Thoughts on Alpha

I just finished leading my first Alpha. In fact, even though I have pastored for over twenty years, this is the first time I have gone through an Alpha course.

Our community did a city-wide Alpha, with as many churches doing Alpha as possible. We wanted to blitz our city with this program.

I went to the training and heard the presentations. I was pretty pumped about this. So many people talked about how Alpha changed their church and new people joined the congregation.

As you may know, Alpha fairly recently updated their videos. Gone are the VHS tapes of Nicky Gumbel giving his talk. While Nicky is still a part of it, the new videos are much more contemporary, including some younger voices.

I was very impressed with the production quality of the videos. There is nothing to be ashamed of here. These are not cheesy Christian videos. I especially liked the testimonies of people from different backgrounds.

Was Alpha everything that I hoped? Not really.

One problem was that everyone who came were church people. That is not the goal of Alpha. It is meant to be evangelism and not discipleship.

Of course many churches start with their own people and then they get the vision and invite others. I’m not sure that is going to happen in our situation.

While the quality of the videos is excellent, I did have some issues. Because they are evangelism focused, they are designed to present the topics in such a way to convince non-Christians to believe.

I often found myself feeling uncomfortable with the “sales pitch” feel to the presentations. As an insider, I know that things are a lot more messy than what is shown in the video.

We are shown young, good looking, hip people with may have struggled in the past but who are now super happy because they met Jesus. The church is portrayed as this big happy family that always loves each other.

I understand that you can’t air our dirty laundry when you are trying to convince people that Christianity is true. But it is possible to be overly positive in such a way that you set people up for disappointment.

I was also somewhat uncomfortable with their Holy Spirit talks. I know these are the most controversial aspects. I am a former Pentecostal and so I am not opposed to charismatic gifts. But I was not thrilled with the emphasis on physical manifestations of being filled with the Holy Spirit.

Will I run Alpha again? Probably. But it is not going to be my first priority and I definitely don’t see it as the silver bullet that many make it out to be.