God, we think they’re getting carried away. I actually grew to like it, the feeling of 500 people all singing the same song, the feeling of surrendering and being carried on a wave of music. I’d loved being in a choir at school, and I realised how much I missed collective singing. But, sometimes, the sugariness of the songs got a bit cloying. They’re all love songs for Jesus. ‘There’s nothing I want more/You’re all that I adore’; ‘Everything I’ve lost/I have found in you’; ‘Your love never fails, it never gives up, it never runs out on me’; ‘Come and have your way.’ And they’re all sung in an American accent, so you don’t actually worship God, you worship Gaaahd.
After the singing, Nicky bounded on stage to welcome us to Alpha and assure us HTB is not a cult and we won’t be harassed if we decide to leave. He clearly recognises how alienated most young British people are from the Church, and he was eager to show that it’s not weird. Alpha talks are filled with reassuring references to pop culture – Russell Brand and Freddie Mercury are quoted, and we’re told Elton John, Madonna and Jennifer Lopez all wear crosses. The theology is straightforward: Christ died for us and was resurrected, and His sacrifice liberated us from sin and death and gave us new life. We can have a personal relationship with Jesus by letting the Holy Spirit into our hearts. The great intellectual challenges Christianity faced over the last 250 years – evolution, Biblical criticism – are brushed aside. ‘Science tells us how, but it doesn’t tell us why,’ said Nicky. Besides, there is a difference between ‘head knowledge’ and ‘heart knowledge’. The most important thing is not conceptual logic, but relationships – our relationship with God, our relationship with each other. Personal feelings and personal testimonies are key. Even in the Alpha session on ‘how to read the Bible’, the speaker spent most of the talk telling his own story.3
The power of small groups
The Alpha course runs for 10 sessions. Each Wednesday evening, after the worship and the 20-minute Alpha talks, we’d go into our ‘small groups’ to discuss the ideas we’d heard. In our group, Nicky, Pippa and Jack sat back and let the rest of us discuss the topic among ourselves, even when we raged against God and Christians. Gradually, over the ten sessions, people expended all their rage and cynicism, and started to open up about their own lives, their setbacks, their longing for God and community. It was a profoundly cathartic and bonding experience to meet regularly with the same group of strangers – people of different ages, nationalities and races – and be honest and vulnerable about what matters to you. Every Wednesday evening we could take off our masks, be real, and feel accepted and cared for. I hadn’t done that sort of thing since my early 20s, when I’d been in an anxiety support group, and I’d missed it. Bit by bit, Nicky and Jack introduced us to various Christian practices, teaching us how to pray and encouraging us to pray for each other. ‘Does anyone have someone they’d like us to pray for?’ asked Jack.
One lady, Sarah, spoke first. ‘I was in Spain on holiday last week and I saw a really mangy-looking cat, with one eye. It looked so unhappy. We could . . . pray for that?’
‘Jules,’ said Jack, eyes twinkling, ‘would you like to go first?’
So the first time I ever prayed out loud was for this anonymous cat. ‘Lord . . . there’s a cat in Spain, with one eye. Help this cat, O Lord.’ Praying aloud felt ridiculous at first. I even resented being prayed for. ‘How would you feel if someone prayed for you, Jules?’ Pippa Gumbel asked me. ‘Patronised,’ I replied. But, again, I grew to like praying for each other, with a hand on each other’s shoulder. Belonging to a small group, meeting once a week to hear each other’s problems, wish each other well, and wish the world well – what could be more normal and therapeutic? The sociologist Robert Putnam thinks this community of care is the reason people in religious communities typically report higher life satisfaction than the non-religious.4
Alpha directly addresses a basic problem most of us have: we don’t always feel loved. We feel there is something about us that is unworthy of love and will make people reject us. We feel small and alone and we know we’re going to die and be forgotten. So we try various strategies to feel more loved and significant. We try to please our parents, but we don’t always understand each other. We try to win love through achievements and status, but success doesn’t make us loved, just admired, envied, even disliked. We seek love through the internet, staring at our phones in the hope of likes and interactions, however casual. We seek love through sex, through substances, through therapy. But even in therapy we know it’s not really unconditional, that at the end of the hour we have to pay and leave. No one talks about our need to be loved because if we did we might have to admit that we feel lonely and needy, and that is pathetic in our individualistic and success-oriented culture. What if there was a God and He loved us? What if the creator of the universe had a special concern for us, even at our worst? What if that love was free? We could let go of our fear, our shame, our inhibitions, our sense that we’re not well and have to hide it to avoid others’ rejection. We could stop trying to prove our importance to the world. We could relax and expand in God’s love, like a sponge in a warm bath. This is what Alpha tries to teach: the Jesus cure. God’s love will cure you of your shame, your addictions, your hang-ups, your desperate striving for the world’s approval. Your Alpha group will love and accept you. The wider community of HTB will love you too, particularly if you’re a ‘seeker’. You are the prodigal son (or fatted calf), whose return to God is celebrated by the saints and angels. You will never be higher status than as a seeker on the Alpha course.
In week seven, all the groups went on the ‘Alpha weekend’, staying in a hotel on the coast in West Sussex. Nicky said we would learn how to invite the Holy Spirit into our hearts. The Holy Spirit doesn’t enter unless you invite him. ‘The Lord is a gentleman,’ another pastor explained, meaning that, unlike Zeus, Jesus doesn’t rape you – although the word ‘rapture’ comes from the Latin raptus, meaning ‘abduction’ or ‘rape’. Nicky explained that the Church had sometimes been suspicious of ‘manifestations of the Holy Spirit’, but they actually have a central role in the Bible, as in the Pentecost episode in the Acts of the Apostles. The Holy Spirit can grant all of us the charismatic power the apostles possessed. To get the fires burning, Nicky said we would pray the oldest prayer in Christianity: Come, Holy Spirit. ‘You might feel a warmth in your chest,’ he said, ‘or a tingling, or your palms might feel a bit sweaty . . . Come, Holy Spirit . . . Come . . . Thank you, Lord . . . Thank you . . . Even now, the Holy Spirit is here, at work in some of you.’ I could hear some people gently sobbing around me. One woman behind me started quietly singing in tongues, like a Mediterranean baby-talk. I opened my eyes and Nicky appeared by my elbow. ‘Can I pray for you, Jules?’ he asked. I was flattered. ‘Lord, we ask that you fill Jules with your Holy Spirit, and reveal Your amazing plan for his life.’ I opened my eyes and Nicky smiled at me eagerly. ‘How was it?’
A brief history of charismatic Christianity
It’s remarkable that the Church of England should have become so ecstatic, considering it was established back in the Reformation as a prophylactic against ecstasy. The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, tells me that during the Reformation there was a ‘fear of the irrational, a fear of the ungovernable spirit’. This is unsurprising, given some Protestants were using the Holy Spirit as a justification to start revolutions. Luther dubbed such ecstatic revolutionaries ‘enthusiasts’, and insisted that it was heretical to claim special gifts or revelations from the Holy Spirit. The Church of England was, from its birth, suspicious of ecstasy – the Holy Spirit was ‘edited out’ of Thomas Cranmer’s 1540 prayer book, according to the Bishop of London. Monasteries and nunneries, which provided a cultural framework for ecstatic voyages, were dissolved by the state and their assets seized. In the second half of the seventeenth century, after the English Civil War and the Thirty Years War, the secular nation-state emerged triumphant and ‘enthusiasm’ was deemed a medical illness and threat to public order. Christianity was rationalised: all claims to personal revelation were subject to reason. God became distant, a blind watchmaker or Deist Supreme Ruler,
