The alpha Alphas: How to get to heaven when you're a hedge fund manager

The leaders of the Alpha Course are angry. The terrifyingly successful evangelical Christian movement that sprang out of an unremarkable church near Harrods has been in the spotlight over the past few weeks. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, got hooked on Alpha 30 years ago as a way of coming to terms with the death of his seven-month-old daughter in a car accident. In the 1980s, he was a regular worshipper at Alpha’s headquarters, Holy Trinity Brompton in Knightsbridge (HTB if you’re on the inside). Partly as a result of his own rather unconventional background — at least for an archbishop — the world has been turning its attention to the global phenomenon that is the Alpha Course and particularly the glittering jewel at its heart: HTB. Welby has been described as ‘the ultimate Alpha male’, while one newspaper went so far as to say that HTB had ‘landed its first Archbishop’.

Alpha grandees, though, aren’t happy with the tone of many of these articles. Welby, you see, is representative of a type that HTB is looking to leave behind — alpha Alphas: bankers and hedge-fund managers using the church as a way of negotiating the ethical pitfalls of careers that are dictated by the amoral vicissitudes of the markets.

Welby, like Alpha’s founding team of Sandy Millar and Nicky Gumbel (the latter is the current vicar of HTB), was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. Welby’s mother is Lady Williams of Elvel, his great-uncle the former Conservative Deputy Prime Minister Rab Butler. Welby worked in the finance department of the French oil giant Elf Aquitaine and then as treasurer of Enterprise Oil in London before leaving to train for the priesthood in 1989. He may struggle to convince his flock that he knows much about the tribulations of everyday people; he has a holiday house in France and lists his hobbies as ‘most things French and sailing’.

The Alpha Course holds itself out as ‘an opportunity to discuss the meaning of life’, a forum for discussing ‘the big questions’. Set up at HTB in 1977, the movement took off under the stewardship of Gumbel, a former corporate lawyer who started running the course in 1990 and quickly expanded outside the church’s SW7 heartland. In the 1980s, when Welby attended, Alpha may have been merely a place for Flaming Ferrari types to repent their junk-bond sins. But Gumbel’s focus on making Alpha a low-pressure venue for the uncertain, agnostic or merely curious to explore thesubject of religion over a (free and usually not terribly good) meal swiftly turned it into a formidable power in the sleepy Church of England. With Gumbel’s informal, chatty style and a focus on rock music — members of the multimillion-selling, Grammy-nominated folk rockers Mumford & Sons worship there — it became particularly successful at attracting the young. In 2009 Gumbel interviewed Tony Blair in front of a 1,200-strong HTB crowd, which received a standing ovation. Gumbel is a member of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.

Senior Alpha figures I spoke to insisted that the course strictly avoids making clear its position on controversial issues such as gay marriage (Justin Welby is anti) and the ordination of women (Justin Welby is pro; one of his first tasks in office will be to sort out the mess the Church has got itself into over women bishops). Nicky Gumbel’s book Searching Issues, although not taught on the Alpha Course, is sold in the shop in the crypt of HTB and urges compassion ‘toward those for whom their homosexual orientation is a daily struggle’. More traditional Church figures frown at the charismatic elements of Alpha such as speaking in tongues — where members are possessed by the Holy Spirit and chant in a kind of heavenly language — and faith healing.

I attended the Alpha Course in 2005 as research for The Revelations, my novel about a (fictitious) evangelical movement that targeted young, wealthy Londoners. I was working for a Berkeley Square finance company at the time and remember the unsettling feeling as I marched off to the Wednesday-night prayer meetings that half of the Mayfair hedge-fund com-munity was coming with me. There were three sharp-suited bankers in particular who accompanied me to Green Park station, got off at South Ken and made the short journey up Brompton Road to HTB. By the end of the course we were chatting happily, talking about the warm glow that emanated from the inconspicuous church behind the far grander Brompton Oratory.

The crowd at those meetings was a heady mix of Gieves & Hawkes-attired bankers, hedge funders in chinos and button-down collars, and horsey young women in pink pashminas and quilted gilets. Cut-glass accents rose into the church’s airy heights, bright white smiles flashed across the room during the discussion group afterwards. The leaders of our session were a young man in property and his fund-manager wife.

I first came across the Alpha Course when I was at Oxford University, where a group of young, attractive people at the periphery of my set attended a weekly prayer meeting at St Clement’s Church. Due in part, I’d imagine, to the fragile, blonde-haired beauty of many of the girls in the Alpha group, I found more and more of my friends joining. Some are still HTB regulars. And they are all City types.

But now Alpha wishes to distance itself from stories of multimillions taken in the HTB collection plates — at the height of the boom years of the last decade a rumoured £5 million was taken at HTB alone; the latest figures show the turnover of Alpha at close to £10 million per annum. Alpha may have been born with a silver spoon in its mouth, but you’re now as likely to see those familiar Alpha Course signs in run-down inner cities as in leafy SW postcodes.

It would seem that much has changed since I attended the Alpha Course seven years ago. Ken Costa, the chairman of Alpha’s international arm and a successful banker (his CV lists senior roles at Lazard and UBS and he has just joined DMC, a private equity firm set up by a group of former Goldman Sachs employees), insists the image of HTB as attracting only ‘post-university yuppie professionals’ is a myth. The church and the two ‘overspill’ locations at Queen’s Gate and Onslow Square welcome 5,000 worshippers each week, from what Costa assures me is ‘a very broad-based group’. He says that people travel from across London to attend the church. ‘Very few people live in the parish because it’s so expensive. Who can afford to live in Knightsbridge?’ Ken Costa, I’d imagine, but I let it pass.