Three months ago, Sam Morris, 23, was a militant atheist. He associated himself with the teachings of Richard Dawkins and other fervent opponents of faith and religion. One evening, he went online and discovered that an Alpha course was about to start within easy access of his home, which brought him to our London church. He turned up thinking, ‘I’m going to take down a few irrational Christians here.’
But his encounter with the teachings and person of Jesus Christ was not what he expected.
On his questionnaire at the end of the course, he wrote, ‘I have gone from [being] someone with no faith to someone with an immense hope. To live in a state of non-truth to living in truth is, to me, the difference between being bound and complete freedom.’
Two weeks ago, he was baptised. He told me, “I’m free of my previous life. I was a slave to a lot of things. I was a slave to society, a slave to my peers … But now I’m free to live my life. I’m excited to see what God’s got in store for me.”
Sam is typical of young people throughout the world who are asking, “Is there more to life than this? What happens when I die? Is forgiveness possible?” There are few environments where the big questions of life can be discussed openly and informally. This is where the Alpha Course comes in.
Sam is one of 2,000 people who have done the Alpha Course at our local church in the last year. Seventy-five percent of the guests are between the ages of 18 and 35, the very ages at which so many are seeking spiritual truth.
More than 19 million people around the world have now attended the course in one of the 65,000 churches of all denominations — Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal and Orthodox — that are running Alpha in 169 countries around the world. Last year alone, two and a half million people attended Alpha, and the numbers are growing at 20 percent year on year.
The course is also becoming a route to faith for young people in the U.S., where the Catholic Bishops’ Conference has identified it as one of the best methodologies for their New Evangelization initiative.
The Alpha Course is a free 10-week course — one evening or morning a week — during which people from outside the church, mostly people who would not call themselves Christians, come together for a meal, a talk and then discussion in small groups.
For many years, I was an atheist. Neither of my parents went to church. My father was Jewish but agnostic, my mother a nonpracticing Anglican.
But when I went to university, I met people who had a real faith in Jesus. I began to research Christianity, pulling a dusty copy of the Bible down from my shelves and reading the New Testament. I was completely gripped by what I read. This encounter with Jesus Christ changed my life, and I tried many ways of presenting my newfound faith to my family and friends. But somehow, the heart of my discovery — a relationship with Jesus Christ — seemed difficult for them to understand.
This is why I was so excited to discover the Alpha Course. Having longed to find a way to share my faith with others, I was delighted to find that this small, introductory course to Christianity, running in the church where I was assistant pastor, was an accessible route to faith for young people outside the church.
Since sharing the course with other churches in the U.K., the U.S. and around the world, we have been astonished by how it has spread through so many different cultures. There are now more than 20,000 churches running the Alpha Course in India, and more than 500,000 people have been baptised in the last five years as a result.
Many commentators, particularly in the West, are quick to declare the Christian faith irrelevant to today’s young people. In fact, people have been saying this of Christianity for centuries. But young people today — like those before them — are looking for truth, meaning and purpose. And now, at the beginning of the 21st century, there are millions of young people like Sam Morris, who are making the greatest discovery of their lives — a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
Nicky Gumbel is vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton in London and pioneer of the Alpha Course.
