When a group of us watched Alpha Course #10, we weren’t expecting this level of duplicity and evasiveness. The video promised to reveal an answer: ‘How can I be filled with the Holy Spirit.’ But in reality, it spent almost a half hour to give three short instructions. Once I began looking into why the video seemed so weird, I soon figured out why. Today, let me show you this video—and give you a peek at the marketing behind its very thick green curtain.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 12/19/2025. They’re both available now! Answering Alpha tag, for the entire series. From introduction: Minky Rose Swirl fabric.)
Important Note: At some point, Alpha Course rejiggered its numbering system. In the system we’ve been watching, this is the 10th video, while in another it’s the 11th. The content of the videos appears to be the same. For our review, I’ll be calling it #10.
SITUATION REPORT: Alpha Course 10: It’s only a model
Alpha Course #10 is called “How Can I Be Filled With the Holy Spirit.”
This video is, ideally, meant to be shown during the Alpha Course retreat weekend (which runs from Friday evening to noon-ish Sunday). More than that, it’s meant to be shown right before the most intense preaching of the weekend.
Accordingly, the content of this video is incredibly simplistic. From here onward, its creators assume they’ve successfully converted any viewer who’s stuck with the series until now, and those viewers will of course agree to anything else the videos suggest they do.
Nicky tells us that the Holy Spirit is pure love, and Christians all have it within them at the point of conversion. But not all Christians are “filled” with the Holy Spirit. Nicky compares the Holy Spirit to the pilot light on a heater: All Christians have the pilot light on, but they don’t really radiate heat. Once they’re filled with the Holy Spirit, then they radiate heat and everyone can tell they’re super-duper different from regular Christians.
From there, the video concentrates on two different topics:
First, the miraculous effects of being filled with the Holy Spirit: Magic healing, broken families reconciled, feelings of overwhelming joy, speaking in tongues being recognized as a real live language (LOLNO), etc.
Second, people offering halfhearted objections to attending the weekend retreat—and their objections being soundly defeated by their own testimonies of how awesome the retreat was.
As I mentioned last time we met up, the priest Raniero Cantalamessa shows up frequently to talk about the Holy Spirit and how it feels for him to work himself up into serious bouts of euphoria.
Also, one older lady we’ve occasionally seen throughout the series wore eyeglasses with a wooden frame. That fashion choice provoked a lot of interested chatter in the watch party. (We generally liked them.)
How to be filled with the Holy Spirit: The three short instructions in Alpha Course 10
Video #10 is almost a half hour long, and somewhere in all that boondoggling they managed to issue three short instructions answering the video’s own title question:
- Go to church
- Go to Alpha Course’s weekend retreat
- JUST ASK, DUMMY! GYAHHH!
Now, I know a lot of people are going to immediately say they’ve tried that, but got nothing. You’ll be happy to know that that’s impossible, according to Nicky Gumbel’s 1994 book Telling Others. He writes:
After we have finished praying for a person to be filled with the Spirit, receive a gift, be healed or whatever it is, we should ask what is happening and what they sense God is saying to them. [. . .] We don’t believe it is possible that ‘nothing has happened’. They may not be aware especially at the time but when we ask the Spirit of God to come, he has promised to come. They may not know the difference until hours or even days later but something will have happened. [p. 150]
In broken systems like Christianity, the message is always perfect. If someone doesn’t get the promised results, a person has to be the problem—and usually it’s the person asking. The problem can’t ever be the message itself. So in this case, the person asking totally got the promised results. They just don’t realize it yet.
(Also, we’ll talk more about this 1994 book next time. I’ve found some very interesting bits in it.)
Funneling targets into the Alpha Course weekend retreat
Earlier, I mentioned that Alpha Course renumbered some episodes. That’s because of Episode 8, which in one numbering system is “Introduction to the Weekend.”
That one threw me off-course briefly because it didn’t seem to fit the flow of the videos I was watching. It felt like the #8 to a whole other series. When I found a #8 called “Who is the Holy Spirit,” that sounded a lot more like the series I was covering.
In “Introduction,” we get metaphors to describe how the Holy Spirit functions, people talk about being lonely and wanting comfort, and Nicky Gumbel offers us an extended anecdote about a guy trying to land a plane without knowing anything about planes, with the help of an experienced pilot on his radio. They’re all meant to hype the weekend retreat.
Churches use Alpha Course to evangelize. As part of the evangelism program, they sponsor these weekends. They might be very fancy indeed, with one source pricing attendance at $350-489, or quite spartan in nature. Most cost about $150, and all the programs I checked out offered what many called “scholarships” for those who can’t afford the cost.
Alpha Course support sites give churches a timetable for promoting the retreat. They want it mentioned around week 4 (which would be the 4th video, since it’s one video per week till the retreat), but week/video 2 is okay if church leaders think people will need more advance notice. Churches should ramp up the hype on week/video 5, try to get a few people to offer testimonies to stir more interest on week/video 6, and start talking about transportation and carpools on week/video 7. It’s all very slickly and intentionally presented.
Churches should regard weekend retreat subsidies as investments more than anything else, because it’s crystal-clear that Alpha Course’s creators fully expect churches to bag-and-tag most of their recruits during this weekend. They need prospective new recruits to attend this weekend.
And one can see why. If the weekend results in five new church members, chances are at least one of them will tithe enough to make up that subsidy and then some for the entire clutch of newbies. Hopefully, one of them will even recruit another person to the same church, which can have profitable knock-on effects long after the program itself ends.
The weird emphasis on speaking in tongues in Alpha Course
For a long time, these weekends concentrated on getting recruits to speak in tongues on Saturday night. The 1994 book makes that goal quite clear; Gumbel even calls speaking in tongues “a beginner’s gift” for new Christians (p 149). As we’ll see next time, he even provides extremely specific instructions for how to coach someone into speaking in tongues!
Nowadays, though, the Alpha planning tools just tell sponsors to pray for targets to ask Yahweh to fill them with the Holy Spirit (local archive). You won’t find much more in their Alpha Team Guide, either. On p. 22, there’s a very brief hint of the series’ previous laser-focus on speaking in tongues on Saturday morning. It concerns a list in 1 Corinthians of the various “gifts of the Spirit.”
Make sure you cover, in particular, the gifts of prophecy and speaking in tongues, as these come up in the talk “How Can I Be Filled with the Holy Spirit?”
After that, the manual advises that prospects “may want to receive a gift of the Spirit.” On p. 50, we also see discussion questions about speaking in tongues.
It’s all surprisingly sotto voce. These newer materials almost sound embarrassed about speaking in tongues—and I can’t blame them there. It’s a charlatan’s favorite kind of parlor trick: one easily coached and easily learned, but spectacularly impressive when done well in front of the right audience.
But in front of the wrong audience, oh goodness, tongue-talkin’ looks absolutely unhinged in the worst way.
And the omission that everybody in the watch party noticed
Perhaps because speaking in tongues is so bizarre-looking and embarrassing, this 10th video featured an omission that every one of us noticed in the watch party: Not one single example of someone speaking in tongues or “singing” in tongues or anything tongues-related. Instead, the people in the video just talk about overwhelming feelings of love, comfort, grace, excitement, euphoria, guidance, and similar strong positive emotions.
So here are a bunch!
And just, like, all of this one:
This next one doesn’t have obvious tongue-talkin’ purely because it’s got worship music playing too loudly to hear it, but it’s definitely happening. The video also features a lot of other manifestations similar to speaking in tongues. It’s interesting to see the people going up onto the stage and doing their thing—it reminds me of the young women on TikTok pretending to have seizures:
This one screenshot taken near the end of that last video says it all:
This is what is likely embarrassing Alpha Course. This, right here, is called being slain in the Spirit. These folks think the Holy Spirit is knocking fervent believers flat on their asses.
It’s hard to imagine modern audiences seeing anything like these videos and coming away thinking it’s divine magic, but that last screenshot in particular will likely not win Charismatic Christians many recruits.
All that said, I want to show you just how focused Alpha Course used to be about speaking in tongues. It’s too fascinating for words. We’ll save that for next time, so be ready for a very wild, bumpy ride!
NEXT UP: Captain Cassidy’s Glorious All-Singing All-Dancing End-Run Guide to Speaking in Tongues. ROSHANDA LASHANDA AHOY! See you soon! <3
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