Jon Ronson is a deeply trustworthy journalist and documentary maker. His Secret Rulers Of The World is still one of the finest short series Guider and I have ever seen.
At the start of a new Channel 4 series on faith in the contemporary world, called Revelations, he looks at how the Alpha course plays out in an evangelical church in Oxford in a film called How To Find God.
Ronson starts out with a lovely gentle introduction, drawing out the way in which in a very relaxed setting, there is a a deep and evolved and structured process that Alpha invites people into. This is almost a service to the missional church because Ronson draws the two strands together: the live participation of the candidates over ten weeks and the way in which Alpha runs.
Then half way in there is a diversion, the diversion that prompts me to not use Alpha in my church. Ronson shows the footage of the so called “Toronto blessing“. Alpha puts a heavy emphasis on the spiritual gift of tongues that we’ve always felt was a bit over the top. Placing the spiritual gifts front and central in a presentation of Christianity runs against the grain of St. Paul’s own teaching. Such extraordinary manifestations of God do happen. But making them central or a necessity is upside down.
You can imagine how uncomfortable I was watching the scene where non-Christians were being asked to call for the gift of tongues. Ronson’s gentle touch as a film-maker is beautifully balanced; respecting these charismatic Christians but keeping the critical distance. A Ford GT40 sports car revs up just when the atmosphere in the room is getting too charged.
Ronson is much more fair minded than I am. He says he appreciates the gamble that the Alpha folk have made in placing tongues so centrally in the midst of their presentation. In his summation he editorialises of Alpha that it is a lovely thing that “these nice people share their lives and only put the pressure on once and even then its engagingly flaky” is about as balanced a conclusion as I have ever seen in a television documentary about Christianity.
Your Correspondent, Not mathematically nice
i thinks this review is pretty devastating review (in my view)….
http://alphacoursereview.wordpress.com/
Alpha is shockingly manipulative from start to finish
Have you ever gone to Alpha QMOnkey?
you’re hoping for a nope aren’t you
afraid its a yep. I even used to help my da print out the material for our church groups!
Its like all those things though, seemed absolutly fine at the time… i was a leader in a church boys group and a kids club and at the time it seemed absolutly fine and great to round up the kids, show them a great time then hit them with the ‘talk’ at the end to see if we could get them ’saved’ in retrospect i shudder. I’d shy from using the word ‘abusive’ but i can see why others might use it.
I asked because you described it as “shockingly manipulative” which is quite damning, and I have never been to one myself. We also made the decision in my church not to use it as we were uncomfortable with some of the material.
In what way is it shockingly manipulative from your experience of, presumably, leading it?
(must be honest, i never ‘led’ it… just attended it to see… in fact if i remember there were no real real genuine non-christians on it the time i did it, just people who were ’struggling’ (inc me i guess))
Other than attending i’ve known lost of people who’ve done it and read quite a lot about it, and i saw this C4 program Zoom is talking about, although weirdly it was on last night AFTER i read this post, does zoom get previews of TV shows now!!
i’m trying to be a bit less rude and not hijack ZT’s blog by engagining other people. so i’ll not go into the why i think its “shockingly manipulative”.
Interesting and fair-minded documentary!
When you step back and watch it all, the tongues stuff does feel a bit out of place – I’m not sure I’d be giving it such a place, even as a charismatic, as Alpha does. Not entirely sure how use of tongues in such a context squares with a bit of 1 Corinthians 14…
Hey Kevin. Can you expand any further on the phrase “placing the spiritual gifts front and centre in a presentation of Christianity runs against the grain of St. Paul’s own teaching”? Surely this IS part of Paul’s teaching and is only emphasised in one week of Alpha. Do you think that Presbyterians have the right (if any!) emphasis on Spiritual gifts?
I thought the documentary made the whole concept of Alpha to be very unfairly pernicious. Inserting the Toronto blessing clips were unnecessary and unhelpful because they aren’t directly anything to do with Alpha. Surely there is a more balanced but still accurate presentation of the gospel that includes Spiritual gifts. I am not a charismaniac but I don’t think you can preach the gospel without them.
Hey Peter,
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Let me try and meet the challenge. My dear friend Andrew Smith emailed me straight after this post to call me to book for the same thing but he’s a crazy Charismatic so I just arrogantly discarded his views and retreated to my copy of Calvin’s Institutes.
If we are running an evangelistic course, I think we need to present “mere Christianity”. The core creedal stuff. The essentials. The non-negotiables. The “extraordinary” gifts of the Holy Spirit are certainly negotiable. Paul says so. Prophecy and tongues and so on are not given to everyone. And where they are shared, they are to be used in a certain way.
With serious respect to Alpha, I do disagree with the central role that these gifts have. It would be similar for me to Fisherwick Presbyterian or some prominent PCI course releasing a global evangelism project where on the fourth week we teach people who to put together a three point sermon. Some of us have that gift, and hey! we think its deadly when that gift is used well, but its hardly central to people catching on to the whole Triune grace thing.
I am not in anyway (anymore for I have repented!) hostile to charismatic and pentecostal churches and am eagerly awaiting the Spirit blessing me someday with such gifts (look how far I’ve come!) so please don’t hear me slate HTB or Alpha or charismata generally. But I still think that the focus on those gifts (at the expense of others even!) in Alpha is a problem (for us in MCC- we’re not looking for an Alpha re-write!)
I certainly didn’t find it pernicious. I think Ronson was trying to root the charismata down in a context for people outside the church and sadly, Toronto and its ilk is the most significant mass of land to drop anchor on in recent history. Countless brilliant little Vineyard churches wouldn’t have helped people understand this “weird” part of Christianity.
Out of interest Zoom, is it ever possible that when a Christian says he is experiencing the holy spirit, that he is in fact deluded through wishful thinking or ‘group think’? how come i’m a gazillion times more likely to be ‘filled with the spirit’ in a group of people who are ‘up for it’ than in a PCI church?
how do you go about deciding what is what? If Peter says the holy spirit came to him and over powered him and gave him a real sense of Christ, making him lie on the ground and kick and shout (or whatever) do you always think – lovely, i wish god would do that to me too?
If i lie on my back and mumble and shout, and say its the ghost of Elvis doing it, you might slap me across the cheeks and help me to snap out of it…. if i say its the holy spirit you might take me more seriously. why?
Are christians EVER deluded about mystical/spiritual goings-on? and if so how do you decide what is delusion and what’s not?
I think there is a whole load of “Holy Spirit” events that are some kind of delusion, illusion or group effect Q, of course.
Do you ever think that someone could have an encounter with the Holy Spirit or in other terms heard the prompting of the Triune God but deluded themselves into believing it was nothing but a hormonal imbalance that day or the mis-firing of neurons? If so, how could one discern what is delusion and what is not?
good question. maybe i have, or maybe when i fancy a coca-cola thats actualy the god of tom cruise leading me to drink it, and i miss interpret it as just human/material thirst. maybe (but unlikely)
or maybe we’re all living in a matrix/truman type unreal-reality anyway.
do you think its possible that you, in your head have been hearing the voice of Allah or Ra calling to you, and you have deluded yourself into thinking that its the voice of the deity which happens to be be most believed in your society and hemisphere?
As long as you concede the point that it is evident that ‘at very least’ some christians are deluded when they think jesus is hearing/speaking/guiding them… then that’s all i was really asking.
And as usual, you ask the Christians questions but don’t consider how you yourself must also answer them…
not sure that’s fair comment, but anyhoo… we’ve agreed on something. Christians sometimes think that their god is listening/speaking/acting when in fact he is not. Sometimes its extreme self/group delusion when they believe that they have been told the future or that their physicaallity is being controlled and shaken by a spiritual force or simply that god has ‘answered’ a prayer though analysis of a change in day to day circumstance. we agree, don’t we, that this is at least ’sometimes’ the case.
(way off topic, but did you see the Robespierre drama/documentary on BBC2 at the weekend? i was gonna do a post but i feared that you’d do a better one!
)
I missed the drama I am afraid.
shame. I ask because Zizek was one of the talking heads, in a kind of head-to-head battle of ideas with Scharma. Sometimes im not sure whether Zizek is taking the mick! some of his comments defending ‘the terror’ were outrageous, though slightly brilliant. I must admit i’m a fan… Marxist or not
Thanks for reply. I agree with you that an evangelistic course should cover the core creedal stuff. But “I believe in the Holy Spirit” IS also part of the earliest creeds. I know you do, so then surely describing this to any ’seeker’ as part of a presentation of Christianity is very important.
But you’re probably right – this is stuff which should be part of teaching for new believers (rather than pre-believers) – and that’s where Alpha (at least in the documentary) messed up. The ‘agnostics’ were not yet ‘filled with the holy spirit’/’saved’ so attempting tongues should have been out of the question.
And I suppose tongues (which I don’t have either and struggle with understanding) is a bit weird for non Christians you’re trying not to put off Christianity. But what about healing, miracles, prophecy, knowledge, etc. Jesus and the apostles were filled with the holy spirit and used these gifts. Why not celebrate these?
I suppose what I’m saying is that they appear to be part of the biblical Christian life and yet not part of the modern Presbyterian Christian life (where I also grew up – don’t take it personally). If we’re not living these gifts either then yes, there is no point in teaching them up front. But being filled with the spirit it should be part of what we’re striving for and teaching to believers at least.
And since you mentioned Calvin, isn’t it the HS who does all the hard work of convicting us and bringing us to God, not the evangelical course?!