Alpha Course has been around for decades. So have criticisms of it from every single corner of Christianity. Today, let me show you some of those criticisms—and what they mean for Christianity itself.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 1/2/2026. No voicecast today, sorry! My voice is doing poorly these past few days. Also: Here’s the Answering Alpha tag for the entire series.)
Situation Report: Alpha Course DENIED
Alpha Course is a decades-old evangelism-based teaching/video series meant to get people interested in adopting Christianity. Originally just an onboarding program for new church recruits, it got a major glow-up in the 1990s courtesy of Nicky Gumbel, who is now the series’ main face and leader. (It got another in the early 2000s to tone down the speaking-in-tongues stuff.)
These days, it’s an international phenomenon with thousands of churches participating worldwide. One person estimates that more than 25 million people have attended Alpha Course classes.
In theory at least, the series is supposed to be ecumenical. That means that any church in any flavor of Christianity should be able to show it to prospective new recruits without having to explain away anything in it. However, its DNA as a hard-right evangelical-fundamentalist fusion mix (what I call “fundagelical”) bleeds through at the most inopportune times—and the series’ critics have noticed this bleed-through many times.
Alpha Course wears its ecumenical façade very awkwardly. It wouldn’t be the international explosion that it is without it, and yet its true colors can be easily discerned underneath that window-dressing.
As a result, Christian criticisms of the series tend to fall along partisan lines. As historian Andrew Atherstone has noted, pretty much every type of Christian has something critical to say about it.
Fundagelicals are mad that the series doesn’t talk at all about sin and Hell. (They’ve always been leery of ecumenical Christians anyway, as well.) Mainline Christians don’t like that it focuses so hard on fundagelical beliefs and practices like speaking in tongues. Catholics disapprove mightily of the series’ teachings about sacraments and dislike that it doesn’t mention transubstantiation.
Today, let me show you the Christian criticisms of the evangelism series that tries to be everything to everybody—and somehow fails to be anything to anyone at all.
Catholic criticism of Alpha Course
In Christianity, a “sacrament” is a formal ritual done at particular times. Taking Communion, for example, is a sacrament. So is baptism. These are about the only two sacraments discussed in Alpha Course. But some flavors of the religion include many more. In Catholicism, they have seven: Baptism, Confirmation, Communion (which they call Eucharist), Confession, Anointing of the Sick, Holy Orders (for men becoming ministers), and Matrimony.
Moreover, their version of Communion isn’t really like that of Protestants. For Catholics, the Eucharist is a divine transformation of a flour wafer and sip of wine into the body and blood of Jesus. This transformation is not metaphorical, and it’s not practiced as an honoring of Jesus’ sacrifice. It is literally and completely and in every single way his body and blood. (Except it’s not, except it totally is. It’s a mystery, which means shut up and go into “duh” mode now please.)
Transubstantiation is one of the goofiest teachings of Catholicism out there, and I say that having been raised Catholic. But for the hardliners it’s not negotiable. As one of them wrote regarding 1 Corinthians 11: 23-29:
[T]he only possible meaning is that the bread and wine at the consecration become Christ’s actual body and blood. [. . .] In fact Christ was not merely saying that the bread was his body; he was decreeing that it should be so and that it is so.
Yes. That’s the only “possible” meaning. You heard him.
But you sure won’t see transubstantiation mentioned in Alpha Course!
These aren’t the only criticisms Catholics have about Alpha Course. Though Nicky Gumbel makes sure to include some Catholic voices in his program, Catholics still notice easily that it’s a Protestant message with a little Catholicism tacked on. They also notice that the series doesn’t use any Catholic-approved translations of the Bible! The program has a more Catholic version, Alpha for Catholics, but it’s still quite simplistic.
Why it’d be a dealbreaker: All other types of Christians would immediately nope out of any Catholic-approved treatment of sacraments and transubstantiation. These are no-fly zones for everyone but Catholics.
Protestant criticism of Alpha Course usually involves its unsatisfactory level of Jesusing
Back in 1997, Martyn Percy said Alpha Course was “Join-the-Dots Christianity.” He felt it was overly pragmatic and treated the Bible as “a kind of instruction manual or guide book.” And he didn’t really like the idea of churches existing to “train and equip” members.
Christians who aren’t Catholic or evangelical—in other words, mainline Protestants—object to its overtly evangelical doctrinal biases: “a largely innerrant Bible, attenuation of a homely and powerful Holy Spirit, and expression of an Evangelical atonement theory.” Over at the old Ship of Fools forum, the largely-mainline members had the same issues with it.
(BTW, I loved this bit from the forum: “[M]y mother was chastised during one session for being remarried. Told she would be forgiven by God if she said sorry to Him. Her response was ‘but I’m not sorry’. It didn’t go down well.”)
Evangelicals, of course, have tons of criticisms. Besides being upset about Alpha Course’s lack of hellfire and damnation preaching, they always notice that it also fails to define “sin” their way. As one of them notes, prospective Christians need to be very aware of just how much Yahweh hates and is disgusted by humans for their sinfulness. Another accuses Alpha Course of getting everything about Christianity wrong, then declares that anyone converting as a result of it isn’t really converted at all—and in fact is going to Hell as a result.
But there’s one aspect of Alpha Course that deserves its very own section in this overall topic of criticism.
Oh, those Toronto Blessing practices
Plenty of Christians criticize the series’ laser focus on “the infilling of the Holy Spirit.” Alpha Course just loves those Pentecostal-style manifestations. These include barking, growling, snorting like a pig, moaning, uncontrollable laughter, dancing around, collapsing in a daze, hopping, and speaking in fake, baby-babbled “languages.” These manifestations burst into evangelicalism courtesy of the The Toronto Blessing (TTB), which began in 1994 and lasted for many years.
Nowadays, Alpha Course presents the infilling of the Holy Spirit as a vaguely-described but euphoric moment with maybe speaking in tongues happening. In its 1990s glow-up, though, Alpha Course really wanted everyone to speak in tongues, and that really freaked out a lot of evangelicals. The fusion between them and fundamentalists hadn’t finished yet, so this particular practice was still a bridge too far for many. Even now, according to one 2023 Reddit post, the Alpha Weekend retreats focus heavily on asking Yahweh to grant them “this gift.”
It was so far, in fact, that in 1996 an Anglican woman walked out of her church over Alpha Course teachings. In 1996, Angie Golding attended an Anglican church in England. They denied her confirmation as a Christian because she refused to attend Alpha Course. She was so offended at the idea that she left, took a dozen or so church members with her, and started up her own home church. (No word on what happened afterward. After her dramatic walkout, she and her new home church dropped completely off the map.)
One 1997 criticism draws attention 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 doesn’t normally see the coaches themselves so explicitly describing their technique!
Another site, Deception in the Church, has some strong words for Alpha Course. I suspect that page was written in the late 1990s:
The wooing of people using the gospel message, only to later enslave them in ritualism, works salvation, and occult manifestations is one of the great deceptions of our time.
Uh oh! Sounds serious!
The infighting that marks Christianity more effectively than any set of beliefs or practices
As product lines go, Alpha Course has survived by sanding off as many offensive corners as it can of its official teachings. It tries to be everything to everybody, and though this has led to enormous success overall, it’s annoyed a whole lot of Christians.
Modern Christianity can’t resolve its differences. One Christian’s ritualism is another’s orthopraxy. One callout of “works salvation” heresy is another’s “cheap grace.” And one’s “occult manifestations” are another’s divine miracles.
For every single doctrine, devotion, or practice in Christianity, there are others completely contradicting them. Even doctrines that Christians consider utterly essential to their religion, like the Trinity, have contradicting, competing doctrines in other flavors of it, like Oneness Theology.
And every single one of these Christians has good reasons for embracing their own particular package of beliefs. Not one of them can successfully persuade any others that they’re wrong, either, at least without relying on personal charisma and emotional manipulation.
All these different Christians can’t all be right.
But they can all be wrong.
This constant bickering is a dealbreaker
Christian infighting has always been a serious problem for Christianity. From the very start, Christians fought like cats in sacks about every single doctrine in the new religion. Nothing has changed since those earliest days, either. They still fight about absolutely everything.
Within the Alpha Course sphere, the series has to play it safe by trying to make everyone as happy as possible—or at least making everyone the same level of unhappy. They’ll never make everyone happy, after all. There doesn’t exist any way to do that and still remain successful.
So I don’t expect criticisms of Alpha Course to end anytime soon.
It’s not just fun for Christians to argue, of course. This constant warfare has become a tribe-approved, street-legal substitute for doing all that boring shit Jesus actually ordered them to do: feeding the hungry, comforting the bereaved, clothing the naked, giving away everything they own to the poor, and all that.
Their savior clearly didn’t care even a little bit about building a coherent religion with clearly-communicated doctrines and a theology that makes sense. Any Christian who thinks any such thing exists is instantly marked as someone who doesn’t understand the source material or their own religion’s history at all.
In that sense, at least, Alpha Course perfectly embodies Christianity.
NEXT UP: The wild world of Christian prophecy. See you soon! <3
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