At 74 years of age, Sandy Millar is showing no signs of burning out his passion to tell people about Christ. And he still thinks the course he pioneered 25 years ago – Alpha – is the best way to do it.

In the country recently at the invitation of Alpha Australia, to infuse energy in the Aussie church for evangelism and church growth, Millar is humble about his involvement in the development of the Alpha Course, now heralded as the most popular Christian course in the world.

Millar, along with fellow curate Charles Marnham at Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) in London, wrote the Alpha Course in the early 1980s as an introduction to the Christian faith for new Christians attending the central London church.

When Millar became Vicar of HTB, he handed over responsibility for the course to then-curate Nicky Gumbel (now Vicar of HTB himself), who saw the potential for the course to be used as an evangelistic tool. Alpha is now being run in 169 countries and has racked up close to 20 million participants.

While Millar was helping to write the Alpha Course, he was also exploring what was then a new concept in London – church planting.

“When I was just starting out as curate [assistant minister] at Holy Trinity Brompton, church planting was only just coming into the vocabulary of church people. The only books there were on the topic were written by Americans. We’d never heard of it in London.”

“There were a number of old Anglican buildings, many of which were underused, some were falling down; the congregations had long since ceased to be there. It seemed useful to repopulate those areas of London, which were no longer populated by Christian people.”

But you can only plant a church with people, said Millar. Which is where Alpha came in. “We were developing the two ideas at the same time – church planting, and Alpha. But as Alpha began to grow and develop, we began to have a group of people excited about Jesus, longing to take that excitement to other parts of London.”

Millar says he sees that part of his ministry as God’s mercy, including the arrival of Nicky Gumbel to HTB, who took Alpha and grew it to become the evangelistic tool it is today.

“God sent a number of people including Nicky Gumbel, who’d been converted the previous summer on a university mission, to London. They came and they were on fire with their new love for God, filled with the Holy Spirit and raring to go. They had heard there was this new-ish, young-ish curate at HTB (me), who was interested in church planting. So they arrived, and we started moving in that direction. And as we moved, more and more people came out of the woodwork too.”

The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, has described Millar as a “professor of church planting” for his work in developing a strategy for church planting that infused dying London churches with new life, and congregations and clergy provided by Holy Trinity.

According to Millar, the church planting initiative, which saw seven “plants” from 1985 to 2005 across London, was a good example of how the local churches worked well with each other and their bishop.

“The bishop had empty buildings, and we needed space. We had people and resources to help, and bishop needed people and resources to populate the buildings. So, working together, we worked for the Kingdom.”

Millar says teamwork is something the modern church could learn how to do better. And it’s particularly something new church planters should think about.

“There is this idea that it’s easier to have babies than to raise the dead,” Millar said of church planters who choose to ‘go it alone’, without reference to denomination.

“Some of it is sheer frustration with obstacles some denominations put in their way to plant a church, and I understand that frustration. But I felt, when we were planting in London, that it was worth hanging in there. It’s worth trying to bring the ‘institution’ – whatever it is – into the 21st Century (even if it overlooked the 20th Century altogether!).”

While Millar says he admires the excitement of modern church planters, he worries too that those who ‘go it alone’ will find they don’t have the structures and machinery for dealing with conflict and succession.

“Plus, to be honest, I’m not sure we want too many more denominations. We’ve got too many as it is. It might not matter though how many there are, provided we all work together.”

Millar notes that working together in a loving, extended church community can serve an evangelistic purpose also. The purpose of Alpha, he says, is seeking to draw people into a loving, Christian community. If the church could work together, become more united, that loving community is much more obvious.

“It’s one less thing those outside the church can use as a reason they don’t want to be involved. Why would they want to be involved with us when we can’t get along amongst ourselves?”

Ultimately, that is what Alpha is about – says Millar. “An Alpha church has in its DNA a desire to be welcoming and inclusive. To build a community of people who love Jesus, and who want to be part of a community that love him too.”

Header Image: Bishop Sandy Millar sharing with the Anglican Archbishop of Perth and guests of the Archbishop in his recent visit with Alpha Australia (photo from Facebook)