Heaven's ad-man

By MICHELE HEWITSON

In the long, bare hall the lights have been dimmed. The space is bathed in a golden glow from the flickering candles and the light emanating from the large video screen. On the screen are images of a man on a stage addressing groups of people sitting at tables over the debris of dinner.

They are a prosperous-looking lot, with their shiny, well-cut hair and their well-cut clothes. The man on the stage has their full attention; they nod in agreement, smile at the jokes. They have gathered to have dinner at the Holy Trinity Brompton in Knightsbridge, an Anglican church just up the road from that monument to conspicuous consumption, Harrods.

On a chilly Monday evening around 80 people are gathered in a church hall at the Greyfriars Presbyterian Church in Mt Eden. In this long, bare room they are watching this video of people watching the man whose name is Nicky Gumbel.

Gumbel, in his buttoned-down shirt, his rolled-up sleeves, is the Old Etonian and barrister-turned-cleric who is now proclaimed by many to be more powerful than the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Gumbel is the man who has repackaged Christianity and established it as a global brand, said the Guardian, "with all the skill of a Baby Gap marketeer."

Which has something to do with why these people are here tonight. Because the marketing of Alpha - a 10-week introductory course to Christianity - relies on a simple and effective gimmick: it invites people to dinner.

Over the past month, the New Zealand branch of Alpha has spent $100,000 on an advertising campaign aimed at enticing people into churches to break bread and hear Gumbel's message. There's no charge for the meal, but there is no such thing as a free dinner, says one of the Alpha organisers for Greyfriars, Mike Legg. "There's always a catch: this [catch] is a video." But, he says of Gumbel's video, "If you don't fall for him, you're not trying."

Even on video it is evident that Gumbel has charisma. That is, he has charisma in the modern, evangelical way. He is more personal motivator than thundering preacher. Well, he is Church of England.

His message is chatty, non-threatening. It is peppered with personal anecdote and references which appeal to the well-read and to popular culture. Tolstoy and Freddy Mercury get name checked. He talks about the World Cup soccer.

He tells you that he used to think that Christianity was boring. He tells a joke. He says it is a true story to demonstrate how the church has become something of an irrelevance. A hospital chaplain kept notes of responses he got to the question: would you like Holy Communion? "No thanks, I asked for cornflakes," answered one patient. "No thanks," replied another, "I've never been circumcised."

This is a way of letting people know that it's okay not to know the answers. In Alpha, the blurb goes, "no question is regarded as too simple or too hostile". Even Jesus, says Gumbel, didn't know all the answers.

W HAT are we doing here? That question is central to any discussion of religion - or to the mid-life crisis.

But more to the point is this: what are these 80-odd people doing in a church hall on a Monday night? Some are graduates of previous Alpha courses, some are Greyfriars folk, 28 of them are first-timers. Some of them will have seen the television ads which ran over a two-week period from mid-June, showing between 50 and 60 times on TVNZ, and on Prime.

There was one which showed a bloke sitting in a car in a car yard with a salesman. "What's this lever for?" the customer asks. "That's your self-esteem adjustment. And that one's to heighten resentment among your neighbours."

"How much does it cost?" asks the customer. "Well, that's the good news," comes the reply. "We've priced this baby so that none of your friends can afford one."

The catchline: "Are you looking for fulfilment in all the wrong places?"

Take a look around the Greyfriars carpark. Here are the carriages of the middle-classes: the Pajero, the VW Golf, the BMW. The Alpha ad appeals to those who have it all - the car, the house, the job - and yet are wondering why they feel something is missing from their lives. If this is the underlying appeal of the Alpha sales pitch, plenty are buying.

In Britain, more than a million people have now attended Alpha since the Rev Nicky Gumbel rewrote and revamped a staid old C of E Bible-study course in 1990. Alpha has now run courses for almost four million people worldwide; it has spread to 131 countries and is taught in 21,500 churches. In this country, an estimated 80,000 have signed up, and more than a thousand - around a third - of New Zealand churches are involved.

Alpha, with its copyrighted logo of a small man struggling to juggle a large question mark, is not just getting people back into churches, it's gaining a reputation for converting agnostics.

It is an interdenominational package deal. Churches who want to run the course must agree to run it in strict accord with the Alpha format - which means using the Alpha videos and Gumbel-authored books. All of which has made Holy Trinity Brompton a packet. The Guardian reported that when the power station which has subsequently been turned into the Tate Modern art gallery came on the market, Gumbel considered buying it to turn into an Alpha cathedral.

Here, as in Britain, regular churchgoers make up about a scant 8 per cent of the population. New Zealanders, says the Rev Derek Christensen, a theologian whose specialist topic is Christian ministry in the marketplace, have a fragile and complicated relationship with churchgoing.

According to Statistics New Zealand's latest census figures, 52.4 per cent of us call ourselves Christians (down from the 1996 census figure of 57.4 per cent) but we wouldn't be seen dead in a church until we are dead, thank you very much. Christensen says the image of the church for many New Zealanders is either that it is full of grey-haired people or, at the other end of the religious spectrum, filled with scary happy-clappy fundamentalists. The truth is somewhere in the middle, he observes.

A LPHA has been described as the Avon of religion. Or Amway, or Tupperware, says Christensen. The marketing's the same: get your brand established in the marketplace, entice people along to a venue, make them feel comfortable, give them something to eat and drink, entertain them. And then you pitch your product.

Which is all very well, but you might think that the big stumbling block would be getting people to come along to a church in the first place. Because Christensen is quite right, most of us have ideas about churches. For those of us who went to Sunday school, or were dragged along by our scrubbed-raw ears to church with the parents, the thought of a church hall is redolent of draughts and uncomfortable chairs and the smell of tea stewing in enormous teapots.

For those who have never been to church, there is no incentive and there is a fear of kooky cults (Christensen mentions the bad publicity generated by the recent, tragic story of the couple whose involvement with a movement on the far edges of the Seventh Day Adventists contributed to the death of their baby).

Chris Darnell at the Alpha headquarters in Wellington says that the emphasis on branding is to make it easier for people to investigate. "So that people don't say, 'Alpha what?"' He's heard of a situation where a man invited a friend to an Alpha dinner and he said, no thanks. Then he saw the Alpha signs - they're outside every participating church, which makes them very visible indeed - and "because he knew it wasn't just one little quirky church doing it, he thought it was obviously something accepted across the board."

Inside the Greyfriars hall the tables are covered with white linen and decorated with ivy and candles. When I told a friend I was going to dinner at a church, he said, irreverently, "What are they going to feed you? The Body of Christ?" I said I thought it was likely to be lasagne. Actually, it was roast pork and baked ham with baby carrots, roast spuds, honeyed kumara and peas. The main course came after an in-house stand-up comedian did a turn as Mr Winstone, the leader of the NZ Second-to-Last Party, and before the Gumbel video. Post-vid is the pud: chocolate profiterole and icecream. Only one woman, with a scratchy child, left before pudding.

At my table the talk is of how the Labour Party are communists, how one woman has a National Party candidate's sign outside her house because "someone has to", about the Treaty of Waitangi. Somebody pipes up to say that you shouldn't talk about politics or sex at the dinner table.

Over at Jean Marie and Robert's table (they prefer first names only) there is some discussion of what being a Christian means. Robert has told me that he considers himself a Christian. His wife, Jean Marie, despite having been brought up a Catholic, says she is a humanist. They are here tonight as guests of Jean Marie's good friend Cathy who is a member of the Greyfriars congregation.

They did a deal. Jean Marie said she and Robert would come to an Alpha dinner if Cathy went to a gym. When Robert said, "What have you done?" Jean Marie said, "Oh, safe as houses, she won't take me up. She's never seen a gym."

The couple are in their mid and late 30s. They have been discussing, in a casual sort of "mid-life crisis" way, things spiritual. But they have really come as a courtesy of friendship, to Cathy and her faith.

Alpha is deliberately soft-sell. If you leave your name and contact details on the door tonight, sign up for the 10-week course and decide not to return, no one will call you or turn up on your doorstep or send flyers to your letterbox. If you do decide to return, you will be fed and divided into small groups with course leaders guiding discussions on set topics such as "Who is Jesus?" and "How can I resist evil?"

At the core of the course is The Weekend. A retreat where course participants are introduced to the Holy Spirit and where they play games of the kind found on team-building exercises.

If it all sounds like innocent fun, Alpha does have its critics. Its stance on homosexuality, for example, has liberal Christians worried. A British journalist who attended the course reported that when the topic came up, Gumbel's response was that "the Bible makes it very clear that sex outside marriage, including homosexual sex, is a sin." The Bible, he added, made it clear that gay people need to be healed. Tom Pearson, who teaches Alpha at the Kohimarama Presbyterian Church, says that what Alpha has to say about homosexuality, and divorce, is that "basically you shouldn't be involved in those sorts of things".

T HE Rev Ian Lawton, vicar of St Matthew-in-the-City, says he has real concerns. He has had to teach Alpha, when he assisted at a Sydney church. He says he adapted the course then, and would not teach it now.

"I'm quite worried about Alpha taking a hold in the Anglican church. Basically, the point of Alpha is to convert people to Christianity ... And the problem is that it denies culture; it stifles diversity. If you need to be converted to Christianity, then your own religion - if you have one - is obviously not good enough. It becomes a territorial thing.

"I think there's a real problem with this idea that people need to be converted to religion." Which seems a bit peculiar coming from a vicar. Isn't converting people the job of the church? Lawton doesn't think so: "I think the job of the church is to encourage people to their own form of spirituality consistent with whatever culture and life they live - not to give them a particular brand of Christianity."

Lawton also raises the issue of stickability: does Alpha last? Alpha has been in New Zealand for eight years; how many of those 80,000 who have done the course have continued as practising Christians is a question that proves impossible to answer. Alpha, in keeping with its "no follow-up" policy, doesn't have the figures. There is an anecdote: that at the Windsor Park Baptist Church on the North Shore an estimated 20 per cent of the congregation came to the church through Alpha.

At every introductory dinner there are testimonies from recent graduates. Anne Friebel, a theology major and former hospital chaplain who says, rather oddly, that before Alpha she was not a Christian, is at the Greyfriars evening. "The word of God is awesome," she says. Through Alpha she has achieved a personal relationship which broke through "all my resistance, all those years not knowing what a Christian was and perhaps not wanting to know".

Jean Marie and Robert have not signed up for the course. They say they had a good night. They liked the environment - "warm and friendly," says Robert. "It was a very nice dinner and I very much appreciated that there was no high-pressure sales."

He says he's not "hard set against it but I don't have a strong desire to go and do it."

Twelve of the 28 guests at Greyfriars sign up tonight. Some of them will return and up to 20 per cent, by some estimates, will drop out over The Weekend. A woman from Windsor Park Baptist whom I'd spoken to calls back worried that the emphasis will be on numbers - because, she says, it's not.

Oh, yes it is. Alpha itself makes a very big deal of its numbers. And in a 2001 piece written for www.poppolitics.com, Guy Redden at the University of Queensland does his sums and works out that if Alpha's exponential growth continues, "all inhabitants of our planet could be expected to have taken it within 12 years".

He suspects it won't. Because, he says, its decline is likely to "have more to do with product cycles and market saturation than the faith of humankind"