About 'bethel bible college'|College for Church Kids, pt. 2
The Twilight of an Actor A few months after appearing in Jim Cartwright's bitter-sweet two-hander "Two", I performed in one final play at the Rose and Crown theatre, the character-driven comedy, "Lovelives". Written entirely by the cast, it consisted of a series of sketches centring on the disastrous antics of a group of singletons who had come together at a lonely hearts club in the London suburbs. Perhaps then it chimed perfectly with the spirit of British post-war comedy and its characteristic celebration of failure and banality. A great success at the R&C, it could in my view have been developed into a television play or even series, but sadly, a brilliant cast dispersed after the final show. Later in '95, my close friend Adam offered me two small roles in a modest London production of the Greek tragedy, "Iphigeneia in Taurois", which had been written by Euripides somewhere between 414 and 412 BC. Directed by Adam, the houses were sparse at first, picking up towards the end of the run. Then, the following January, I joined a Christian theatre company, Street Level, based at a large Pentecostal church in the vast multicultural suburb of Croydon in Surrey. While forming part of the Greater London Urban Area, it's yet in effect a city within a city which runs the gamut demographically from tough inner city areas such as Thornton Heath to leafy middle class enclaves such as Sanderstead; yet it still manages to contain the largest council estate in Europe in the shape of New Addington With two other Christian actors...viz., company leader Serena from the aforesaid Thornton Heath...and 19 year old Rebecca from nearby Sanderstead, I went on to serve variously as MC, script writer, actor, singer and musician, and together, we toured a series of shows around schools in the bleak outer suburbs of South East London. One of these, "Choices", was almost entirely written by me, although it had been based on an idea by Serena, who also heavily edited it for performance purposes. On the whole, the kids were incredibly receptive to our productions, and we were greeted by them with an almost uniform affection, and there was an incredible chemistry between Serena, Rebecca and myself...until things started to go wrong. Towards the end of the summer, Serena asked me to write a large scale project for the group, suggesting a contemporary version of John Bunyan's classic Christian allegory "The Pilgrim's Progress". This I set about doing, and after some weeks of labouring over what turned out to be an unwieldy and often violent epic punctuated by scenes of the blackest humour that occasionally verged on the off-colour, I began to have second thoughts about continuing with Street Level. The play, "Paul Grim's Progress", had left me poor shape spiritually, and I didn't fancy too many more of the long and costly train journeys that were necessary to get me to Croydon and back. So, I began to withdraw; which wasn't very honourable of me, because Serena had become more dependent on me than ever following Rebecca's departure at the end of the "Choices" tour. As things turned out, my dark masterpiece was never produced, and in time, I destroyed all but a few pages of it. By the time of my final exit from Street Level, I'd long defected from Cornerstone to the Thames Vineyard Christian Fellowship, part of the Association of Vineyard Churches founded by John Wimber in the 1970s. This was as a result of being told by a phone friend that the Vineyard movement contained members whose spiritual gifts were in the realm of the truly exceptional. My curiosity aroused, I went along one Sunday evening and had a powerful experience which made me want to stay; and so I did. As with Cornerstone, I joined a Home Fellowship group, where I completed part of the Alpha course, which had been pioneered by Nicky Gumbel of West London's famous Holy Trinity Brompton. I'd visited HTB at some point in the mid '90s, when it was at the height of the revival movement known as the Toronto Blessing. This was so called because it had been ignited in January 1994 at the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church by St. Louis pastor Randy Clark. Clark received it himself from South African evangelist Rodney Howard Brown during a service at Rhema Bible Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then pastored by Kenneth Hagin Jr, founder of the controversial Word of Faith movement.. It spread to the UK in the summer of 1994, where it was dubbed The Toronto Blessing by the Daily Telegraph newspaper. Its main British centres went on to include- as well as HTB - Terry Virgo's New Frontiers family of churches and Gerald Coates' Pioneer People, whose main venue at the time was a cinema in the Surrey suburb of Esher, which I visited once or twice, and which was so packed I was forced to stand all throughout the service. But returning to my acting career: its last hurrah came in the spring of '98, when I started rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare's Scottish Play, to be staged at Fulham's Lost Theatre in the summer; and despite the fact that my three cameos were praised by cast and audience alike, I've not acted since beyond a handful of ill-fated auditions. Quite simply, the passion to perform in front of a live audience that raged within me like a forest fire for more than two decades has long been extinguished, or rather turned to dread. Some months after my final performance at the Lost Theatre, I wrote the prose piece that eventually turned into "Such a Short Space of Time". Its creation took place in what I'm sure was the glorious last summer of the millennium, and my parents were on vacation at the time. Thence, I was often at the house where I'd spent my adolescence and young manhood, performing a variety of tasks such as watering my mother's flowers, or just simply soaking up the atmosphere of a place I loved. Taking cunning advantage of my parents' absence, I transferred some of my old vinyl records onto cassette, something that my own ancient hi-fi was incapable of doing. It was an unsettling experience...to listen to songs that, perhaps in the cases of some of them, I'd not heard for ten or fifteen years, or more. With a heartrending intensity, they evoked a time in my life when I was filled to the brim with sheer youthful joy of life and undiluted hope for the future. Yet, as I did so, it seemed to me that it was only very recently that I'd first heard them, despite the colossal changes that'd taken place since, not just in my own life but those of my entire generation. And so I was confronted at once with the devastating transience of human life, and the effect the passage of time exerts on us all. Such a Short Space of Time I love...not just those... I knew back then, But those... Who were young Back then, But who've since Come to grief, who... Having soared so high, Found the Consequent descent Too dreadful to bear, With my past itself, Which was only Yesterday, No...even less time... A moment ago, And when I play Records from 1975, Soul records, Glam records, Progressive records, Twenty years melt away Into nothingness... What is a twenty-year period? Little more than A blink of an eye... How could Such a short space Of time Cause such devastation? Dispersals and Beginnings A few months later and the troubled, turbulent 20th Century gave way to the 21st to the sound of fireworks frantically exploding all throughout my neighbourhood. Phoning my father that night to wish him a happy new year, I discovered that my mother was desperately ill with flu. It's crossed my mind since that she may have become susceptible to the flu virus partly as a result of stress caused by the fact that I'd latterly quit yet another course; this time an MA in French and Theory of Literature from University College, London. In time though, her incredible Scots-Irish constitution saw her through to a complete recovery. I'd found the course magnetically compelling on an intellectual level, despite an awareness that writing extensively about Literary Theory might come to disturb me, and even challenge to my faith, and I eventually withdrew on a provisional basis. It's a decision that's haunted me ever since. At the time I was attending a satellite church of Kensington Temple, part of the British-based Elim Pentecostal movement, founded by Welsh evangelist George Jeffries in 1915. I was playing guitar for them at the urging of my friend Martina, Russian wife of Pastor Phil of New York City. It was Phil who'd got in touch with me the previous summer through KT about joining a cell group at his home in the Surrey suburbs. This eventually mutated into Liberty, with which I forged very close ties from the outset, especially with Phil and Martina, and first worship leader, Maria, from Peru. Then, shortly after agreeing to be Liberty's lone musician, I quit my position as a telephone canvasser for an e-commerce company based in Surbiton, Surrey, thus bringing a fairly lengthy period spent as an office worker to an end. A change in my professional fortunes came around Christmas, when I was made lead singer for Nuages, a Swing band named after the instrumental by the great French Jazz guitarist Django Reinhard. We went on to cut several very fine demos arranged by band leader Bruce, but they didn't result in the interest they deserved...given the wealth of talent involved. In early '01, Pastor Phil decided to dissolve Liberty, which was a sad event for all of us, so I made yet another return to Cornerstone, to be joined there by Maria and a couple of other friends from the LCC. Around about the same time, I took a short computer course at my local adult education centre, but nothing came of it in terms of employment. Then, the following summer, in the wake of the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival, Nuages disbanded, which was a real shame because we'd finally found the audience we'd been searching for all along at the festival, evidenced by the passion with which our first performance there was greeted. The day after our final show, I started working from home making appointments for a travelling salesman, and was briefly very successful at it, until things started tailing off in the autumn and I was let go. By this time I'd left Cornerstone, although I've made a good many subsequent returns. This sudden exit came in consequence of a desire born of intensive internet research to seek out churches existing beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic fold, these being Cessationist, which is to say they don't accept that the more spectacular Gifts of the Holy Spirit such as Tongues and Prophecy are still in operation. Up until then, any church that didn't encourage the speaking in other tongues I'd not recognised as being truly Christian. That is not the case today. One of my main inspirations during this period of wandering was the Cessationist Sermon Audio website, and I downloaded so many of their sermons that my computer may have crashed as a result. I was also inspired by the many online Discernment Ministries, although not all of these were - or are - Cessationist, and among the churches I visited were Bethel Baptist (Wimbledon), Christ Church (Teddington), and Duke Street Church, (Richmond), all located in the pleasant and affluent outer suburbs of South West London. Bethel is an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church based on the US model and therefore using the King James Version of the Bible only. I went to three - possibly successive - services at Bethel, and fully intended to return for a fourth, and so witness the preaching of Sermon Audio favourite David Cloud of Way of Life Ministries, but never did. What happened was that I was held up at Wimbledon British Rail station for over an hour on my final Sunday at Bethel, and this may have put me off travelling by train to church, although I was also tiring of the constant new boy status of the inveterate church-hopper. Christ Church is part of the Free Church of England, which separated from the established C of E in 1844 in response to the High Church theology of the then Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts. The Free Church is Evangelical, as well as liturgical and Episcopal, and its member churches adhere to the Doctrines of Grace, also known as the five points of Calvinism. These are Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and the Perseverance of the Saints. According to Calvinism, those who form part of the Elect have been predestined to final salvation by God, and that no one can come to saving faith through their own free will due to total depravity. Duke Street is also a Grace fellowship; while Bethel is Free Will. As a result, many Calvinists would describe it as Arminian, after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius who emphasized free will when it comes to responding to the Gospel. They would not, however, be entirely accurate in doing so because true Arminians maintain that salvation can be lost, while most IFB fellowships believe in the doctrine of Once Saved Always Saved. In short, they are neither Calvinist nor Arminian, which is an oxymoronic statement to some. For me, all true believers are united by a clear adherence to certain key doctrines forming the basis of the one true faith without which there can be no salvation, even when they may be divided by non-saving inessentials, or secondary truths. For example, while I'm an upholder of baptism by full immersion, I certainly don't believe adherents of infant baptism to be heretics, at least not automatically. On the other hand, I have a real problem with those who maintain that a person must be baptised in order to be saved, because the Bible makes it clear that we are saved by faith alone. That said, every Christian should be baptised by full immersion because God commands it, and God urges us to keep his commandments. Also, while I believe that Christ's return will be followed by a literal thousand year reign on earth, which makes me a premillennialist, a person can insist that Christ won't return until after the millennium, or that the millennium lies in the past, and still be a saved Christian. What are at issue here are justifiable differences in scriptural interpretation. Before 2003, which was my year of relentless internet research, I'd known next to nothing about the finer points of my faith, although I was fairly well versed in the subject of prophecy thanks to having been introduced to this early in my Christian life by Spencer and Grace, through various magazines and books such as "Prophecy Today" and the works of Barry R Smith. At the same time, I had no clue whatsoever as to the meaning of Calvinism or Arminianism, Predestination or Foreknowledge, Cessationism or Continuationism and so on, but that didn't affect the state of my soul, in fact, no one is either saved or damned by believing one or the other of these distinctions, but by faith alone, with true saving faith producing the fruits of repentance. No Christian has a perfect knowledge of the truth, but I believe there is unity to be found between Evangelicals adhering to the fundamentals of the faith, irrespective of what church they choose to worship in, but this can never be achieved at the expense of compromising the pure Word of God. For all this talk of churches...if the truth be known, I've not been settled within a church since 2001, which points to a deep inner turbulence that I still haven't managed to understand, although it may be at least partly attributable to the fact that I accepted Christ relatively late. After all, the Bible makes it clear that each person who rejects the sovereignty of the fleshly realm for Christ's sake will know incessant tribulation and persecution. Perhaps this is especially true of repentant Christians who come to faith following a relatively long period of time within the decadent heart of the world as avid flunkies of the Flesh. However, as comfort these late converts have a true and infinitely worthwhile purpose in life. This was something that constantly escaped me in my youth, for all the fierce, flaming fanaticism of my beliefs and ideals. In many ways, though, I've been my own worst enemy. One by one I've had to slay evil habits left over from my pre-Christian existence. In my early days as a Christian, for instance, I still entertained a fixation on the occult, albeit from a Christian perspective. Now I can barely stand to look at pages filled with occult information and symbols. Most recently, I've had to address the matter of my dress, which may not seem very important to some - God looks at the heart after all - but I disagree. For close on a decade I was more or less addicted to designer sportswear, and among the objects of my love affair were shady baseball caps, sweat tops with massive logos, flashy striped trakkie Bs, and chunky branded trainers...and I wore an earring too, having had my ear pierced in 1979. Some Christians associate earrings on men with ancient pagan idolatry, and specifically the notion of being enslaved, and that makes good sense to me. I've recently come to realise that if a Christian's outer appearance fails to reflect a changed life, he may be cheating others of the chance of coming to Christ through him. He will also be cheating himself of respect, and God of potential converts. In short, I think it's time I started looking like the Christian I profess to be. Perhaps then I might actually start acting like a person worthy of the name. A Final Distant Clarion Cry In a general sense the year 2000 turned out to be something of a turning point for me, not just spiritually, but in terms of my entire personality, which has become more inward looking, even by the standards of the previous seven years. Significantly perhaps, the previous year had been the first since I was about 17 that I faced the world with my hair its natural medium brown after having dyed it for nearly three decades. What prompted this was not a sudden loathing for the vanity of the bottle blond, but the fact that the peroxide-based streaking kits I favoured were causing me to have breathing difficulties. At first I missed being blond, but in time I came to prefer my natural colour after years of youthful blond androgyny. The fact is that throughout my twenties and for much of my thirties, I remained in a state of extended adolescence, blond being after all the natural colour of eternal youth. I've elicited a lot of admiration in my time for attempting to take the romantic bohemian rebel existence to its logical conclusion when all around me were conforming at a furious rate, and perhaps still do. But the price for doing so has been high, in terms of social and financial mortification, for which I've no one to blame but myself. If I thought they'd listen, I'd tell the young: listen to your parents, and not to the voices of trendy rebellion, because they're trying to protect you from social failure, out of knowledge of how painful this can be beyond a certain age. Young people still worship at the altar of romantic rebellion as they've done since time immemorial, but perhaps to not quite the same extent as my own poor generation. We were the ones who came to maturity to a frenetic Rock soundtrack in the tail-spinning nineteen sixties, and who can say what effect it had on us, this music...tailor-made to inspire a generation scornful of deferred gratification, a generation of hipsters. However, Rock was far more than another mere music form...being a total art involving poetry, theatre, fashion, but even more than that...a way of life with a strong spiritual foundation. It could be said that its first true ancestor was the great 19th Century artistic and cultural movement known as Romanticism, which reached a climax with Nietzsche, who by declaring God's death, cleared the way for the eventual rule of a Do Your Own Thing philosophy so dear to the heart of Rock and Roll culture. Convinced by 2003 that no person can call themselves a Christian and yet listen to such a libertine music as Rock, I made an attempt to destroy all traces of it in my possession, even though I'd long lost any real taste for Hard Rock. However, by the summer, my attitude had mellowed to the extent that I felt able to write about an hour's worth of Rock songs in response to a request from my dad, Pat Halling, for songs for a possible collaboration with the son of a close friend. Yet, these were as far from Hard Rock as it's possible to be, being influenced by such relatively benign and melodic genres as Folk, Pop and Soul. The songs, some new, some re-workings of old tunes, were recorded on a Sony CFS-B21L cassette-corder, which I think has been discontinued, and were generally well-received, despite having been crudely recorded. Pat even went so far as to suggest that I record them properly in a studio, which was a high compliment indeed, given that unlike me, he's a trained musician who's been a professional since the age of 9, where I'm just a primitive with an ear for a catchy tune. A year or so later, a project was mooted by Pat which involved the recording of an album of Pop standards featuring myself and harmonica genius James Hughes, as well as Pat's own London Swingtette. In spring 2008, the CD was finally released with the title "A Taste of Summer Wine", due to the fact that Jim's playing had long been featured on a British situation comedy called "Last of the Summer Wine". Two year on, and the roman à clef, "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child", looks set to follow suit after more than four years of labour and endless rewrites. As I've stated elsewhere, soon after coming to Christ, I destroyed most of what I'd written up until that point, and then wrote quite happily for a time as a Christian, until it seems that God called a halt to my literary activities. It was as if I was being saturated with an almost tangible leaden darkness which took me over to the extent of altering the expression in my eyes. Once again, I started destroying any writings I managed to finish, sometimes dumping whole manuscripts in handy dustbins, or one sheet after the other down murky London drains. This went on until about 1998, when I more or less gave up creative writing altogether, which was a good move, given that these early Christian writings reflected a continuing preoccupation with subjects that had held me spellbound prior to my conversion. What's more, some of my writings mixed truth and fiction to produce a pointless and deceptive hybrid. Finally, in January 2006, I believe God made it clear that I was mature enough to be able to write again, and so I started tentatively publishing pieces at the Blogster website, with the first autobiographical one being written sometime around the spring of 2006. As things stand, I'm desperately trying to put the finishing touches to the memoir that evolved out of them, in fact, since 2006, I've done very little except write, so there's really not much to say by way of wrapping things up. What I will say is that shortly before Christmas 2008, I was informed that Elizabeth , my one-time mentor at Westfield College had died aged 84 in her adopted village of Woodstock, Oxfordshire. The executor of her will asked me to read one of the lessons at her funeral and deliver a eulogy in the capacity of a former student. This took place in the parish church of St Martin's in the beautiful village of Bladon, where Winston Churchill is buried, which is significant given that Elizabeth was one of the founding members of the Churchill Centre, and had written on the great man's relationship with the Christian faith. On that day, I discovered that Elizabeth had been born in 1924 as an only child of working class parents in Lancashire, but had gone on to gain a place at Oxford University, before becoming a lecturer there and then at Westfield. What an ascent...from humble northern roots to a lectureship at the most hallowed place of learning in history...little wonder she was so fragile, almost febrile as a person, but so kind, so single-minded in her devotion to those who shared her passionate view of art and life. It was such a sad experience for me to be reunited with Elizabeth after nearly a quarter of a century while being unable to communicate. It made me realise how important it is to stay close to friends and family, because there comes a time when it is no longer possible to reconcile with them. It's too late; they've gone; and the world is always so much the poorer for their sudden absence and silence. What else have I done since 2006? How have I spent my time? In terms of my online life, every so often I find myself immersed in a labyrinthine search for information related to a subject that has me briefly in its thrall. As a result it requires mental processing through a punishing bout of research and the fervid taking of notes. The most recent topics to beset me were the nature of the giants of Genesis 6:4, and the spread of pagan religion following the destruction of the Tower of Babel when God confused the languages, and I couldn't wait to be free of them. As a general rule I'm most content when at peace with my faith, and least while lost in an endless quest for cyber-knowledge with one page linking incessantly to the other until information overload becomes a serious threat. From time to time, however, I'm tempted to venture beyond my comfort zone into the mysteries of the Bible and history. It's hard for the intellectually curious to resist doing this, and according to the Bible, knowledge shall increase (Daniel 12:4) in the time before the Second Coming of Christ, and this may well be via the miraculous medium of the World Wide Web. There's really not a whole lot left to add to "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child", which while woefully inadequate as a full account of my existence, passes muster as an undercoat, and I do hope there's someone who's persevered this far. After all, it's not just about me; this is a testimony more than anything else. And one that's now at an end. This is the alternative roman à clef version, so some names have been changed. |
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