I agree that the success of Alpha poses a challenge to the emergent conversation – the point is very well made. But I am still left with a couple of questions.

First, while the emerging church is no doubt driven largely by a ‘small disillusioned group of reactive intellectuals’, it seems to me that the likelihood remains in principle that a spiritual journey that begins with the blessed certainties of the Alpha course will sooner or later enter the same dark forests of disillusionment. Whether this equates with a growth towards maturity is another matter, but the way things are currently structured, there is an inevitable developmental trajectory in play here. We might even go so far as to consider whether the current angst of the emerging church is not directly a reaction to the Alpha course.

Secondly, it is not just the propositional nature of the Alpha course that creates problems. The real issues, I think, are theological. Mainstream biblical studies – even mainstream evangelical biblical studies – have moved along way beyond the apologetic simplicities of the Alpha course. It is surely time that the church faced up to this huge discrepancy and began to develop a grassroots theology that is not so at odds with prevailing readings of scripture. The Alpha course suffers from the fundamental flaw of much popular theologizing – it abstracts a quasi-mythical narrative of personal salvation from the biblical text and then reorganizes everything else around it. The danger is that the Alpha is trading short-term success for long-term intellectual integrity.

And how many members of HTB does it take to change a light bulb?