In Alpha Course #14, viewers learn that they should ‘tell others’ about their conversion. That means how to do personal evangelism. But the video accidentally reveals just how poorly Christianity fares as “good news” worth sharing.
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SITUATION REPORT: Alpha Course #14: How and why should I tell others?
In Alpha Course #14, which our Discord’s AV Club watched recently, we learn about the great necessity of personal evangelism. Timestamps all come from this video:
Personal evangelism is just person-to-person evangelism done by mostly amateurs on a mostly impromptu basis. Usually, the evangelist knows the target. Christians lay great importance on this kind of evangelism, deeming it extremely effective. It’s also free to do and volunteers handle all of it, which I’m sure Christian leaders like too.
The video stresses the importance of personal evangelism. It admonishes viewers not to feel embarrassed or ashamed about sharing their “good news,” comparing mockery and loss of social standing to actual persecution. Several guests show up to talk about the different ways they evangelize. In addition, the hosts stress that even if their personal evangelism doesn’t seem to impact anybody, it will totally all matter one day.
However, the video undercuts its own message in several key ways. It accidentally reveals that its creators know quite well that their “good news” isn’t really that good. Its main host, Nicky Gumbel, comes off as a hypocrite—especially if you’ve seen Alpha Course’s previous videos. And most of the testimonies seem completely irrelevant. One even ties evangelism to a task that is completely unrelated to anything Jesus commanded his followers to do.
All in all, this is a bizarre, unpersuasive video. Rather than relate a play-by-play as we normally do, we’ll tackle its self-owning, contradictory themes and messages.
Alpha Course Message #1: Evangelism is essential for transmission of Christianity
Throughout the video, Alpha Course hammers at the essential nature of personal evangelism. At about 3 minutes in, Nicky Gumbel, the face of the entire course, tells us that there’d be no Christians at all if nobody had evangelized in that crucial first century. He tells us that the word “go” appears 1514 times in the Bible, implying that “go” is a strong concept.
Right out of the gate, he’s wrong. It appears 1492 times in the KJV translation, 1427 times in the NIV that I think this course normally uses, and as infrequently as 1138 times in the New Living Translation that some UK Anglicans like. This “1514” number cited might be an urban legend, or maybe he’s added in other forms of the verb like “went,” but that’s not what he actually says.
I could forgive someone messing up in a speech—human memory can be really iffy about specific details like that. But this is not an impromptu speech. It is a polished, edited video that Alpha put out specifically to teach people about their faith. Even if he were correct about the citation, the word “and” appears 29511 times in the NIV, “divorce” 16 times, and “baptism” 20 times. Frequency of a word’s usage doesn’t imply anything.
However, Nicky is completely correct in asserting that evangelism is completely necessary for recruitment. Yes, it certainly is.
You see, Christians have to transmit information about their faith because no information about it gets transmitted otherwise. It’s the same reason they must tell people they prayed for them: Their targets would never know it happened without being told.
Nothing about our universe and our reality would lead anybody to any of the main beliefs of Christianity—or those of any other religion on Earth, I’d wager. If every artifact of humanity vanished overnight and we all woke up without memories, we could recreate our knowledge of the real world using tools and processes like the scientific method. But we could never perfectly recreate any flavor of Christianity.
This talk of the essentialness of evangelism isn’t exactly the win Nicky wants it to be.
Alpha Course Message #2: Do what they say, not what they do
Nicky’s hypocrisy has come up before. In fact, in the very previous Alpha Course video we got a good look at it. At the 18:00 mark in that video, Nicky tells us a story about himself:
According to Nicky, he was riding a bicycle in heavy traffic when a taxicab did something he didn’t like. So he began pursuing the driver, who had a passenger on board. His goal was to confront the driver and get his registration number to report him to his employer. Nicky admits that what he was doing was extremely dangerous, putting both himself and possibly many other people at risk. But his anger overtook him, he says:
Something in my spirit—I don’t think it was the Holy Spirit—said, “Get him.”
Oh boy, was Nicky ever embarrassed when he caught up with the driver, who revealed that he knew exactly who Nicky was because he’d done Alpha Course! He loved it! He’d converted because of it and said it had changed his life.
Nicky presents this story as a cutesy little anecdote about how he, in his own words, “really [has] got a long way to go. We’re still in a battle. It’s a process.” In reality, however, I’d have been terrified if I’d been riding in that taxi. And then, I’d have been angry that the driver then had a personal conversation with the road-raging bicyclist, and infuriated if that personal conversation then turned into trying to recruit me to their religious group.
Alpha Course is supposed to transform people’s lives. The driver here certainly claimed that it had. But the leader of the course, the guy who turned it into an international phenomenon, still acts like this.
In today’s video, Nicky continues to present himself as a lovable scamp, like oh ain’t he a stinker! His wife talks about having to give him a written list of people to call to share the news about their new baby (at 4:40 in the video). He can’t remember how much the baby weighed, so his wife Pippa corrects him—with a patient, longsuffering smile. I can’t help but think he gets details wrong just to annoy her.
Then, at 6:20, he tells us about a dance he attended after his conversion. Before getting there, he’d decided to evangelize the first person he met that he knew. That person happened to be his future wife. So he told her:
I didn’t want to waste any time with polite conversation. I just said “Hello, Pepper. You look terrible. You really need Jesus.” So that was insensitivity.
Negging works on some women, I guess. It wouldn’t exist as a strategy if it didn’t. But it certainly reveals that Nicky’s conversion didn’t change him at all. He’s just learned to frame his hypocrisy in ways that won’t drive away his potential recruits.
This message feels like a permission slip to the flocks to continue to be hypocrites.
Alpha Course Message #3: Evangelism apparently takes many forms
There’s a real pattern of “do what I say, not what I do” in this video as it offers another permission slip: The flocks should feel free to turn anything that pleases them into evangelism. Evangelism can be literally anything. It doesn’t need to involve direct sales pitches. It doesn’t even need to involve any of the boring, time-consuming, resource-draining stuff Jesus actually told his followers to do (like feeding the hungry and comforting the bereaved).
At 8 minutes, we meet Julia Immonen of a group called “Sport for Freedom.” She says that after her conversion, she was shocked to discover that human trafficking is still a thing in the current year. So she wanted to do something about it!
About 10-15 years ago, evangelicals got way into human trafficking. Sport for Freedom appears to have operated between its founding in 2013 and its dissolution in 2018, so they slot neatly into that timeframe. (They’ve since merged with Justice & Care, founded in 2009.) Even in the early 2010s, though, stories about trafficking were in wide circulation. I’m really surprised Julia didn’t know anything about it.
At 9:30, she says:
And so I really sort of said to God, “Okay, how can I serve you in this? How can I make a difference? [. . .] I ended up putting together a crew. And we wanted to be the fastest women ever to row the Atlantic Ocean to retrace the transatlantic slave trade route, and really try and make a noise and be a voice for so many people who don’t have that voice today.
The AV Club erupted at this point. None of us understood the link between rowing a small boat and the transatlantic slave trade and modern-day human trafficking, much less how anything about any of that stuff linked to evangelism. Yes, it’s a physical feat to be sure. It’s a good cause, too. It’s just that the video doesn’t even try to imply that this group’s activities function as evangelism. After the anecdote, Gemma and Toby explain that “wide-ranging influence” can be evangelism, but this is an extremely weak retrofitting attempt.
(Please forgive a brief segue: As a last note, Yahweh and Jesus both accepted slavery as a practice. Even today, many evangelicals offer what I call “atrocity apologetics,” pseudohistory aimed at supporting some nebulous “biblical slavery” ideal that somehow isn’t actually real slavery.)
Alpha Course Message #4: Even if it feels unloving, it’s totally loving
Just as Alpha Course redefined evangelism to mean literally anything, its hosts redefine love as well. This was an astonishing bit of sleight of hand from Nicky, and the AV Club caught it immediately (at 3:40):
There’s the need of other people out there. It’s an act of love to tell people this amazing news—that Jesus brings us peace, a deep inner joy fills our hearts with love, brings meaning and purpose to our lives, brings forgiveness, eternal life. [. . .] It’s like if you found water in a desert—an oasis. It would be really selfish just to take the water and drink it yourself and not tell your friends. You want to tell your friend: “Look, we found water!” And it’s natural to want to tell people we found Jesus. [. . .] The word “gospel” literally means “good news.” And when you hear good news you want to tell other people.
As one person in the watch party pointed out, it’s not actually loving to tell people in a desert that you found a mirage of water that looks exactly like water until you get close. As I said, nothing in reality supports any Christian claims. Nicky’s making an invalid comparison here.
But I see why he must do it. Most people are well aware that religious recruitment is an unwelcome topic to almost everyone. After Nicky negged his future wife, he says that even he got bogged down by the fear of social rejection! So the flocks must be goosed repeatedly to frame evangelism as an act of love—even when that “love” alienates them from the people they most treasure.
Amid these exhortations to evangelize, Gemma and Toby stress that evangelists need to be respectful of their targets. Evangelists must respect the opinions of others. But intruding on them with unwanted recruitment pitches is the opposite of respect. Telling someone they need to change their entire worldview to obey the evangelist’s demands is shockingly disrespectful.
There’s an essential tension between these conflicting instructions.
And the ultimate self-own: The good news that doesn’t feel very transmissible
There’s even more tension between the video’s conflicting teachings about their so-called “good news.” On the one hand, it’s presented as the best news humanity has ever gotten, so naturally Christians should feel compelled to talk about it constantly. But on the other hand, the video’s creators take as read that Christians will naturally feel extremely reticent to mention their conversions to others.
That tension arises from difference between the hype and the reality of Christianity. But it also arises from the nature of very personal experiences.
For many types of good news, people freely transmit it on their own without prompting. As Nicky describes, the birth of a child is definitely one of those types of easily-transmissible good news. So might be a promotion, or a future move to another country, or finding an awesome new anime series.
But some good news is deeply personal. We must consider the target receiving that news before spreading it. Losing one’s virginity is obviously not something to disclose to coworkers at a professional office. Normies aren’t likely to understand why that EVE Online heist was so spectacular. That cushy new nepo-hire job at Lockheed Martin might not go over well with a far-left social media audience.
Unfortunately for Christians, religion, by its nature, is exactly that kind of deeply personal. It’s a subjective experience that not everyone will understand—or want.
The “good news” that won’t be good news to most people
Even Nicky himself understands at some level that his “good news” won’t feel like good news to most people (at 7:15):
I think you know if you go around like that, sooner or later you get hurt. And I swung from insensitivity to fear. I became very very fearful even to mention the name Jesus. And I guess [. . .] I was looking for ways in which to communicate faith in a way that doesn’t involve either insensitivity or fear.
Obviously, he was afraid. He didn’t want to be considered boorish or insufferable, especially not by people whose opinions he took seriously. Toward the video’s end, he even tries to compare social embarrassment over one’s own boorishness to actual religious persecution. At 26:00, he tells us:
You probably won’t face physical persecution, as many people around the world today face and the early Christians faced. But people may laugh at you. People may ridicule you. The early Christians, when they faced real opposition of physical persecution, they prayed for boldness. I want to encourage you not to give up. The message of Jesus is so important. Keep on telling people.
He ends by telling viewers that even if their evangelism appears to have no effects at all, it totally does. To demonstrate that point, he offers an anecdote about a Sunday School teacher whose teaching made a difference to a student of his decades later. But this isn’t evangelism! The boy was presumably there to be taught. He wasn’t an acquaintance from work, and the teacher wasn’t his weird stoner buddy in the stockroom who “got saved” last week and needs to tell everyone about it. The personal dynamics are completely different here.
It’s very strange that Nicky’s examples throughout this series have been almost completely disconnected from his topics. Even I have an example of (cringey) evangelism I did that might have resulted in a conversion years later. You’d think the leader of Alpha Course would have a few of those coming easily to hand.
But the real good news for Nicky Gumbel is that he appears to have found the perfect way to handle the social costs of evangelism:
Making Alpha Course videos to tell other people to evangelize!
NEXT UP: Why the ‘good news’ doesn’t interest what some evangelicals call ‘happy pagans’. See you soon! <3
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