Chelsea footballer Olivier Giroud has issued a warm endorsement of HTB's Alpha Course after recently completing the famous evangelistic course online. Giroud said that Alpha provided him with a "fantastic experience" to share his faith with a bunch of friends who he had invited along to hear the talks. 

In a video shared on Twitter by Alpha founder Rev Nicky Gumbel, Giroud explained:

"I did Alpha online this last two months. I have to say it was a fantastic experience...to share my faith with friends I invited to do Alpha...to share my faith not in a threatening way. I really enjoyed it, and I'm pleased my friends could enjoy it also. That's the spirit!

"Obviously I highly recommend it. Don't hesitate to do it. It's fantastic and you won't be disappointed. Be blessed and keep being a blessing."

Online alpha course sign-ups have been exploding since the Covid-19 lockdown was made official in March. According to the head of Northern Ireland Alpha, Jonny Campbell, there are now 1,900 digital Alpha courses happening across the country via the video conferencing platform Zoom. In many cases, Campbell said, these Alphas are seeing as many as triple the usual number of guest sign-ups.

Director of communications for Alpha International, Mark Elsdon-Dew, told Premier the digital courses have been way more successful than they had anticipated.

He said: "We've never done alpha online before. And we didn't really think it would work, I suppose. And so it's been a massive surprise that it has. And we haven't had to adapt very much"

"All we've done with the groups is do them on Zoom, instead of sitting there in the church. Everyone seems to be loving them and nobody's dropping out, which is another extraordinary thing."