eChurch Blog

Recently, Channel 4 showed a documentary by reporter Jon Ronson on the Alpha course. It was called Revelations: How to Find God (1/8/09). Apparently Ronson approached 20 churches to get material for his report and the only one of these to agree was St. Aldate’s, Oxford, whose vicar is Charlie Cleverly. The result was broadcast at 7.00 pm on Sunday June 28.

Some have seen the portrayal as subtly cynical. However, I thought the report was relatively sympathetic. Ronson himself stated in a Radio Times interview: ‘This is a really gentle, human film. I wanted to make one that both Christians and agnostics would like. And I know that I’ve managed it, because we’ve shown the film both to the church and the agnostics and they’ve both really liked it. … the people who do the Alpha course are … just regular people trying to make sense of their lives and of the world’ (Radio Times, 27/6-3/7/2009, p.162).

Quite promising

Indeed, the early part of the course, when people were encouraged to discuss their misgivings about God or the Christian faith, seemed quite promising. It was clear that the initial objections people raise are fairly stereotypical. Alpha booklets are, in fact, available to answer all these points.

Despite all this, the documentary as a whole for me was a shocking reminder of how professing Christians can confuse psychological experience with a work of the Holy Spirit.

‘Holy Spirit weekend’

The Alpha course was started originally in the late 1970s as a local course run by Holy Trinity Brompton (Church of England) to help Christians explore their faith. In 1990, Nicky Gumbel restructured and streamlined the entire course to target people, particularly agnostics, who might be interested in becoming Christians. It consists of weekly sessions held over ten weeks.

Gumbel was convinced that the Holy Spirit should be a key component in Alpha (of course the Holy Spirit must be central in any evangelistic work as it is his work to convict people of their sin and need for salvation). Gumbel decided to make a central feature of the course something called ‘The Holy Spirit weekend’: halfway through the course, attendees are taken on a weekend- or day-retreat when the things they learned, which are ‘in the head’, can be spiritually applied to them. This sounds fine, but what it boils down to is this:

* Attendees have received teaching during the first half of the course.
* It remains for this teaching to percolate from the ‘head’ into the ‘heart’.
* This has to be done by the Spirit.
* The way this is done is by learning to ‘speak in tongues’.

The shocking thing is that the people being encouraged to ‘speak in tongues’ were not even Christians. They were inquirers and, clearly, some of them were understandably spooked by this.

In fact, the biblical gift of ‘tongues’, or ‘languages’, is a miracle, just as much as raising someone from the dead. How embarrassing, then, to watch the retreat-leader demonstrating ‘tongues’ by doing something which he had learnt to do. In fact, most people can learn to produce such syllables, provided they set aside their inhibitions and disbelief long enough to attempt it, something I would not encourage.

Toronto connection

The programme reported that Nicky Gumbel had visited the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church in 1994 and so became convinced that the Holy Spirit should be central to the course. Video-clips were then shown of the typically bizarre behaviour in those meetings. This served to remind me of the lapse in discernment required to accept such manifestations as being symptomatic of the Holy Spirit’s work.

It was not surprising to see at least two people turned off the Christian faith, or at least ‘organised religion’, through this episode. This laid them open to becoming New Agers or Wiccans or Buddhists, which many people of our generation perceive as viable alternatives to ‘organised religion’. In this way the course is in danger of inoculating certain people against the Christian faith. There was one person who had become more sympathetic as time went on, feeling that the course had a good vibe. But what was he being led into? The Christian faith? Or a lifestyle-change enhanced by a psychological technique which makes people feel good?

In the programme we saw people becoming progressively more open during the first half of the course as their difficulties were resolving. But, just as this was happening, the ‘Holy Spirit weekend’ aborted the incipient new openness to God.

Failure in discernment

The New Testament is very clear in exhorting us to test and discern our spiritual experiences. We need to:

* be aware of false spiritual experiences which lead us away from God (Colossians 2.18; Galatians 1.8);
* have our senses exercised to discern between good and evil (Hebrews 5.14);
* allow, but test, prophetic utterances (1 Corinthians 12.3; 14.5,19,39,29-31; 1 Thessalonians 5.19-22; 1 John 4.1-6);
* value the gift of discerning spirits (1 Corinthians 12.10), which is available because it is needed;
* be aware that authentic miracles can have a demonic or satanic source (2 Thessalonians 2.9-10; Revelation 13.13-15);
* test all messengers claiming to come from God (2 Corinthians 11.13-15; Revelation 2.2).

It is not always obvious how all these tests are to operate today, but the message that everything should be tested is loud and clear.

Confused paradigm

It is interesting that Alpha has a link with both the ‘Toronto Blessing’ and the Vineyard Movement. Therefore, the shared spirituality is no surprise.

Indeed, one of the key faults within the Vineyard movement is its tendency to embrace both Christian and pagan experiences within its paradigm of spirituality. I became aware of this through my personal acquaintance with a Vineyard leader. He had been an agnostic, but then experienced a spontaneous stereotypical mystical state. This type of experience is described by R.C. Zaehner in his book, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane. It is an ‘oceanic’ feeling in which the person senses as if he or she is one with the whole of reality and that this ‘whole’ is somehow contained within the self. Boundaries between different objects are totally dissolved and ‘all becomes one’. The poet W.H. Auden called this type of experience, ‘The Vision of Dame Kind’, and it is a foundational phase in all non-Christian mysticism. It can also be mediated through hallucinogenic drugs and is related to the manic phase of manic depression or ‘bipolar disorder’. Soon after his experience, someone in the Vineyard commented enthusiastically, ‘It sounds like baptism in the Holy Spirit’. This convinced him to join the Vineyard.

Vineyard spirituality was heavily influenced by Agnes Sanford, a popular visiting speaker at Fuller Theological Seminary in California, where John Wimber, the Vineyard founder, encountered her. Mrs. Sanford was highly influential in the thinking of Episcopalian and Lutheran charismatics in the USA in the 1960s and also within the charismatic wing of the Church of England. In her autobiography, Sealed Orders, Mrs. Sanford described such a panenhenic experience, which she regarded as an experience of the Holy Spirit. She creatively fused this experience with her belief in a personal God and the resulting cocktail was her ‘panentheistic’ [All-in-God/God-in-everything] spirituality, which made her believe that God’s power could be mediated to us through material objects.

This acceptance of both Christian and pagan spiritual experiences all as ‘God’s work’ is a key-note of Vineyard and Toronto spirituality. Once this is understood, many enigmas become clear.

Alien spirituality

Effective courses for non-Christians, such as Christianity Explained or Christianity Explored, strip out non-essential or controversial factors which can distract people from realising that they are in rebellion against their Creator.

It was tragic to see people being drawn to God and then having, regretfully, to decide that the Christian faith was not for them merely because of the introduction of a spiritual element alien to the historical Christian faith.

Mike R. Taylor