At this point in our Alpha Course mega-review, we must stop to discuss speaking in tongues. The Christians who do it really like it! But not everyone knows what it is or how it’s done. So today, let me offer you a crash course in one of the weirdest worship practices in Christianity.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 11/29/2025. They’re both available now! Answering Alpha tag for entire series. From introduction: Hesiod’s Theogony; Enheduanna’s exaltation.)
SITUATION REPORT: The basics of speaking in tongues
Alpha Course #10 features a number of extremely careful references to speaking in tongues. Notably, it does not include a single example of anyone doing it. But they promise us that sometimes, people recognize languages in this babbling!
It begins by describing Acts 2, wherein a miraculous evangelism event occurs. In this story, Jews had gathered together from far and wide in Jerusalem for the Feast of Pentecost. While there, they heard the Apostles speaking to them in their native languages, and they were convinced by this miracle to convert:
Astounded and amazed, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? How is it then that each of us hears them in his own native language? Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism; Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” [Acts 2:7-11, Berean Standard Bible translation]
After hyping up speaking in tongues for the first 18 minutes of the video, though, Nicky returns to caution us: Hey, not all Christians are ever going to speak in tongues! It’s okay if someone doesn’t! (But immediately afterward, his wife shares an anecdote about a miracle she finds so amazing that it could only possibly be divine in nature.)
Toward the very end of the video (around 20 minutes in), Nicky even tells us that most of the time, these divine languages aren’t “recognizable” at all. Out of everything in the video, this one statement is the only objectively true thing in it.
A (somewhat) short history of speaking in tongues
Of course, speaking in tongues is not a Christian-only thing. Many religions past and present have featured this practice. One 1956 article in American Anthropologist cites Herodotus and Virgil talking about it—and its author then suggested that “sorcerers of India and China” might have done it. Buddhists have their “twilight language,” and some shamanistic cultures do it too. Other religions associate the practice with prophecy and divine communications, just as Christians do.
Nowadays, though, it’s mostly connected to Christianity. But despite the miracle recorded in Acts 2, almost no writers describe the practice until about the 1100s. (In the second century, Celsus derided it as “meaningless and nonsensical,” though!) The idea of it shows up with increasing frequency in Christianity from the 1600s-1800s, until it exploded in the Christian scene in the early 1900s.
Anyone who’s done time in Pentecostalism knows what I mean there, too: The Azusa Street Revival! This Los Angeles-area revival was the work of William Joseph Seymour, a Holiness Pentecostal minister. His denomination accepted and began endorsing the practice of speaking in tongues around 1901. At the time, the practice was even more controversial than it is today. But Seymour persisted, preaching at home meetings, until in 1906 everything set off. Los Angeles residents began flocking to these meetings.
Back in my day, my fellow Pentecostals and I were all proud of our movement’s diversity and multicultural roots. (But I don’t remember a single one of them warbling happily about the fact that the earliest Pentecostals accepted women leaders! As in Christianity’s earliest decades, once the menfolk formalized things, they mostly shut women out of leadership roles.)
Pentecostal missionaries carried this new practice with them wherever they went. By the 1960s, it’d become a decided part of several major flavors of Christianity, including Anglicanism and Catholicism. With the Jesus People movement and its orgiastic practices, speaking in tongues spread even further.
When evangelicals fused with fundamentalists between the 1980s-1990s, they largely adopted speaking in tongues as a practice. (I can tell you, though, that until the fusion completed my evangelical friends in college all thought speaking in tongues was a sign of possible demonic possession.)
A big part of that fusion may have happened because of the Toronto Blessing movement, which began in 1994 and continued unabated for some years. Its practices included speaking in tongues, “holy laughter,” hopping/jumping/dancing, being “slain in the Spirit” (read: getting so overwhelmed one must lay down), making all sorts of animal noises, and more. This movement legitimized Pentecostal practices like nothing else could have—and made those practices a worldwide phenomenon.
The modern practice of speaking in tongues: accepted but not universally practiced
Nicky Gumbel has written that Alpha Course’s revamp succeeded because of the Toronto Blessing. It’s likely no coincidence that his first book about Alpha Course, Telling Others, was published in 1994! Indeed, his church, Holy Trinity Brompton, was hugely important to the Toronto Blessing’s spread to the UK. They’d been charismatic since the 1970s, but it doesn’t sound like any of them had ever experienced anything like the Toronto Blessing.
They probably hadn’t, either. As a given rule, Pentecostals get way more rowdy than regular charismatic Christians. The Toronto Blessing was far more Pentecostal than evangelical in nature, regardless of its leaders’ formal ties. So yes, they got extremely rowdy.
In the modern day, probably a quarter of all the world’s Christians now belong to groups that at least accept speaking in tongues as a legitimate manifestation of their god’s power. Most of them don’t actually do it themselves, but their groups at least accept it. We collectively refer to tongues-accepting Christians as charismatic, meaning they practice “spiritual gifts,” or charisms. Speaking in tongues is only one such supposed gift—there are lots of them!
It’s still not universal, but it’s widely accepted. In 2020, Barna Group found that Millennials value speaking in tongues as a weekly worship element far and away more than any other generation—including Boomers. Predictably, they also found that “Elders” —the WWII generation—don’t value it much at all. It’ll be interesting to see what Zoomers make of it as a worship practice. They’ll either go nuts for it or disdain it entirely.
Speaking in tongues: Behind the scenes
Have you ever felt so completely gobsmacked by emotion that your mouth temporarily froze up and you couldn’t say a word? Imagine if you pushed through that emotion and tried to talk anyway. Speaking in tongues is like that. At times of humongous emotion, your frontal lobe—which handles language—just might go offline temporarily while your brain’s amygdala—the seat of emotion, so to speak—goes into hyperdrive.
At the same time, your parietal lobe might flare into action. That part of the brain handles your sense of self and where you physically are in relation to others and the world. According to a 2006 study of speaking in tongues, this might explain why speaking in tongues feels like a “very intense experience of how the self relates to God.”
Another way to conceptualize speaking in tongues is to compare it to trying to dial or write phone numbers in a dream. (I can’t be the only one who gets those dreams. Please, please tell me I’m not.)
So the only real question, for church leaders and prayer group coordinators, is how to get people into that incredibly heightened emotional state. That’s just a question of setting context and priming the group. Sociologically speaking, it’s easy enough to do for any skilled leader. The right music, repetitive chanting/singing, sermons that amp up big emotions like gratitude and fear, all of them can bring people to those extremes…
… Especially if they deeply desire to go there in the first place.
No, it isn’t supernatural at all
Needless to say, speaking in tongues is not in any way even remotely supernatural. It’s just our brains doing what brains do in extreme situations. Nobody has ever once found an example of tongues-talking that even remotely resembles real speech from any language past or present. As I discovered myself as a teenager, no sensible pastor allows even an investigation into a congregant’s supposed “prayer language.” Anyone claiming such a miracle is either lying or vastly mistaken about what happened.
And yes, that most definitely includes Pippa Gumbel in Alpha Course #10, who claims that someone who spoke in tongues was saying “my dear child” in Russian—while praying in tongues for a Russian speaker:
[Penny] ran out of English words, so she started praying in tongues for [Anna]. At that moment, Anna suddenly opened her eyes, smiled, and laughed, and said “You’re talking to me in Russian!” Anna actually spoke fluent Russian and she loved the language, but Penny didn’t speak a word. So Penny said, “What am I saying?” And Anna said to her, “You’re saying to me, ‘my dear child, my dear child.'” [timestamp 19:23 from this video link]
Google Translate says that the phrase “my dear child” sounds like “moy dorogoy rebyehnok” in Russian.
It’s easy to imagine that Penny babbled random syllables that sounded vaguely Russian—most of that crowd fancies syllables that sound Middle Eastern, which has some similarities to what English speakers would imagine Russian sounds like. Either way, I guarantee you that if we recorded Penny speaking in tongues, we’d quickly find out she wasn’t speaking in Russian at all.
Even in the context of Pippa’s anecdote, the phrase doesn’t land as hard as she really wants it to. It’s supposedly this life-changing event for Anna, but if Yahweh wanted to tell Anna something, why do it through another person’s babbling? Why couldn’t Yahweh tell her about his love himself? Or at least use more specific words in Russian to do it?
I’d think this would be far more miraculous and impactful: “You’ve found the right Christian group, Anna. Stay here and devote yourself to me.” But I guess “Anna, ty nashla pravil’nuyu khristianskuyu obshchinu. Ostavaysya zdes’ i posvyati sebya mne” would be a lot harder to babble accidentally.
Coaching people into speaking in tongues
The primary way recruits learn to speak in tongues is at charismatic church services, particularly revival events. A revival is just a really amped-up, often longer-than-usual church service aimed at recruiting new people. It might last one night or years, depending on how long the congregation can maintain the necessary emotional energy.
Another must-have is a good coach!
Back when I was Pentecostal, I cringed watching my Evil Ex Biff at revival altar calls. An “altar call” is a post-service prayer meeting held right at the podium up front. They’re often quite intense and can be the catalyst for conversions and all sorts of experiences.
Biff had a very hands-on technique for coaching recruits into speaking in tongues. (Almost all tongues-talking churches have a strict policy of same-sex-only touching, so he only did this with other men.) The longer the recruit took to speak in tongues, the more hands-on Biff got. By the end, he and the recruit might be drenched in sweat and locked in a tight, belly-to-back embrace, with Biff rocking them both back and forth while murmuring encouragement in the recruit’s ear. But he always succeeded in getting the recruit to babble.
Jesus tap-dancing Christ. It sounds so lurid to type it out and look at it. However, that is seriously what happened. Maybe his recruits only babbled to end the embrace, for all I knew. But at the time, it all seemed embarrassing but legit.
Decades later, I read Nicky Gumbel’s Telling Others—and saw almost this exact same technique laid out in text without any hint of embarrassment:
When praying for people to receive the gift of tongues I have found the greatest barrier is a psychological one — making the first sound. Once a person has made the first sound the rest usually follows quite naturally. In order to help people to get over this barrier I explain the difficulty and suggest they start by copying what I or one of the other prayers is saying. Then I start to speak in tongues slowly so that they can follow. Once they have made the first sound they are usually away praying in their own language. I encourage them to try and concentrate on their relationship with God and try, as far as possible, not to be self-conscious. Rather they should concentrate on praising God with the new language he has given to them. [p. 150]
At first, I felt shocked that someone had literally written out how to coach someone into speaking in tongues. It’s like Gumbel doesn’t even realize he’s describing coaching. There’s nothing supernatural at all in what he wrote here. He literally teaches people to do this, then describes it as a divine miracle.
A few pages later, though, Gumbel tops himself by teaching recruits how to sing in tongues together. If you’ve followed my Alpha Course posts, you’ve already learned that one of his heroes, Raniero Cantalamessa, is a Catholic priest who does this same thing. Here’s Gumbel’s topper:
After the Saturday evening we respond to God in songs of thanksgiving and praise. Sometimes we will sing in tongues. I explain that singing in tongues together is different from all speaking in tongues together. Speaking in tongues without interpretation is a private activity [. . .] Singing in tongues is a corporate activity of praise and worship to God, co-ordinated by the Spirit of God. On occasions, it has been one of the most beautiful and almost angelic sounds I have ever heard. [Did you catch his “on occasions”? Mostly, it must sound like sheer chaos! – Cas] It is also a golden opportunity for people to receive the gift of tongues as they begin to sing praises to God in the language he gives them. [p. 153]
When I read that passage, I laughed out loud. Hey, Gumbel thinks his god can make people laugh uncontrollably too! Maybe I was infilled again, ZOMG!
HOW TO ACTUALLY DO THE THING
The speaking in tongues part is actually easy. Pick a few syllables that sound vaguely Middle Eastern. These sounds are important to use, because Jesus spoke Hebrew and Aramaic:
- Sho/sha
- Ro/ra/ree
- Dara/doro
- Lo/la
- Kri/Kro/Kra/Kar/Kor
Now just combine them! Of course, remember to pace the syllables like words and occasionally make “compound words” with the sounds, so words have different lengths. End “words” with different sounds sometimes. Pause every few syllables—as if you were ending a sentence or using a comma. Emphasize a syllable every so often as you would in normal speech.
Shorondar makree alosha mahakrisho!
With this trick under your belt, you’ll shine like a star at every revival service forever!
Once you know how to speak in tongues, you can do it any time you want and in any context
As I found out myself, speaking in tongues also makes for a grand party trick. I once attended an office Christmas party that featured a hypnotist. He selected three of us, “put us under,” and had me pretend to be an alien queen speaking through an interpreter to a human reporter during an interview. I was told to speak in an “alien” language, which my interpreter would relay to the reporter.
I had no trouble whatsoever with that assignment. It was astonishing to realize how easy it was to summon back those old muscle memories, even of something I’d barely done years ago. And the interpreter had very little trouble working out what I was “telling” her.
The people at this party were all normies. Most were back-end software developers. They’d never heard anything like what I was doing.
That’s why speaking in tongues seems so incredibly impressive. If someone encounters it without knowing anything about it, it looks shocking. It’s liminal. In other words, it lacks normal contexts. Most people don’t have a mental category for it at all. As such, it feels bizarre and inexplicable. If a Christian explains it as supernatural, an unwary person might just believe it.
So the more people who know what it looks like and how it operates (and why!), the better. Don’t get it twisted: Speaking in tongues can be an intense experience, but it’s not supernatural and it’s definitely not real language.
In fact, it’s the opposite of language: It doesn’t communicate or symbolize anything to anybody. As miracles go, it’s beyond unimpressive.
NEXT UP: A Christmas special! It’s ALL ABOUT YOU, in Christianity. See you soon! <3
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Christian criticisms of Alpha Course (reveal a dealbreaker) - Roll to Disbelieve · 01/05/2026 at 4:00 AM
[…] to Gumbel’s very obvious coaching of Alpha Course attendees to speak in tongues. I saw the exact same coaching in my Pentecostal church many times. It’s easy to do and extremely effective. But one […]