Why am I here?

Nicky Gumbel, newly retired from leading Holy Trinity Brompton, talks about the London home of Alpha.

Elim launched its second national Alpha course last month. Tell us about your experience of running Alpha recently.
Pippa and I are running our 96th consecutive Alpha small group at the moment, and we haven’t missed a course for 32 years – it’s such fun.

It’s wonderful to be back running Alpha in person again – I love going around our group and hearing story after story of people whose lives are being changed by the Holy Spirit.

Being able to physically lay your hand on someone and pray, “Come, Holy Spirit” is an amazing privilege too.

That said, the Holy Spirit isn’t confused by Zoom, and we’ve enjoyed seeing how well Alpha works online, too – six of the courses we’ve run have been online.

We’ve found that people are more open, the course is more accessible to many more people, and they don’t have to overcome the barrier of walking into a church or someone’s home.

We’ve had some amazing testimonies, conversations, stories and friendships in our online courses.

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Can you give us an example of how you’ve seen the Holy Spirit move during an Alpha course?
Last night, people were sharing their experiences of the Holy Spirit in our small group.

The first guy who spoke was an atheist but had just become a Christian, and he was absolutely on fire.

He was saying he had just been offered a job but had turned it down because he wanted to be able to go to church instead.

He’s telling his friends about his faith and inviting people he thinks might come on the next course. You can see how God brought him on Alpha.

His mother died recently, and he is grieving. He had been to her grave, and while he was there, he saw a credit card on the ground.

He picked it up and noticed it belonged to someone he’d been good friends with at school but hadn’t seen for 25 years.

So, he contacted the guy, and it turns out he’d been at the graveyard too because his younger brother had died, so they were both grieving.

His friend said, “You’ve got to come to Alpha” and brought him along.

Last night, he was saying he could see it wasn’t a coincidence that he picked up that card. It was God’s hand.

It’s an amazing story.

Elim’s national Alpha course is being run in collaboration with Alpha. What’s your take on that, and would you like to see more partnerships like this?
We love Elim. Pentecostal churches are so key to the future of the church in this country – I wish we had a closer relationship with them, and that’s something we’re trying to encourage.

We need the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, so we must learn from Elim and the Pentecostal church because for the church to thrive, we need God the Father and Jesus the Son, but we need the Holy Spirit too.

You retired as vicar of HTB in July. What does the future hold for you and Alpha?
One reason I’m changing my role is because I want to focus on the 2033 vision and Alpha’s contribution to that.

I’m sure you have 17 April 2033 in your diary.

That date is Easter Sunday and the 2,000th anniversary of the resurrection and the Great Commission – to go and make disciples of all nations – shortly afterwards.

That’s what I want to focus on for the next ten years: how do we get the gospel out to all nations by the 2,000th anniversary of the resurrection?

We’re working on making Alpha available to everyone on the planet by then and are making a new set of videos.

It’s part of a bigger collaboration: Bible translators are working to get the New Testament into every language – so every language will have 25 chapters of the New Testament by 2033.

Rick Warren is aiming to have a Bible, a believer and a body of Christ in every people group across the world by then too.

As far as the future of Alpha itself is concerned, I think there are huge opportunities for Youth Alpha.

Archie Coates, who has taken over as vicar at HTB, is planning a big Youth Alpha for September and they’re hoping to have 500 people on that.

A third film series has been made to keep it up to date with youth culture, which changes so fast. Dan Blythe is heading up Youth Alpha globally and is doing a fantastic job.

On a different note, church planting is a priority for Elim. What’s been your experience of this with HTB? How have you managed to plant successful churches and raise up strong leadership teams?
There’s a great quote from Peter Wagner that says church planting is the single most effective evangelistic methodology under heaven.

I believe every church needs a big front door and a big back door.

For us, the front door is Alpha – we run it three times a year and constantly have new people coming into the church through it – and our back door is church planting.

We have 127 church plants and are constantly sending leaders out to them.

If you only have a front door, the church just gets bigger, fatter, older and more unhealthy, so planting churches makes us healthy because we’ve got people coming in and going out.

When people move to lead church plants, you then need to raise up new leaders, which gives them an opportunity to step up and grow.

Our vision statement is to play our part in the evangelisation of the nation, the revitalisation of the church and the transformation of society.

Part of that involves having a lively church within striking distance of everyone, which is why planting is so important.

These new churches could be Elim, New Frontiers or the Church of England, but everybody needs a lively church nearby.

The more Elim plants the better because there’ll be more lively churches near more people.

What is the most significant issue facing the church at the moment?
There are so many, but one I’m particularly focused on is unity or reconciliation.

The church has a terrible history with its involvement in the slave trade and its rejection of the churches that were formed as a result of the Windrush generation.

I feel like we’ve been in exile for the past 70 years because of this rejection, injustice and racism.

In a way it was a rejection of the Holy Spirit too, because the Windrush generation were Spirit-filled people who would have brought so much life to the church here.

Instead, they were rejected by the denominations, and this was a rejection of the Pentecostal movement to some extent too.

That has terrible consequences. Jesus had very strong words for people who didn’t have a good attitude towards the Holy Spirit.

I think if the churches in this country really come together in collaboration, partnership and unity it will be as Jesus prayed; that we will be one in order that the world will believe.

That’s why things like Elim’s partnership with Alpha are so important.

The greatest need is for the nation to believe and turn back to God, but that will only happen if the church comes together again, and we put right some of these historic injustices.

Have you and Pippa got any fun plans for your retirement?
We’ve got so many. We have nine grandchildren, and we’d love to spend more time with them.

Our second son is going to be the vicar of Christ Church in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil so we want to work with Alpha in Latin America too and we hope to spend some time over there.

We also want to see all the Alpha offices around the world.

One of our biggest changes will be no longer attending HTB on Sundays – I’ve been in leadership there since 1976 and in the parish for 67 years so it will be very strange.

We’re going to join one of our churches in Clapham where we’ll be living, but we won’t be there much because we’ll be visiting HTB plants around the country.

I’m excited to see them and now we’ll have the freedom to do that. It’ll be so exciting to see what’s going on.

It will be great to have time to do all that, but by the look of the diary I don’t think we’ll have much spare time.

Filming the new Alpha series is going to take three months and we’ll be doing ten international trips during this time too.

It’s a big commitment, but it will be fun.

Ministry is fun, and Jesus is fun to be around – he turned water into wine after all.

We love ministry and we’re very blessed.

Nicky Gumble speaks to Mark Greenwood about Alpha Online

As part of recent digital transformation, Alpha has developed an online version of its course as a free and easy-to-use tool to help engage people in local communities with the gospel. Alpha Online has created a space for people to connect with others online to watch a series of high-quality video episodes and explore the Christian faith together, utilising online discussion groups.

After running over 90 in-person Alpha courses and several online, Nicky Gumbel, who pioneered Alpha, has been absolutely astonished by how much more accessible Alpha Online is. Here is their conversation.