Camp Meetings

At the beginning of the nineteenth century in the vast wilderness of the American Frontier, there were few places of worship. In 1801 Presbyterians and Methodists joined together at Cane Ridge in Kentucky to hold a ‘camp meeting’ whereby believers spread across the mid west trekked days before setting up camp to hear a series of circuit preachers expound the Gospel. So popular was this gathering that similar camp meetings were held throughout the century and when word spread that a religious meeting was to be held, both believers and non believers would attend. Such meetings proved popular with non believers as they were glad of a break in routine and upon hearing the Gospel many were consequently converted.

The Alpha Course

In 1981 Charles Marnham, a clergyman at the evangelical church Holy Trinity Brompton in London devised a course that was designed to present the basic principals of the Christian faith to new Christians in a relaxed and informed setting. He called it the Alpha Course.
By the mid 1990s a curate, Nicky Gumbel, who had taken over the running of the Alpha Course at Holy Trinity Brompton, was recognizing the possibility of using it as a tool for evangelism by modifying the course to make it attractive to non-churchgoers. (He has noticed the number of non-churchgoers who are attending.) Soon other churches, noting its success, were asking Holy Trinity Brompton if they may use Alpha for their own contacts. By the end of 1994 there were 750 Alpha courses running and by the mid-2000s it use had spread all over the world to over 150 countries and churches within all the mainstream Protestant denominations plus the Catholic church.