
I might add they work very, very hard, and at considerable cost to them and their families/partners/supporters and friends. But this is hardly akin to the seven years of education and formation required of Jesuits. The Christian life, rather like Christmas or Easter, is not something you can learn from a Haynes Manual (see illustration below – a humorous book, obviously). The Christian life needs to be lived. We are always becoming Christian. Conversion is present and future tense, not one date to be marked up in the past tense.
The graduates of Alpha Programmes are now emerging. The courses that began almost fifty years ago have produced clergy, not all of whom have stuck with the blueprint. Some have recognised that their Alpha-Mater left them with holes in their Christian knowledge. The exclusions that will sometimes crop up in sermons and teachings are the fruit of mechanistic-pragmatic training models would cover, but not be confined to, critical thinking, imagination, wisdom, desert spirituality, analogy and poetry, deeper journeys into contemplative prayer, loyal dissent and authentic revolutionary theologies. These seek to resist oppression, confront oppressors, and transform the church with liberationist thinking. The job advertisements in the Church Times are instructive here. For the most part they focus on equipping and growth – the twin concerns of mechanistic-pragmatic paradigms in training ecologies.
Alpha hasn’t caused any of this, by the way. There is no blame being apportioned here. The success of Alpha Programmes is merely a symptom of where the Church of England has got to and where some other denominations have arrived at in the 21st century. But if the church is to survive, it might need to ask what pedagogical assumptions programmes like Alpha carry. And whether this packaging is, in fact, at some risk of veiling the revolutionary power and gift of the gospel.
Revd. Prof. Martyn Percy
People who own Land Rovers, particularly older ones as illustrated, swear by them, whereas I find myself swearing AT more modern vehicles. I’ve just spent 50 minutes driving 30 miles in a new car, which is not so much electronic, as digital. All thinking is taken away from you, and it gives you a telling off if you do something wrong, like changing lanes without indicating. Is there a manual? No, there isn’t anymore.
Can you manual-ise ministry? Yes you can, and they did. But as time goes on the simple guide to faith becomes more and more engineered by the Central Faith Control, that you are no longer allowed to think for yourself, neither can you adjust anything without reference to them. What happens if some knock along the bumpy road of life knocks a sensor off kilter? You get something similar to the “tyre pressure check and reinitialise” centre screen alert I received this morning. No, I had absolutely no idea what this meant. We stopped and checked the tyres, which looked fine, but now we have to take her back to Mission Control and get the firmware engineers to re-set it.
Meanwhile I had to drape a towel over the second screen (yes it has 2) because I find it too distracting whilst driving. The car goes like a rocket, but obviously you can’t drive it very hard because every sin you commit is logged somewhere (there will be many in my case) and probably sent back to Mission Control in a data upload.
The fun has gone out of going somewhere and learning stuff, thinking for yourself. The digital overload has been created to fill the gaps in what used to be a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t work for me. Centrally proscribed Answers but no questions allowed.
If it made coffee, I could forgive it, but I’ll settle for my usual mode of transport – walking – and keep an eye on the scenery as I go thank you.
I refuse to have a Satnav for similar reasons – that mechanical voice is a darned distraction, and is well known to have limitations, as well as being a menace with those who obey it without thinking. The dear old (paper) Ordnance Survey is much more to my liking.
Back in the late 1950s a diesel locomotive’s driver was bragging about his wonderful new steed to a colleague who still had charge of an elderly steam engine. The put upon one replied, “So ‘er may be modern, right enough, but con ‘er bile yer tea, or fry yer bacon an’ eggs?” Enough said.
I generally steer clear of organised religion (despite being a hymnwriter), but if I strayed closer the path of Living the Questions would be attractive. LtQ, the healthy and necessary counterpart to Alpha, includes material for reflection by heavyweights such as John Dominic Crossan, Hans Küng, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Lloyd Geering, and the grand old man of the Prophets, Walter Brueggemann
https://livingthequestions.com/
Thinkers and writers of stature who have given enormous consideration to a wide range of questions of faith in our time. Alpha with its scripture-by-rote approach, absence of any wisdom that comes with theological nuance and encompassing of contradiction – cannot approach anywhere near the depth of LtQ in comparison.
Alpha has always struck me as a (successfully) packaged brand of narrow theology with sinister homophobic undertones. It seems to have bred many abusive cultures within the Church. Many in London and further afield would say that HTB, the motherlode, is itself an abusive culture. It has furthered a reduction of thought within the Church and packages a faith tradition as a product to sell … rather than an unfolding of mystery and metaphor by which to live.
Many moons ago Pete Ward, at that time I believe the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Youth Adviser, wrote an article for “Anvil” about Alpha, likening it as a product to the worldwide spread of McDonald’s.
I have seen Alpha successfully be part of confused people’s journey to settled faith. Not a panacea, but neither is it a plague. There’s surely a need for balance on Alpha….
My sister went to an Alpha course years ago, and said afterward that it was the first time she had ever understood the Christian message.
Myself, I think Alpha has both virtues and faults, but it’s terribly middle class. Some of the other courses recommended assume not only a middle class lifestyle, as Alpha does, but also a literate background and training in critical thinking. And we really can’t presume that of many people nowadays. When I was house-hunting I was dismayed to see that only one of the houses I looked at had any books. Magazines and newspapers were rare, too.
The breakthrough comes when you realise that you don’t understand the Christian message. That’s where Alpha goes wrong.
Alpha arguably balances the absolute reality of the divine invitation with the mystery of God. Isaiah 53 is a real prophecy fulfilled by One Solitary Life. The mystery of God and the divine invitation (both clearly expressed in Isaiah 55) are covered in the Alpha Course. Why not celebrate Alpha’s value and success? With diminishing attention spans in an online age, Alpha may be a bit cumbersome. ‘Hope Explored’ is quite impressive.
I’m not sure I understand your comment.
Isaiah’s comment about the mystery of God-“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”-does not negate the invitation to salvation expressed in the same chapter. That’s the essence of what I am trying to say……
Sorry, this was a response to Toby rather than James.
When I first did Alpha, I was amazed how posh Gumbel was, positively upper class, and how this could still have appeal amongst the lower classes, with a tendency to inverse snobbery. However he gets over this with his obvious giftedness. I liked him.
Moreover I suspect the class thing feeds into an opposing force to inverted snobbery, giving us encouragement for social climbing and a pat on the back for our wealth (and making it ok to pursue more). Maybe I’m stretching a point here, but the HTB axis, from where Alpha originates, has significant wealth influence as an intrinsic founding (unspoken) principle. Not only is it ok to be loaded, it’s the route to Board level.
I’ll be very careful with how I phrase this. The Alpha course’s contents are very good – basic, straight off-the-shelf evangelistic Christianity, which can be used as an introduction to faith by any Christian denomination. A lot does depend on how far you feel able, or willing to adapt the material to fit your own background, particularly if you want to give participants a grounding in the traditions of your own particular denomination . As Martyn and others have said, it is package, presented in a particular way and in that respect may need some thought if it doesn’t quite fit your individual circumstances.
By being designed to present the basic ‘core’ of the faith it does, therefore share a common weakness with my ‘CECU’ or IVF Christian Unions, and (whisper it not) C S Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’. Now Lewis was quite open about that weakness – he deliberately avoided the differences of attitude, doctrine or tradition which can subsequently cause confusion and dissent. He did it, as did CECU et al, for a very good reason – to get people into active faith, and in that respect none of them can be faulted.
Now I’m not sure what Martyn (who I respect) means by quasi-Pelagian faith – hopefully he’ll enlighten me – but I think I know what he’s hinting at. While geared, reasonably effectively, to promoting individual salvation, in my own experience it is weak at developing an understanding of church life as a body of believers – the basic individualism gets in the way of things such as changing or challenging political outlooks, financial giving and other areas where it seems very hard to agree a common set of principles, as several people have remarked on here before now.
Similarly we have the problems of mutual acceptance of churchmanship traditions – we’re probably all familiar with the veiled jibes against various traditions in Christian literature, which mostly seem to stem from false superiority and a lack of understanding about why others might think as they do.
We need to go outside our particular little mental box here – yes, Alpha and ‘Mere Christianity’ are a good, solid foundation – but we need to expand our thought processes, and get involved with other believers who come from other traditions. As someone who naturally has a mechanistic way of thinking, which my strand of the faith has reinforced, I value the input on here from others, with a different outlook but who are still Christ centred. That’s something which needs to be promoted all the more, and on as wide a base as possible.
I too have an all singing all dancing car which so far I have avoided driving much to the annoyance of my husband. I have been told exactly on many occasions how to drive it but strangely enough I find a huge comfort at using a handbrake which is missing.
The mistake was to be invited to an Alpha course having grown in richness of faith in many Christian traditions for over forty years. I saw that it was a useful guide for people eager to know what Christians were up to in church and weren’t brave enough to ask questions which would have been dismissed anyway. It didn’t touch the beating heart of wonder and awe and yes the comfort of knowing there is a handbrake.
It’s my wife’s car and I’ve been told to stop being rude about it! But yes I’d like a proper handbrake.
Alpha is ubiquitous. Our local Roman Catholic Church did one. But if you’re conservative evangelical, you do “Christianity Explored”. Would it be cynical to say this is similar to Alpha, but without the Holy Spirit?
The Holy Spirit centred session of Alpha is interesting. It takes courage for leaders to wait and see what happens within a group-calm silence, an extension of earlier evening debates, tears, heightened emotions, professions of faith.
I suspect that Alpha dealt with the dullness (or old fashioned and forensic coldness) of Anglicanism in past decades. In earlier decades many of us were immersed in the evidence for faith, even if we rejected it or remained agnostic for a time. Latterly, the wider knowledge of biblical truth claims is very poor.
‘Evidence for belief’ may need to feature more in a revised Alpha Course. Belief in supernatural spheres possibly rests very easily within post-modernity. Accepting how one specific truth claim eats up the others is possibly more of an anathema.