We now arrive at Alpha Course #5, which concerns prayer in Christianity. Here, we see Christian dishonesty at its fullest flowering. The Christians responsible for this mess desperately want to promise potential recruits that prayer results in miracles. Oh, yes, they do desperately want to promise that. But they know they can’t, so instead we get this cringe mishmash of garbled testimonies and yes-but-no-but-actually-yes-sometimes-but-don’t-expect-it-or-anything sales patter. At the end, Jesus comes out looking really bad, while Alpha Course only continues to look worse as an evangelism tool.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 8/26/2025. They’re both available now! Answering Alpha series tag.)
SITUATION REPORT: Alpha Course Video #5 makes promises about prayer that Christian leaders can’t keep
The Alpha Film Series consists of a number of short evangelistic videos seeking to inform potential recruits of the basics of Christianity. The videos base their material on a decades-old evangelistic Bible study series called Alpha Course. Though the series creators are evangelicals, they tried to make the videos ecumenical (meaning not specifically about any one flavor of Christianity).
Episode #5 of the Alpha Film Series concerns prayer. It seeks to show potential recruits how to pray—and why they definitely should pray.
However, what it actually does instead is make Christians look like dishonest hucksters willing to say literally anything to score a sale. They’re making promises about miracles that they can’t actually keep.
A brief recap of Alpha Course #5
As with all of these videos, Alpha Course #5 mixes man-on-the-street vignettes with talking heads sharing anecdotes and observations, then brings Nicky Gumbel in to deliver the main message. They fill out the rest of the video with testimonies and more chitchat, finally ending with a Sinner’s Prayer-style entreaty to convert.
Nicky Gumbel is the old dude in the video thumbnail above. He’s also the main guy behind Alpha Course these days. He tells a story about being dead broke and backpacking across the US by bus. He claims he was an atheist in his youth, but that day he nonetheless prayed for relief. And he ran into an old school friend of his! OMG! It’s a miracle!
Based on this experience, Nicky claims prayer became his #1 priority even though he’s really bad at it and struggles to focus. Yes, because we all know how our #1 priority is, right? (/s)
He also claims that prayer is what people were created to do, because Yahweh is apparently a narcissistic jerk. Nicky tells us that prayer is also how people cultivate a relationship with Jesus. Yes, because relationships are all about completely one-sided communication with someone who never answers back in any tangible way. (/s)
The video goes on and on like that. It trots out testimonies about miracles and changes people have experienced as a result of prayer, along with tons of anecdotes about the same.
Its main point is that prayer works miracles, except when it doesn’t. Oh, but it really does, even though they can’t promise you that. Except they promise you that you will totally see miracles if you pray.
The absolutely hilarious old talking point about “Abba” that Alpha Course regurgitates about prayer
Having seen a bunch of Alpha Course videos already, I went into this video expecting to hear parroted talking points that make no sense except to other well-indoctrinated Christians. But the wide-eyed, kittenish retelling of those talking points made me die laughing in a few places—and one also infuriated me with its sheer dishonesty.
Old talking point #1: Jesus teaches Christians to call Yahweh “Abba,” or “father.”
Last time I checked, only Jesus was the son of Yahweh. If you call your dad “father,” that doesn’t mean I get to do the same. Still, this is an absolutely hilarious bit of folklore that I first heard in the 1980s as a Pentecostal—and an unsurprising one as well, given evangelicals’ and fundamentalists’ fascination with Judaism.
The use of “Abba” in right-wing Protestantism originates in 1967 from a book by Joachim Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus. Before the book even came out, Christianity Today had already printed a story praising Jeremias’ assertions. Though he changed his mind a few years later, the damage was done. Even today, you can easily find modern evangelicals who didn’t get the memo that Jeremias realized that he was wrong. (Of course, many do realize that—including The Gospel Coalition!)
Weirdly, Christians who lived before the Jesus People movement didn’t call Yahweh “Abba.” If Jesus taught his followers to do that, they took a weirdly long time to figure it out—and non-evangelical flavors of Christianity don’t do it at all. Considering how hard Alpha Course tries to be ecumenical, it’s weird they include a teaching that wouldn’t fit into the more formal flavors like Catholicism (where we find “Our Father” and other formalities).
Fine-tuning, yet again
Old talking point #2: Yahweh made the entire universe for humans.
The science-illiteracy of evangelicals strikes again. I learned this old chestnut in Pentecostalism as well. When I was a teenager, it impressed me! I’d walk outside, look up at the stars, and think “Jesus made all of this just so I’d have somewhere nice to live.”
This talking point amounts to nothing more than narcissism. It is a form of the “fine-tuning” argument for Creationism, which posits that someone, we’re totally not saying WHO, created the universe to support life—specifically, life on Earth. The Milky Way galaxy alone might contain a trillion planets. Astronomers think the universe might contain 200 billion galaxies, each containing their own complements of planets. And we only know for sure that life even exists on one of these planets in one of these galaxies. Moreover, humans only evolved on that one planet within the past 300k years ago. We’re relative latecomers here!
If this talking point had validity, it’d only reveal Yahweh as a moron. He apparently designed a universe that immediately kills humans everywhere but one little tiny speck of it.
Again, Creationism is very much an evangelical marker belief these days. Though many evangelical converts to Catholicism retain their Creationist beliefs, Catholicism itself is not Creationist. More science-embracing Christians will also find the fine-tuning argument very weird and unsettling. This isn’t actually a very ecumenical talking point.
And yes/no/wait. Again.
Old talking point #3: Yes, no, wait.
After zeroing in on so many right-wing teachings, we now zoom out for a far more ecumenical talking point.
At 19:00, Nicky Gumbel explains that Jesus totally always answers prayer. But he doesn’t always give you what you wanted—which is what every normal person defines as “answering prayer.” Instead, Jesus answers by saying yes, no, or wait to his followers. Sometimes he’ll just do what was asked. At other times, he’ll say no, and at other times still he’ll ask the praying person to wait.
Of course, he never actually makes these answers clear in any kind of useful, tangible way. No, Christians must gauge their god’s answers by observing what transpires after they pray. When they don’t get what they asked for, then they twist the refusal into part of their god’s plan. Nicky does precisely this, too, saying:
When I look back, I am so thankful that God shut that door—because, for example, if he hadn’t I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now. He knew what was best for me. [Timestamped video]
But at the time of the prayers, he certainly didn’t know that!
This talking point is annoying, but also endearing because it’s specifically the one that destroyed my faith. I’m glad my faith was destroyed, because it was faith in something that isn’t real. It needed to go! But I’m also sad about the deep pain I felt as my onetime faith flowed down the drain of my Faith Pool. If I hadn’t been made so many promises that got broken in such rapid succession, I wonder sometimes if my Faith Pool would have drained so quickly. Or even at all.
Here, Nicky also claims to keep a prayer diary. He claims to be very impressed at how many prayers he’s made that got answered. He does not show the prayer diary to us, which is utterly unsurprising . After all, he’s either lying or using his own yes/no/wait logic on his requests. That way, literally any outcome can be post hoc recast as a divine response.
And the infuriating inhumanity of prayer in this Alpha Course video
I was already annoyed over that yes/no/wait thing, but this next bit made me downright angry. Nicky Gumbel now shares a deeply personal tragedy that prayer did nothing to help, but he wants us to see prayer as very helpful anyway.
In this scene (around 20 minutes in), Nicky describes the sudden and extremely unexpected death of one of his friends during a game of squash. As his friend suddenly dropped to the ground with a heart attack, Nicky says he prayed harder than he had ever prayed in his life for his friend to recover:
I have never cried out to God more than I did in that moment. He had six children. The youngest was six, and the oldest was 18. And we had to tell each of these children [that their father had died]. It’s the most painful thing. And it it still is today the most painful thing for me.
As he retells this story, Nicky chokes up. His eyes redden and glisten with tears. Several times, he swallows back sobs.
It’s the most emotion I have ever seen out of this guy in this entire series. This is a visceral pain.
From what I can tell, his friend died 30 years ago. But his grief still looks as fresh as the day of the death. It is a raw, red wound that pulsates and throbs with every heartbeat. It makes me feel far more sympathy for Nicky than I want to feel.
Perhaps that’s why, when Nicky immediately follows this story up by cheerily telling us that he totally prayed the next day that he’d still totally trust Yahweh’s divine plan, I went off like a rocket.
This guy doesn’t even allow himself to feel the vast loss he’s suffered, or the betrayal of his unanswered prayer. It’s all got to be okay. He’s got to keep his Jesus mask on nice and tight. Everyone has to be pretty and happy, just like in the post-apok series Autodale.
Nicky wants us to think that his faith sustained him through the death of his friend. But what he shows us is something else entirely.
Prayer vs real-world hard emotions
Nicky’s still-raw grief completely cuts across his religious claims. It’d be shocking, if I didn’t know right-wing Christians as well as I do. They’re not taught to deal with hard emotions. They bottle them up and recite mantras designed to wish them all away.
These Christians get taught to pray for Jesus to take their hard emotions away. These emotions can be a gift that tells us something is very wrong with a situation—or that we’re neglecting necessary self-care. But such Christians are not allowed to express them.
Unfortunately, hard emotions have a way of getting out. They’re hard precisely because they can’t be ignored. They’re an unavoidable part of what it means to be human. Either we deal with these emotions well and resolve them, or we do it poorly and they keep returning.
Nicky’s gone that latter route. Every Pentecostal I knew was doing the same exact thing, including me. I didn’t learn to deal effectively with those hard emotions until I was in my late 20s-early 30s—years after my deconversion.
I shouldn’t need to say that Jesus didn’t help me at all with my anger issues or my PTSD. But I’ll say it anyway: He didn’t. Instead, real therapy and a lot of personal work is what finally did the trick.
Nicky’s here claiming his prayer totally helped with his grief. But his behavior on-camera tells us that his grief is still there and still demanding his real attention, which he so far has clearly refused to give. Maybe he just never will. Dude’s 70 now and still hasn’t. I find that incredibly sad. I might not like this guy at all, but I don’t wish that kind of pain on anyone.
The Problem of the Overwhelming Reason
Christianity suffers from a few key situations where one completely-overwhelming reason drowns out all their nicey-nice lesser reasons to obey.
Hell, of course, is the main overwhelming reason that Hell-believers have to obey Yahweh. They can sing all they like about Jesus’ love, but avoiding Hell is their big motivation. If they could avoid Hell doing anything easier than whatever flavor they’re following now, they’d do that instead. When they evangelize, they make a few initial feints about lesser reasons, but when those fail the big gun—threats of Hell—invariably comes out.
For this Alpha Course video, the overwhelming reason to pray is getting what you asked for. And I don’t mean “yes/no/wait.” No. I mean what every normal person means by “answers to prayer,” which is getting what you asked for. The video’s creators want people to pray to foster a relationship with Jesus. But when that fails to persuade anybody, the miracle claims come out.
That’s why this video leads with a miracle claim: Nicky meeting his old school friend while alone and desolate. He doesn’t lead with a story of feeling a rich, multifaceted relationship with Jesus develop as he prays. In fact, he admits he’s bad at prayer. (Unsurprising; I seriously doubt any evangelicals pray as often as they claim. They’re all about surface-level appearances.)
No, what really stands out in Nicky Gumbel’s mind as a reason to pray is seeing miracles happen as a result.
Of course, the miracle he claims here isn’t even really miraculous. Yahweh could have really pushed some thrill buttons by doing something really wild, like having him encounter a friend whose death he personally witnessed years ago (AHEM, like his squash buddy). So this is just a nice happenstance occurrence. Anyone could experience the same thing if they traveled long enough—and they wouldn’t even need to pray for anything beforehand.
I hope Nicky didn’t pin his conversion on such a flimsy foundation.
The miracle promises are a problem too
All in all, this video promises that prayer creates miracles. Except that the video’s creators know they can’t promise that too hard. If they do, people will take them seriously. And when nothing even vaguely extraordinary results, those people will be sore at them. So they hedge their bets as hard as they can.
At 12:00 into the video, Nicky begins to outline “the rewards of prayer.” He rambles for a while about how worrisome modern life can be, then declares that prayer makes people worry less. Jesus will ensure it. He won’t actually fix his followers’ problems, of course—even though we see Jesus literally making that promise multiple times in the Gospels. Instead of making himself actually useful, the Jesus of Nicky Gumbel just helps praying people worry less about their troubles.
Nicky also assures us that prayer grants Christians “perspective.” That must be why fervent Christians are such undiscerning, easily-fooled sheep who fall for scams and bad-faith actors all the time.
Then, immediately after Nicky shares these utterly lackluster “rewards of prayer,” we hear about the Chilean mining accident of 2010. This was worldwide news at the time: 33 men were trapped underground after a mineshaft collapsed. Numerous world governments and corporations cooperated to get the men rescued. All survived. But despite the very earthly facts of all the very earthly forces arrayed to help these men, Alpha Course wants us to believe that they survived and got rescued because they impressed Jesus by praying a lot while they were underground.
So yes, it’s like when those Thai kids got trapped while exploring a cave and Christians attributed their rescue to Jesus. This is the “perspective” Christians get from prayer.
Nicky returns to tell us about all the weird little coincidences he’s observed after praying for stuff. This is where he mentions his totally real prayer diary, by the way.
The cosmic slot machine Alpha Course can’t afford to promise (but sure does anyway)
Then he says not to look at prayer as a “slot machine” that dispenses miracles, even though he literally just told us that’s what happens. Sometimes. You know, like if Jesus is in a good mood. And if it’s for the Christian’s own good. And the stars align and the goat sacrifice went nicely.
What picayune porridge this god apparently grants his followers. Sometimes he grants miracles, but most often he doesn’t. One can’t count on that, but it’s obvious they all do consider prayer to be like playing the Lotto. You can’t win the million dollars if you don’t kiss his ass, after all!
So Nicky found an old buddy while traveling, and that minor coincidence was apparently worth up-ending his entire life to become Christian. Another man considers his rescue from that mining accident to be divine, but if his god could rescue those men then he could have prevented the accident as well and saved a lot of people a lot of anguish and money.
Jesus emerges from this mess of a video looking like a toxic boyfriend. It’s like he’s starting big fights just to get the make-up nookie.
Overall, these guys have disturbingly low standards for their god. But maybe that’s good. These laughably minor, natural-looking, and manpower-requiring “miracles” seem to be about all he’s able to manage. Maybe his god just liked Elijah more.
How Christian promises about prayer broke my faith
As I mentioned, the yes/no/wait talking point broke my faith at last.
I conceptualize belief in anything as a pool of water. The more important and complex the belief is, the bigger and deeper the pool gets. Our reasons for holding that belief are taps that feed water into the pool, while the drain at its bottom represents contradictions to our beliefs. As long as the water stays in the pool, we believe. When it drains completely away, we lose the belief.
Yes/no/wait was one of the last taps feeding water into my Faith Pool. At the very end, I had lost so many reasons to believe:
- The Bible is very obviously not divine, but a very human document
- Christians aren’t better people than non-Christians (and often are far worse)
- Miracles aren’t real
- Testimonies absolutely cannot be trusted
But I still held onto a little spark of faith in prayer as a way to connect with my god. I’d fully internalized the yes/no/wait teaching, so I couldn’t test anything about prayer. My belief in prayer was, to use the science word, unfalsifiable.
When it finally sank in that prayer was just talking to the ceiling and expecting a reply, that nothing about Christians’ conceptualizations of prayer matched what Jesus himself claims about it in the Gospels, that yes/no/wait is just an extrabiblical rationalization, that’s the moment my faith pool completely drained.
That was it for me. I was done.
Alpha Course sets up a cruel dilemma for believers
I faced a collision with reality that never needed to happen. My religious leaders set me up for that collision in the hopes that I’d swerve wide of it well before getting too close to it. It’d always worked that way before. But it didn’t work on me. I didn’t swerve.
Millions of people are facing that same collision now, and a great many of them aren’t swerving either. They’re no longer content to spend their lives talking to the ceiling and confirmation-biasing the results no matter what they might be.
But don’t expect Christians to give up their completely false promises about prayer. They’d rather have a lackluster god who ignores most of their requests than face reality without the chance of totes-for-realsies miracles.
NEXT UP: Evangelicals can only engage with strawman atheists. This time, the strawmanning is so egregious that we’ve got to pop some popcorn and load up the Get-A-Load-of-This-Guy Cam! See you soon! <3
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Alpha Course #10 talks in circles around speaking in tongues - Roll to Disbelieve · 12/22/2025 at 4:06 AM
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