In her book, Finding God Beyond Harvard, Kelly Monroe Kullberg describes the growth of the university campus based movement Veritas: “Veritas isn’t about religion. Its about the art of life and a new way of seeing. Veritas is truth whose nature is love and hospitality… Our approach is generally not debate but exploration… If Jesus is truth and life, we imagine every sane person wants to know.” Those words could describe what Nicky and Pippa Gumbel have demonstrated in the last 18 years through the Alpha Course. In 1986 when Nicky and Pippa came to Holy Trinity Brompton, Nicky was a practicing barrister in the City of London. He was asked to be one of several speakers presenting a course for new converts at HTB called Alpha. The course was transformed under his leadership from being one designed for new Christians to one primarily for those outside the church who would not consider themselves as Christians. With its informal, relaxed and low-key approach the course grew fast in popularity – particularly among those in their 20s and 30s. Today, more than 11 million people have participated in the ten week course now running in 35,000 churches of all denominations, spread across 160 countries in 69 official languages (and 34 unofficially). Of the 160 prisons in England, 117 offer the Alpha Course. An avowed atheist whose father, Walter Gumbel was a secular Jew and successful barrister and whose mother was a non-practicing Anglican and civic leader, Nicky Gumbel was converted to Christianity at Trinity College, Cambridge as a result of meeting people who had a genuine Christian faith. As he puts it, “I started to explore for myself, and it was through reading the New Testament that I began to see there was much more in the Christian faith than I had thought, and I came to faith in Christ during my first year. I was enthralled. It was as if I had found what I had been looking for all my life”. Perhaps part of the genius of the Alpha Course is the assumption that millions of unchurched people have been looking all their lives as well and the confidence Nicky has that the Holy Spirit will guide them over the course of 10 weeks.