AN EVANGELICAL Christian group has appointed Lord Foster, the architect, to convert a disused Victorian church into a television studio to broadcast its sermons worldwide.

The Alpha course movement, popular with urban professionals, will use the architect’s first church building to relay its teachings to devotees’ computers in more than 150 countries.

More than 9m people worldwide have taken the course and the west London centre will be used to help develop missions in India, Africa and China.

“Digital technology is to our era what Gutenberg was to the 15th century when he created the press to print the Bible,” said Ken Costa, the chairman of Alpha. “This is a new technological revolution in the way Christianity will be spread. It is Christ for the iPod generation.”

Costa, who is also chairman of the European investment division of UBS, the Swiss bank, has hired Foster to draw up the plans for a “come and see” studio that involves a broadcast-quality auditorium inserted in the 19th-century St Paul’s Church on Onslow Square, Knightsbridge.

“It will not feel like any normal church,” said Costa. “We are leapfrogging traditional religious television. These will be internet-based broadcasts free to those in the developing world who can’t afford TV and will enable them to have a platform to communicate to us.”

While Foster reinvented office design with a gherkin-shaped glass tower in the City of London, he will be staying faithful to the original style of the listed church. The development is budgeted at £15m.

“The challenge is to restructure a 19th-century church to fit contemporary needs,” he said. “The building will combine a sense of history with a reinvigorated 21st-century environment for worship and learning.”

The interior will be remodelled and congregations of more than 1,000 in the auditorium will be able to watch sermons from around the world on giant screens.

A new building will be connected to the church with a glazed atrium containing teaching facilities. Subject to fundraising and planning permission, it will open in 2008.

David Suchet, the actor, Geri Halliwell, the pop singer, and Jonathan Aitken, the disgraced former minister, are among the 2m Britons who have taken the Alpha course, which is billed as “an opportunity to explore the meaning of life”. It has been criticised by elements of the Anglican Church as being too shallow.

The thousands who worship at Alpha’s base, the Holy Trinity Brompton, in Knightsbridge, disagree. Lawyers, actors and television presenters are among the 3,500-strong congregation every Sunday.

Alpha’s TV schedule is likely to feature speakers such as Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, alongside programmes on “life” lessons dealing with issues such as divorce, parenting and debt as well as pure theology.

The Church of England supports Alpha but emphasises it is just one of a number of introductory courses available to would-be Christians.

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