September/October 1997

Alpha –  the Omega in Evangelism?

David Richardson was startled to discover that none of the new converts he questioned who had come to faith through an Alpha Course described an experience of conviction of sin and salvation through the redeeming work of Christ. In this thoughtful article he reflects on the reason for this and asks some searching questions about ‘process evangelism’ which has replaced ‘challenge evangelism’ which was a characteristic of the Billy Graham crusades

Few would doubt that Alpha is a success story in contemporary evangelism. It has clearly caught the contemporary mood, and the happy combination of food, gospel presentation and open-ended group discussion, together with its commitment to a ‘process model’ of evangelism rooted in the life of a local church. All give the course strength and coherence. John Finney’s research on evangelism has shown how vital friendship and ongoing relationships are in the process of winning a person for Christ, and Alpha provides a superb framework for this to happen.

The fifteen sessions and the weekend away (which we now run as an away day) have provided a church like ours with the structure and the incentive to run what in effect is a term’s evening classes on basic Christianity (we are now in our eighth course).

Any reader of Holy Trinity Brompton’s Alpha News will know that our experience is being repeated in many different social settings, and issue by issue the course is endorsed and blessed by senior church leaders, evangelical academics and by well-known evangelists. The course is now being used in many different countries and similar blessings are being experienced.

In our local church context we have seen more professions of faith through Alpha than any other programme in which I have been involved in recent years. Like many churches we have adapted the course for our own needs and we do all our own presentations. This year I have begun collecting the stories of those who have come to faith through our Alpha Courses and, again and again, I have been moved by the sincerity, the sense of reality, and the clear changes that are happening in people’s lives. There can be no greater joy than being alongside a person coming to life in Christ.

So why the need to reflect on what is happening? Why not just praise the Lord for his blessing and get on with it? Why not ‘go with the flow!’ as the saying goes?

The reason is that I have noticed what I can only call a significant shift in the centre of gravity in the way the Gospel is being portrayed through Alpha. It is not that basic evangelical teaching is missing, or that the theology of the atonement is not really evangelical. Sandy Millar is also insistent that the course is thoroughly Trinitarian. Of course, no one programme could ever cover the whole spectrum of Christian truth. But critics have pointed out the individualistic tendency in Alpha. This is particularly seen in its concentration on the work of the Spirit in and for the individual, to the neglect of the social and community aspects of the Gospel. It could also be noted that the resurrec­tion, which is foundational, according to St Paul, only appears as an appendix in talk one as evidence of the divinity of Jesus. It would require another article to include a full analysis of the doctrinal content of Alpha so these can only be mentioned as examples.

The most worrying aspect of the Alpha Course is that it is structured, and is being received in a way which shows that the experience of the Spirit, particularly in a tangible, felt, visible, manifest encounter, is becoming the heart of the Christian faith rather than ‘salvation by faith’ in the finished work of Christ.

The course begins with the person and work of Christ, but quickly moves on to the need to be filled with the Holy Spirit. This seems to be the meaning of the illustration about having a pilot light burning, but needing the full burner on to heat the system. The weekend away concentrates on this issue including the expectation of gifts of tongues and other manifestations of the Spirit.

The stories I have collected betray this understanding in the converts, and this is clearly discernible in the published testimonies which over and over again highlight the encounter with the Spirit. This is often portrayed in tangible ways, at the Holy Spirit weekend, and is seen as being the moment when the real Christian life begins. In these testi­monies, there seems to be no structural, necessary link between this experiential encounter with the Spirit and the experience of the forgiveness of sin and salvation through Christ. I don’t believe that this is the intention, but I believe it is almost inevitable, from the way the course is structured to interact with the felt needs and interests of a contemporary culture which is deeply suspicious of all absolute truths.

Evangelicals have always at their best moments sought to stress the points of contact between the timeless Gospel message and an aspect of a culture which would be open to Gospel truth. Sometimes it has been the burden of guilt, at others the fear of death, and maybe in recent times issues around meaninglessness and a loss of the sense of self. I just wonder if Alpha is moving beyond that. Let the reader judge:— A typical example: I asked one young woman what she understood her experience to be about at an Alpha weekend which she says was the turning point in her life. ‘I don’t really know’, she said. ‘I am an intuitive person really... It’s not about what you think is it? It’s about feelings really... All the tears and shaking on that Saturday… I don’t know… It just came over me… just that I felt loved and that he (God) must have always been there for me.’ Life has been clearly different for this person since that weekend and she is now reading her Bible regularly and seeking to follow Jesus. So, if a life of discipleship begins, does it really matter that the material about Jesus in the course (talks one and two) seems only to be preparatory to the real business of an experiential encounter with God through the Spirit?

David Bebbington noticed in his well-known History of Evangelicalism that one of the consequences of charismatic renewal was a weakening or even a loss of the characteristically evangelical stress on the cross. This, in spite of the joint statement in 1977 by evangelicals and charismatics. Much more recently, David Oss writing his (Pentecostal) contribution to a recent book Are Miraculous Gifts for Today? comments; ‘The desire of this writer and many others in the Pentecostal movement is that we do not devolve into an experience-based sect with little regard for the inspired word, which alone is sufficient for faith and practice, We should not seek experience, but God who gives good gifts. And we should proceed according to the scriptures rather than departing from them into a pneumatic brand of neo­orthodoxy’. (p 273)

It may be that we are in danger of just such a re-forming of evangelicalism. Part of my unease is the way traditional evangelicalism is portrayed as being somehow trapped in the Enlightenment. As Nicky Gumbel writes, quoting Graham Cray, ‘In the Enlightenment, reason reigned supreme and explanation led to experience. In the present transitional culture with its pick and mix world-view, in which the New Age movement is a potent strand, experiences lead to explanation’. The conclusion, therefore, is that only Enlightenment people feel at home with those things that appeal to the mind and, again I quote, ‘Others coming from the New Age movement find that rational and historical explanations leave them cold, but at the weekend away they are on more familiar territory in experiencing the Spirit.’ (p 19 Telling Others –  the Alpha Initiative).

It would appear then, that the most important thing to do is to get people to have an experience, and then to offer part of the Christian ‘meta-narrative’ as an explanation, or more correctly to offer an experience within the context of the Christian story. The more we move into a post-modern situation, the more appealing this strategy appears to be. But there are real dangers, and one of them might be our loss of ability to discern between the flesh and the Spirit, whose work according to scripture is always about the business of bringing us to the Father and glorifying the Son.

A great deal of work has been done in recent years by social scientists and psychological researchers on the subject of ‘conversion experience’, particularly in the context of cult formation. One of the things that is clear in this research is that there is probably no such thing as ‘raw experience’ (ie experience that is not already contextualised)... but only ‘interpreted experience’. Many cults have learnt how to encourage experience through a process of interacting with a seeker and offering a context in which an already interpreted experience can happen. In other words, the experience, which is always real to the person having it, is already interpreted by the framework and context that is provided.

On the Alpha weekends, we can create the context in which we can, ‘ask the Spirit to come’. The seeker is away from home for the weekend in a warm, affirming circle of new friends, a context which involves inviting the enquirer to participate in ‘charismatic worship’. He stands with hands outstretched with an expectation that anything unusual that might be experienced will be interpreted as an encounter with the living God. Moreover (this is the important point) all of this may happen before there has been an adequate understanding in the enquirer that his real condition before God is that he/she is a sinner in need of forgiveness, and that this forgiveness is only grounded in the sacrificial death of Christ. There is a real danger that such ‘conversions’ will be at best, shallow, and at worst spurious which will lead to disillusionment and hardening of heart, months or years down the road when the Alpha context is no more.

One thing that we can say is that such practice is very different from the preparatory law work so stressed in the preaching of the Reformers, and the fear of hell and damnation prominent in their successors of the great awakenings.

We have come to recognise both the strengths and weaknesses of crusade evangelism. I would plead that we reflect on Alpha’s particular brand of charismatic evangelism and its relationship to traditional models of conversion to Christ. One of the things we try to do in our local church is to make the whole course more explicitly Christocentric, and take more time than is in the course on the character of God and the meaning of sin.

It is interesting to note that even though we rework the material to give more emphasis to the Spirit’s work in convicting of sin and bringing us to faith in Christ, with less emphasis on the intuitive, the only conversions that have a self-understanding that is recognisably evangelical in structure are those who come to Alpha with that interpretative framework already in place, who have been, at some time in their past, in meaningful contact with evangelical Christianity.

I hope that Christ himself will always remain the centre of focus in our evangelism. I believe that there is much more work to do in teaching a fuller understanding of evangelical doctrine, otherwise many of those who claim conversion on the basis of a dramatic experience of God of whom they know little, may, in years to come, be blown away by the terrible uncertainties of our post modern age.

David Richardson was formerly Pastor of Bromham Baptist Church, near Bedford, and is now Pastor of Frampton Baptist Church in Hackney.