God in the Life of the Alpha Course

'I feel an urgent desire to get the Christian message out to everyone,' the Revd Nicky Gumbel, the origintor of Alpha, told the Editor at the Alpha Training Day in Oxford in May. As a child his only encounter with the Christain faith had been at school chapel, which meant nothing to him. His father was a non-religious German Jew who had come to Britain in the 1930s and his mother was not a churchgoer. While Nicky was a student in Cambridge, David Macinnes (now Rector of St Aldate's, Oxford) came to lead a university mission. Partly through meeting him, 'the first Christian who impressed me as a person', Nicky started reading the New Testament. 'I knew that it was true and that I had to make a decision. I struggled with it because of the implications I thought it would have on my life. I thought I would put it off until my deathbed, and then I realised it was then or never and reluctantly I said 'yes' . At that moment I had an inner certainty that it was true and from then onwards I had a desire to communicate that to other people. I wanted to tell everybody.' He was called to the Bar and enjoyed practising law for ten years, but he sensed that he had to make a choice about his long-term future; what he really wanted to do with his life was to communicate the Christian faith with people. It was this desire that led him to ordination training at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford and then to Holy Trinity Brompton in London where he was to develop the Alpha courses. 'I've always been looking for ways to reach people,' he says. 'I stumbled across something that seems to be the most effective way I have come across by miles. But I feel we haven't started: two million people have done Alpha and there are six billion people in the world. There's a long way to go.' Nicky keeps his amazing enthusiasm for Alpha because he sees individual lives being changed all the time. 'If I could find a better way I'd drop Alpha tomorrow. I'm not interested in Alpha; I'm interested in people coming to know Christ.'

Nicky Gumbel, Alpha Co-ordinator, Holy Trinity Brompton