February 23, 2003

Ian Lawton

Epiphany 7     Mark 2:1-12

The Alpha course, with its 50-minute lectures, neat didactic style and fluffy filler jokes is un-Anglican in my book. I grew up an Anglican. I have Anglican blood, whatever colour that is. I cut my teeth on the most tedious of Prayer Books, the Australian Prayer Book of the 1970's. I counted the pages of the hymn book rather than listen to the sermons. I played number games with the hymn boards rather than sing the dirges. I found more joy in tricking the priest into giving me communion twice than receiving the sacrament.

Yet here I am an Anglican priest of ten years, and going strong. The most common question I field these days, asked with a hint of amazement, is why I am in the church and what led me there? After all, they say, 'you don't look like a vicar!' I am an Anglican priest because of ten minute sermons. I choose a worship tradition that values symbol and silence alongside word and teaching.

I choose a tradition which values diversity. I am inspired by Anglican Bishops around the world who teach non theistic faith, by Anglican Bishops around the world who are social justice activists, by Anglican Bishops around the world who fight to open the church to people of all sexuality and gender and difference, who engage in inter-faith connections. These are the champions who excite the possibilities for my Anglican future.

I follow my father into an Anglican future, as he too is a hero. He too has stood against fundamentalism, for women in leadership, for social justice, for people on streets and all within a tradition of sacrament and corporate prayer. This seems worth pursuing. The beauty of symbols is the lack of need to define and confine their meanings. Symbols are what they are experienced as. They are nothing more and nothing less.

The strength of the liturgy is the interconnection of the personal and the corporate, the individual and the social, the now and not yet. The confidence of the liturgy is the unselfconscious breath of the past which permeates all that happens without restraining its future.

The wonder of Anglican ideology (if there is any such generalisation) is the refusal of dualism as an assumption. Nominalism is alive and well, allowing attenders to be anonymous. There are no Christians and non-Christians. So you see the fit is a good one. Not so for Alpha however!

Alpha is primed as an attempt to offer meaning to life. It suggests that it can offer reality in a confused world, life in a dark place. This all leads to the conclusion that wherever you are before you arrive at the course it is unfulfilling and Alpha has a better way to live. I find in Alpha no mention of symbol and no room for silence. Alpha fails to interact with the breadth of Christian scholarship. It offers only a theistic God who hears the prayers of the righteous, and works primarily through the supernatural. I see nothing in Alpha of the radical Jesus social movement, no attempt to follow the lead to inclusiveness. On the contrary I see a regressive and exclusive view of women, gay and lesbian people, divorcees, and people of different faiths.

I hear no mention of racism or poverty or any of the great social issues of our day. I sense little interest in empowering people of spirit for lives of growth. Rather I sense a hocus-pocus style spirituality where those who have the most pious experience are the most spiritual. The aim in Alpha is life after death, and so the claim to offer meaning to life is misleading.

There is in Alpha too much talk about the evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus, and too little about the need for people to lose, even die, in order to grow and progress. There is too much kudos given to certainty, and not enough value given to questions. The Bible is seen to be more a closed book of divine commands than a history of social movements and an attempt to live with integrity in an ancient world.

In Alpha, prayer is individualistic, magical and offensive in its depiction of God as prejudiced. In Alpha the Holy Spirit is the height of powerlessness and supernatural fatalism. There is too much emphasis on defining evil as external and cosmic, and too little on the evil of human oppression and the human tendency to stagnate. Alpha encourages an offensive and insensitive attitude towards evangelism and an irresponsible view of healing. Its view of church is more at home in the self styled Pentecostal than in the Anglican Church in which it arose. Finally the last chapter is a call to effectively "let go and let God". Within the theistic framework of Alpha, this seems to present a limited sense of human responsibility and freedom.

Alpha lacks the personally empowering, socially challenging, life affirming Gospel emphasis. It is, in my view, a step backwards in time and will not serve the Anglican Church in moving forward with courage. Nor will it offer individuals the long lasting tools of personal growth. It will not address the great social questions of our day, and finally it will not even get close to providing meaning to life.