Telling Others

The Alpha Initiative

Nicky Gumbel

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781473681200
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'What distinguishes Alpha from other initiatives is the easy going, relaxed feel of the proceedings - that and its astonishing success.' - The Times Telling Others imparts the vision, excitement and challenge of Alpha, with a practical guide to running a successful course. Perfect as a resource for churches, the book details the principles and structure of Alpha, tips on hosting small groups and giving talks, and guidance on pastoral care. A series of appendices provides suggestions for practicalities such as administration and running daytime and workplace courses, and advice on avoiding common mistakes and pitfalls. The chapters are interspersed with testimonies, written in their own words, from people whose lives have been changed by God through Alpha.

01

Principles

I am not a natural evangelist. I have never found it easy to tell others about Jesus Christ. Some people are completely natural evangelists; they find it the easiest thing in the world. I heard about one man who seizes every opportunity to talk to people about Jesus. If he is standing at a bus stop and the bus is late, he turns that situation into a conversation about the second coming! I have another friend who is a tremendously confident evangelist and speaks about Jesus wherever he goes. On a train he will speak to the person opposite about Jesus. If he’s walking along the street, he will turn to someone and get into conversation with them about Jesus. On one occasion when he and his family went to a Happy Eater (a popular restaurant chain at that time), he banged the table and called for silence in the restaurant. He then stood up and preached the gospel for five minutes. He says that at the end people came up to him and said, ‘Thank you very much, that was very helpful.’ I would never be able to do that.

I became a Christian on 16 February 1974. I was so excited about what had happened that I longed to tell everybody about Jesus. After I had been a Christian for only a few days I went to a party, determined to tell everyone. I saw a friend dancing and decided the first step was to make her realise her need. So I went up to her and said, ‘You look awful. You really need Jesus.’ She thought I had gone mad. It was not the most effective way of telling someone the good news. (However, she did later become a Christian, quite independently of me, and she is now my wife!)

If we charge around like a bull in a china shop, sooner or later we will get hurt. Even if we approach the subject sensitively, we may still get hurt. When we do, we tend to withdraw. Certainly this was my experience. After a few years, I moved from the danger of insensitivity and fell into the opposite danger of fear. There was a time (ironically when I was at theological college) when I became fearful to even say the word ‘Jesus’ to those who were not Christians. On one occasion, a group of us went from college to a parish mission on the outskirts of Liverpool, to tell people the good news. Each night we had dinner with different people from the parish. One night my friend called Rupert and I were sent to a couple who were on the fringe of the church (or to be more accurate, the wife was on the fringe and the husband was not a churchgoer). Halfway through the main course the husband asked me what we were doing up there. I stumbled, stammered, hesitated and prevaricated. He kept repeating the question. Eventually Rupert said straight out, ‘We have come here to tell people about Jesus.’ I felt deeply embarrassed and hoped the ground would swallow us up! I realised how frozen with fear I had become and that I was afraid even to take the name of Jesus on my lips.

Ever since then I’ve been looking for ways in which ordinary people like me, who aren’t naturally gifted evangelists, can communicate their faith with friends, family and colleagues without feeling fearful or risking insensitivity. That is why I was so excited to discover Alpha. One simple definition of Alpha is that it is ‘evangelism for ordinary people’.

During the 1990s, the number of people attending church on an average Sunday in Britain dropped by one million, according to a survey carried out by Christian Research. By 2002, figures from the Church of England’s electoral rolls showed that membership had fallen by 12 per cent in a single year.¹ Despite this overall decrease, attendance among children and young people under sixteen increased by 1 per cent during the same period.² The British Social Attitudes of 2010 suggests that over 62 per cent of the population never attend any form of church service. A recent article in The Guardian newspaper stated that ‘In the 2011 census, 59% of the population defined themselves as Christian, down from 72% in 2001. One in four people said they had no religion, up from 15% in 2001’ and in 2016 the ‘number of people attending Church of England services each week has for the first time dropped below 1 million – accounting for less than 2% of the population.³ The vast majority of the population of the United Kingdom do not attend church, and of those who do, many only go at Christmas or Easter. Following in the wake of the decline in Christian belief, there has been a decline in the moral climate. The fabric of our society is unravelling. Every day in Britain at least 330 couples are divorced, twenty babies are born to teenage mothers under the age of sixteen and 518 babies are aborted. If the divorce rate is falling, this is only because fewer people are getting married, and half of all couples divorcing have at least one child under the age of sixteen. In addition, at least one new crime is committed every six seconds and a violent attack takes place every nine minutes. In the late 1990s, while there were 30,000 Christian clergy of all types, there were more than 80,000 registered witches and fortune tellers.⁴

But at the same time, shoots of new life are springing up all over the place. New churches are being planted and many established churches are seeing growth, sometimes slow and sometimes quite dramatic. Many Christian initiatives that arose out of the renewal movement in the Decade of Evangelism continue to build and encourage the church. One of those new shoots is Alpha. All of us involved with it have sensed the extraordinary blessing of God upon it.

I realise that we need to be cautious about saying this is a work of God. I know the story of the man who came up to a preacher and said, ‘That was a great talk.’ The preacher rather piously replied, ‘It wasn’t me, it was the Lord,’ to which the man responded, ‘It wasn’t that good!’ In saying that we believe Alpha is a work of God, I am not for a moment suggesting that it is perfect. I’m sure that it is greatly marred by human error and frailty. There is much room for improvement and we try to listen carefully to constructive criticism. Nor do we believe that it is the only method of evangelism that God is blessing: far from it. Nevertheless, all the signs point to it being an extraordinary work of God and we are deeply grateful.

When Alpha first started growing I thought, ‘How could something that started in Central London work elsewhere?’ Alpha currently runs in more than 169 countries including: Zimbabwe, Kenya, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, India, Korea, the United States, Canada and many others.

While at an Alpha conference in Zimbabwe, I discovered that Alpha was not only running among the English-speaking white Zimbabweans but also among the Shona-speaking people in their own language. Zimbabwe has a population of almost 14.1 million people: there are around 30,000 whites in Zimbabwe but over 9 million black Zimbabweans speak Shona. While I was at the conference I met a man called Edward Ngamuda. He had originally done Alpha in English but then thought that he would like to run the course in Shona. A couple, who had come to Christ on Alpha, owned a farm with 900 workers. They asked him to come and run the course for those who worked on their farm. Thirty people came on the first course and fifty came on the second. I asked him whether these people were Christians when they came on the course. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘we had a Muslim, a witchdoctor and a polygamist come.’ I asked how the polygamist happened to be there and was told that his first wife came on the first course, and that she had brought him and the other two wives on the next one! Edward assured me that Alpha worked better in Shona than it did in English. It was then that I began to realise that Alpha, which started in London, could operate in different countries and cultures. Why is this?

I believe it is because Alpha is based on six New Testament principles; in this first chapter, I want to look at each of these principles in turn.

Evangelism⁵ is most effective through the local church

I’m ashamed to say that when I used to think of evangelism, I only thought of two types. I thought of mass evangelism: Jesus spoke to crowds; Paul spoke to crowds – and that has a good history in the church. I also thought of personal evangelism: Philip with the Ethiopian and Jesus with the woman at the well. But what I had never noticed was that in the New Testament the dominant model is evangelisation through the local Christian community. Paul wrote to the Christians at Thessalonica and he said: ‘The Lord’s message rang out from you’ (1 Thessalonians 1:8) – that is, from the local Christian church.

John Stott, author of many books and former Rector Emeritus of All Souls, Langham Place, has described evangelism through the local church as ‘the most normal, natural and productive method of spreading the gospel today’.⁶ Similarly, in March 1998 at the US Bishops’ Ad Limina address, Pope John Paul II affirmed that the parish will necessarily be the centre of the new evangelisation. There are at least four reasons for this.

What you see is what you get

Missions and Billy Graham-style crusades clearly have been greatly used by God. They raise the profile of the church and are still an effective means of bringing people to Christ. In our church we often take teams on missions to universities and elsewhere and we appreciate the value and fruitfulness of this type of evangelism. But missions are more likely to bear lasting fruit if they are earthed in an ongoing programme of local church evangelism, because they then have the great advantage of continuity of relationships. Someone may respond at a crusade or mission and be referred to their local church. They may be disappointed to find the environment of the church radically different from the meeting that attracted them in the first place and so they subsequently stop attending. This is one of the reasons why the follow-up after big crusades is so hard. By contrast, if someone is introduced to Christianity at their local church, they become familiar with the place and the people, and are therefore much more likely to stay. We are finding on Alpha that belonging comes before believing for many people.

I used to think that people would come to faith and then join a local church – that believing would come first and then belonging. Those who come on Alpha don’t think they are joining the church; they are coming to explore the Christian faith. And at one level that is all Alpha is: it is an opportunity to explore the meaning of life. But then over the weeks they start to make friends with the other people in the group, and they start to look forward to seeing each other. In a recent small group, one person said, ‘Well, you know, my father is a Muslim. I don’t really know what I am.’ Another said, ‘Well, I haven’t been to church since I went to chapel at school.’ Another one said, ‘You know, I’ve never been to church. I was brought up as an atheist.’ At the end of the evening they all went off to have a drink together, because they had become friends. This way, when guests such as these come to faith they are already part of a Christian community – part of a local church. Without really noticing it, they have started by belonging and then, in many cases, they have come to believe. This is what makes it so much easier to integrate them into the church.

Incidentally, no one joins Alpha – Alpha does not have a single member. They join their local church. If a guest does Alpha in our parish, they join the parish church here. If they do it in a Catholic church in Latin America, they join the Catholic church in Latin America. If they do it in a church in China, they join the Chinese local church. This is one of the reasons why all these different parts of the church are happy to run the course: because they know that if they run it in the Coptic Orthodox Church, the guests will join the Coptic Orthodox Church. If they run it in the Baptist Church, they join the Baptist Church. So belonging comes before believing. What they see when they come is what they’re going to get.

It mobilises a whole army of evangelists

In every church there are people who have gifts that can be used in evangelism, but often their gifts are not utilised. For example, a Gallup survey discovered that only 10 per cent of American church members are active in any kind of personal ministry. However, an additional 40 per cent expressed an interest in having a ministry, but did not know how to start. This group is an untapped gold mine.

What we find on Alpha is that we are mobilising people who have the gift of evangelism. People come on the course as a guest and many of them (though not all) come to faith in Christ. We don’t allow these new Christians to come back and repeat Alpha, but they can come back as a helper as many times as they like. We generally don’t allow them to repeat the course because we don’t want Alpha full of people who have done the course over and over again. It would be very off-putting for new guests, apart from anything else, to do the introductions on the first night: ‘How do you come to be on Alpha?’ ‘Well, this is my fifth Alpha.’ We call those people Alphaholics. We try instead to involve them in a different ministry in the church.

What does work well is when they first come on Alpha as a guest, then they come back as a helper a few times. Then they might even eventually go on to host a small group or take that group on to form a new home group, or cell group, in the church.

Take, for example, Hailey, twenty-two years of age. She came on the course two years ago: not a churchgoer; not a Christian. She came to faith in Jesus Christ on the Alpha weekend and immediately started talking to some of her colleagues at work and they started asking her questions. She came to me on week 7 of the course and said, ‘Do you know, I don’t know the answer to any of their questions! They keep asking me, “What about other religions? What about suffering?”’ So I said, ‘Well, do you have a Christian friend that you could go to? Do you have anyone at work who is a Christian?’ She said, ‘No, I don’t think there are any other Christians at work.’ I said, ‘Well, do you have any Christian friends from university?’ She said, ‘No, I don’t think I met anyone at university who was a Christian.’ I said, ‘What about school – did you meet any Christians at school?’ She said, ‘No, I don’t think I met any Christians at school.’ I said, ‘Have you ever met a Christian before in your life?’ She said, ‘No, I don’t think I’ve ever met a Christian before in my life.’ This is England! But she came to faith, and so we asked her to come back and help on the next course. She was an excellent helper.

We find that people who did the previous Alpha are the best helpers because they’re a kind of bridge. When the guests come, they’re able to say to them, ‘Look, I was in your position three months ago. I understand totally how you feel.’ They speak their language and so they identify with them. On the following course Hailey hosted the small group. She had only been a Christian six months but she made an excellent small group host.

On every Alpha, approximately one-third of the people involved are hosts and helpers; all of them are doing evangelism. Tens of thousands of people are now involved. Steve Morgan, the Rural Dean of Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, put it like this:

It has been the heart cry of past generations to put evangelism within the grasp of ordinary people who are terrified at the thought of evangelism. This has never happened before. We have here ‘a history-making-thing’. For generations, the only people who would touch evangelism were those with an outgoing personality. But now the shy little old lady can embrace evangelism for the first time. It has never been available for all types of personality before. Any church, at any time, with any group can run with this. We believe that the nation has been praying and calling out for this for generations.

It is friendship based

Alpha is a New Testament model of evangelism: Peter brought his brother Andrew; Philip brought his friend Nathaniel; the woman at the well went back and told everyone in her town; and Matthew the tax collector threw a party and invited all his work colleagues to meet Jesus. Pope Benedict XVI said, ‘Anyone who has discovered Christ must lead others to him. A great joy cannot be kept to oneself. It has to be passed on.’⁷

Alpha is a form of come and see evangelism. What happens is people come to Christ, they get excited about Jesus and they say to their friends, ‘Come and see!’ This is why Alpha works best with people outside the church. However, what we found as other churches started to run Alpha was that not all of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also By Nicky Gumbel
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 01 Principles
• 02 Nigel Skelsey
• 03 The Structure of Alpha
• 04 Paul Cowley
• 05 The Alpha Recipe
• 06 Gram Seed
• 07 Hosting Small Groups
• 08 Donna Matthews
• 09 Pastoral Care
• 10 Judy Cahusac
• 11 Giving Talks
• 12 Pete Dobbs
• 13 Prayer Ministry
• Appendix A – Alpha Talk Scheme
• Appendix B – Administration
• Appendix C – Daytime Alpha
• Appendix D – Alpha in the Workplace
• Appendix E – Guest Questionnaire
• Appendix F – How to Avoid The Seven Common Mistakes
• Appendix G – Prayer and Alpha
• Appendix H – Worship on Alpha
• Appendix I – Alpha Weekend Entertainment
• Endnotes
• Alpha
• Praise for TELLING OTHERS