Lost at Sea (4 page)

A Message from God

I
t’s a Wednesday evening in early summer, and you’d think some high-society soirée was taking place in Knightsbridge, West London, on beautiful lawns set back from the Brompton Road. Porsches and Aston Martins are parked up and down the street, and attractive young people, some famous, in casual wear and summer dresses are wandering up a tree-lined drive. But this is no soirée.

We are agnostics. We are entering a church—the Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB)—to sign up for the Alpha Course, led by Nicky Gumbel. He is over there, welcoming agnostics; he’s good-looking, tall and slim. It sounds impossible, but apparently Gumbel’s course, consisting of ten Wednesday evenings, routinely transforms hardened unbelievers, the entrenched faithless, into confirmed Christians. There will be after-dinner talks from Gumbel, and then we will split into small groups to discuss the meaning of life, etc. There will be a weekend away in Kidderminster. And that’s it. Salvation will occur within these parameters. I cannot imagine how it can work.

But many thousands of agnostics have found God through Nicky Gumbel. To name one: Jonathan Aitken, the former Conservative cabinet minister imprisoned for seven months in 1999 for perjury against the
Guardian
newspaper. “I am a man of unclean lips,” he told the Catholic newspaper the
Tablet
, “but I went on an Alpha Course at Holy Trinity Brompton, and found great inspiration from its fellowship and the teachings on the Holy Spirit.” The
Tablet
added, “He has done Alpha not once but three times, graduating from a humble student to a helper who pours coffee.”

Nicky Gumbel’s supporters say that within Church of England circles he is now more influential than the Archbishop of Canterbury; they claim that Gumbel is saving the Church. Other people say some quite horrifying things about him. I was told it is almost impossible to get an interview with him. His diary was full for three years. His people were apologetic. They said that the only way to really get to know Nicky, to understand how he does it, was to enroll in Alpha.

“Hi!” says a woman wearing a name tag. “You’re . . . ?”

“Jon Ronson.”

“Jon. Let’s see. Great!” She ticks off my name and laughs. “I know it feels strange on the first night, but don’t be nervous—in a couple of weeks’ time, this’ll feel like home.”

I drift into the church. There are agnostics everywhere, eating shepherd’s pie from paper plates on their laps. Michael Alison, onetime parliamentary private secretary to Mrs. Thatcher, is here. So is an ex–England cricket captain. I spot the manager of a big British pop group. The famous former topless model Samantha Fox found God through Nicky Gumbel, as did Geri Halliwell. I wonder whether Jonathan Aitken will pour the coffee, but I can’t see him. And now Nicky Gumbel is onstage, leaning against the podium, smiling hesitantly. He reminds me of Tony Blair.

“A very warm welcome to you all. Now some of you may be thinking, ‘Help! What have I got myself into?’” A laugh. “Don’t worry,” he says. “We’re not going to pressurize you into doing anything. Perhaps some of you are sitting there sneering. If you are, please don’t think that I’m looking down at you. I spent half my life as an atheist. I used to go to talks like this and I would sneer.”

Nicky is being disingenuous. We know there are no talks like this—Alpha is uniquely successful, and branching out abroad, so far to 112 countries, where they play Nicky’s videos and the pastor acts the part of Nicky. “This just may be the wrong time for you,” says Nicky to the sneerers. “If you don’t want to come along next week, that’s fine. Nobody will phone you up! I’d like you to meet Pippa, my wife.”

We applaud. “Hi!” says Pippa. “We’ve got three children. Henry is twenty, there’s Jonathan, and Rebecca is fifteen.”

Nicky assures us that we are not abnormal for being here. The Bible is the world’s most popular book, he says. This is normal. “Forget the modern British novelists and the TV tie-ins,” he says. “Forty-four million Bibles are sold each year.” He says the New Testament was written when they say it was. “We know this very accurately,” he explains, “through a science called textual criticism.” He says Jesus existed. This is historically verifiable. He quotes the Jewish historian Josephus, born
AD
37: “Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works . . . the tribe of Christians so named after him are not extinct to this day.” I am with Nicky so far. But the agnostics here—it soon becomes clear that Nicky can read our minds—are thinking, “But none of this proves that Jesus was anything more than a human teacher.”

Nicky tells an anecdote: He says that he once failed to recognize that his squash partner was Paul Ackford, the England rugby union international. Similarly, Jesus’s disciples, in the region of Caesarea Philippi, failed to recognize that their master was the Son of God.

I could live without the squash anecdote.

Nicky says that Jesus could not have been just a great human teacher. When he was asked at his trial whether he was “the Christ, the Son of the Living God, he replied: ‘I am.’” Nicky’s point is this: A great human teacher would not claim to be the Son of God.

“You must make your choice—either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else he’s a lunatic or, worse, the Devil of Hell. But don’t let us come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great moral teacher. He hasn’t left that open to us. He didn’t intend to.”

This final logic (a quote from one of Nicky’s heroes, C. S. Lewis) is impressive to me. It remains in my mind.

Then it’s on to the small groups. I am in Nicky’s group: As is typical, it consists of around ten agnostics, some from the City, one a professional sports person, strangers gathered together in a small room in the basement. We sit in a circle. I wonder what will happen to us in the weeks ahead. For now, we gang up on Nicky and his helpers: his wife, Pippa, an investment banker called James, and his doctor wife, Julia, all ex-agnostics who found Christ on Alpha. We ask them antagonistic questions. “If there’s a God, why is there so much suffering?” And: “What about those people who have never heard of Jesus? Are you saying that all other religions are damned?”

Nicky just smiles and says, “What do the other people here think?”

At the end of the night, Nicky hands out some pamphlets he’s written called (such is the predictability of agnostics)
Why Does God Allow Suffering?
(answer: Nobody really knows) and
What About Other Religions?
(answer: They will, unfortunately, be denied entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven. This includes me—I am a Jew).

I am enjoying myself enormously. I drive away thinking about the things Nicky said. I play them over in my mind. But by the time I arrive home and then watch
ER
, my mini-epiphany has all drained away, and I go back to normal. I cannot imagine how any of my fellow agnostics will possibly be converted by the end of the course.

As the weeks progress, the timetable becomes routine. Dinner, a talk from Nicky, coffee and digestives, the small groups. But the hostile questions have now become slightly less combative. One agnostic, Alice, who is the financial manager of an Internet company and rides her horse every weekend in Somerset, admits to taking Nicky’s pamphlets away with her on business trips. She says she reads them on the plane and finds them comforting. We talk about the excuses we give our friends for our weekly Wednesday night absences. Some say they’re learning French. Others say they’re on a business course. There is laughter and blushing. I miss Week Three because I am reporting on wife-swapping parties in Paris. On Week Four, Nicky suggests I tell the group all about wife-swapping. The group asks me lots of questions. When I fill in the details, Nicky shakes his head mournfully. “What about the children?” he sighs. “So many people getting hurt.” He’s right. Nicky ends the night by saying to me: “I think it’s important that you saw something awful like that midway through Alpha.”

Week Five, and Nicky is onstage talking about answered prayers and how coincidences can sometimes be messages from God. He says he keeps a prayer diary and ticks them off when they are answered. As Nicky says these things, I think about how my wife and I were told we couldn’t have a baby. We went through fertility treatment for four years. Every month was like a funeral without a corpse. And then we did have a baby, and when Joel was born I thought of him as a gift from God.

The moment I think about this, I hear Nicky say the word “Joel.” I look up. Nicky is quoting from the book of Joel: “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.”

Later, I tell the group what happened. “Ah,” they say, when I get to the part about us having a baby. “Ah,” they say again, when I get to the part about Nicky saying “Joel,” and then reading out an uncannily appropriate quote.

“Well?” I say.

“I don’t know.” Nicky smiles. “I think you should let it sit in your heart and make your own decision.”

“But what do
you
think?” I say.

“If I had to put a bet on it,” he says, “coincidence or message, I’d say definitely, yes, that was a message from God.”

The subject is changed.

“So?” says Nicky. “How was everyone’s week?”

Tony sits next to Alice. He is the most vociferous agnostic in the group. He always turns up in his business suit, straight from work, and has a hangdog expression, as if something is always troubling him.

“Tony?” says Nicky. “How was your week?”

“I was talking to a homosexual friend,” says Tony, “and he said that ever since he was a child he found himself attracted to other boys. So why does the Church think he’s committing a sin? Are you damned if you commit a sexual act that is completely normal to you? That seems a bit unfair, doesn’t it?”

There is a murmur of agreement from the group.

“First of all,” says Nicky, “I have many wonderful homosexual friends. There’s even an Alpha for gays running in Beverly Hills! Really! I think it’s marvelous! But if a pedophile said, ‘Ever since I was a child I found myself attracted to children,’ we wouldn’t say that that was normal, would we?”

A small gasp.

“Now, I am not for a moment comparing homosexuals with pedophiles,” Nicky continues, “but the Bible makes it very clear that sex outside marriage, including homosexual sex, is, unfortunately, a sin.” He says he wishes it wasn’t so, but the Bible makes it clear that gay people need to be healed.

“Although I strongly advise you not to say the word ‘healed’ to them,” he quickly adds. “They hate that word.”

The meeting is wound up. Nicky, Pippa, and I stay around for a chat. We talk about who we feel might be on the cusp of converting. My money is on Alice.

“Really?” says Nicky. “You think Alice?”

“Of course,” I say. “Who do you think?”

“Tony,” says Nicky.

“Tony?” I say.

“We’ll see,” says Nicky.

I drive home. In the middle of the night it becomes clear to me that I almost certainly had a message from God—that God had spoken to me through Nicky Gumbel.

WOMAN LEADS CHURCH BOYCOTT IN ROW OVER EVANGELICAL PIG-SNORTING

A woman has walked out of her church and is holding services in her living room because she says she cannot bring herself to “snort like a pig and bark like a dog” on a Church of England course. Angie Golding, 50, claims she was denied confirmation unless she signed up for the Alpha Course, which she says is a “brainwashing” exercise where participants speak in tongues, make animal noises and then fall over. Mark Elsdon-Dew of HTB, Holy Trinity Brompton, said the Alpha Course included lectures on the Holy Spirit. “It affects different people in different ways,” he said.

—The
Times,
May 11, 1996

Of course, stumbling upon this press cutting comes as a shock. I had no idea that the shepherd’s pie, the nice chats, that these things seem to be leading up to something so peculiar—something that will, I guess, occur during our weekend away in Kidderminster.

I visit Mark Elsdon-Dew, Nicky’s press man. I have grown fond of Mark. “Do anything you want,” he frequently tells me. “Go home if you like. Really. Any time you want. Don’t worry, I won’t phone you up! Ha-ha!” Mark was once the
Daily Express
’s news editor, but then he did Alpha and now he works for Nicky, in a Portakabin on HTB’s two and a half acres. Nicky has so many staff—more, even, than the Archbishop of Canterbury, says Mark—that there aren’t enough offices in this giant church to accommodate them all. I want to test Mark, to see how honest he’ll be about the negative press. I ask him if any journalist has written disapprovingly about Nicky. “Oh, yes,” he says excitedly. “Hang on, let me find them for you.” Mark rifles through his filing cabinets and retrieves a sheaf of articles. “Look at this!” he says. “And how about this?” One article, from the
Spectator
, suggests that Nicky’s organization is akin to
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, something that looks like the Anglican Church, acts like the Anglican Church, but is something else, something malignant, growing, poised to consume its host: “For now they need the Church of England for its buildings—but they are very aware that through the wealth of their parishioners they wield an influence over the established Church that far outweighs their numbers.”

“If you think that’s bad,” says Mark, “you should see this one.”

“Oh, good,” I think.

It reads: “HTB’s divorce from the real world, together with a simplistic and communal response to all problems, a strong leader, and a money-conscious hierarchy, are trademarks of a cult.”

“And here’s a real stinker,” says Mark.

“The Alpha Course: Is It Bible-Based or Hell-Inspired?”

This last one is from the Reverend Ian Paisley. His conclusion, after fifteen pages of deliberation, is that it is Hell-inspired.

Usually, when a discovery such as this presents itself midway through researching a story, I feel nothing but glee. On this occasion, however, the gaiety is tinged with indignation and relief—indignation that these people, this apparent cult, have managed to get under my skin, to instill in me feelings of some kind of awakening, and relief because I no longer feel the need to deal with those feelings.