Repackaging Christianity: Alpha and the Building of a Global Brand

＂Alpha has become a global phenomenon and, in this well-researched and compelling account, it has now found its historian.＂ --Professor Timothy Larsen (Wheaton College) for the Times Literary Supplement

Alpha is a global phenomenon, one of the most famous and controversial brands in Christian evangelization. Launched internationally in 1993, it has attracted wide public commentary over the decades, not only among churches but also in mainstream television, radio and newspapers such as TheEconomist and TheNew York Times. Even Elle and Fabulous have covered Alpha. Over a million participants attend the course every year and it has been a powerful driver of Christian innovation and resurgence in a secular culture.

Alpha’s presiding genius, Nicky Gumbel, has won plaudits as a new Billy Graham for the modern age. As Alpha prepares to mark its thirtieth anniversary in 2023, Repackaging Christianity tells, for the first time the full accounts of Gumbel’s dramatic conversion to Christianity along with other key figures such as the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. It chronicles the genesis of Alpha from its beginnings in the West London dinner party set of the 1970s, turbo charged by the influence of John Wimber and the Toronto Blessing in the 1990s to what is now an international movement ’to transform society’ embraced on every continent on the world.

Plenty of books, articles and doctoral theses have analysed and criticised Alpha from sociological and theological perspectives. But there has never yet been a full history of the fascinating story of this movement, until now.

Andrew Atherstone is Latimer Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and a member of Oxford University’s Faculty of Theology and Religion.

He has published widely on modern Christian history, especially the evangelical, Anglican, and charismatic movements, for both general and scholarly audiences. His recent scholarly books include, as co-editor, The Routledge Research Companion to the History of Evangelicalism (Routledge, 2018), Making Evangelical History: Faith, Scholarship and the Evangelical Past (Routledge, 2019), and The Oxford Handbook of Christian Fundamentalism (OUP, forthcoming 2022).

Andrew is the biographer of the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Archbishop Justin Welby: Risktaker and Reconciler (DLT, 2014).