About 'bethel bible college'|A repost: Colleges that ARE promoting Contemplative/ Emerging/Emergent teachings and DO have a Spiritual Formation program
Introduction "The Twilight of an Actor" existed in the first place as nothing more than "Such a Short Space of Time", and as such was published at Blogster on the 19th of February 2006. This versified piece was based on extracts from an unfinished autobiographical story, penned I think in early summer 1999 as the decade, century and millenium were all three coming to an unquiet close. In time, the title piece, "The Twilight of an Actor" was added to this basic structure as were, more recently, "Fireworks Frantically Exploding" and "Dispersals and Endings", both originally part of "A Final Distant Clarion Cry" which follows. Final editing of both pieces was completed in November 2008. The Twilight of an Actor Following on from Jim Cartwright's bitter-sweet two-hander "Two", which I touched on in some detail in "The Trials of a Teetotaller", I performed in one last play at the Rose and Crown theatre, the character-driven comedy "Lovelives". Written by the cast, this ensemble piece consisted of a series of sketches centring on the desperate antics of a group of singletons attending a suburban lonely hearts club. Perhaps then it chimed perfectly with the spirit of British post-war comedy and its characteristic celebration of banality and even failure. A great success at the R&C, it could in my opinion have been developed into a television play or even series, but sadly, as is all too often the case, a brilliant cast dispersed after the final show. Then later in the year at the Tristan Bates theatre near Leicester Square, I played two small roles in a production of Euripides' "Iphigeneia in Taurois", directed and translated by my longtime friend Adrian. These were Pylades, right hand man of one of the main characters, Orestes, and the Messenger, a maniacal buffoon of a character which I interpreted with the kind of refined cockney accent once supposedly favoured by policemen and regimental sergeant majors. From January 1996 until the following summer, I served variously as actor, MC, script writer, singer and musician for Street Level, a Christian theatre company based at the Elim Pentecostal church in West Croydon, Surrey. A group of three consisting of myself, and two locals girls, 19 year old Esther, and married company leader Sally, we toured several shows around schools in various tough multicultural south London areas including Croydon itself, as well as Thornton Heath, Norwood, Crystal Palace and so on. One of these, "Choices", was almost entirely written by me, although it'd been based on an idea by Sally who also heavily edited it for performance purposes. On the whole the kids, most from relatively deprived backgrounds, were incredibly receptive to our productions, and we were greeted by them with almost uniform enthusiasm and affection, which was a surprise and a delight to me at least, although Esther had told me before our very first show that they tended to be very easy to relate to. Whether she meant towards visitors I'm not sure, but I imagine she did. Towards the end of the summer, Sally asked me to write a large scale project for the group. She suggested a contemporary version of John Bunyan's classic Christian allegory "The Pilgim's Progress". Once I'd completed it my enthusiasm for Street Level had begun to wane. This had nothing to do with the company itself which for a few brief months in 1996 was marked by frantic creativity leading to shows with a radical Christian message performed to great success for the benefit of some of the capital's least privileged young people. The fact is that the long and costly early morning train journeys to Croydon via Wimbledon or Clapham Junction were starting to exhaust me. In consequence I suddenly quit, which wasn't a very kind thing to do to Sally because I think she'd started to see me as her rock, and she'd a lot of responsibility on her plate with regard to forthcoming performances and the training of a fresh crew of young Christian actors. My decision was especially mean given that Esther had herself left some weeks earlier, but I had to consider my finances. What's more my spiritual health was poor at the time after weeks of labouring over what turned out to be an unwieldy and often violent epic marked by scenes of the blackest humour. As things turned it was never produced, and I'm not surprised, because although artistically it had its merits, spiritually it was grossly immature. In Christian terms I was still only a little over three years old, and it showed. In time I destroyed all but a few pages of it. By early 1997 I'd vanished into the sanctuary of office life. This included a happy and socially lively period as a panel recruiter for Surrey's Topflight Research which came to a close when I started rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare's infamous Scottish Play at Fulham's Lost Theatre in the spring of 1998. Despite my cameos as Lennox, the Doctor, and an Old Man being praised by cast and audience members alike, I've not acted since other than a handful of auditions. As things stand, while I'm still open to the possibility of film or television work, the likelihood of my ever appearing onstage in a play again is virtually nonexistent. Quite simply put, the passion to perform in front of a live audience that raged within me for more than two decades has long been quieted. Some months after my final performance at the Lost Theatre I wrote the prose piece that eventually mutated into "Such a Short Space of Time". My parents were on vacation for a few weeks during the period of its creation, a glorious summer as I recall that was the last of the millenium. Therefore I was often at the house in which 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 sneaky 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 fiteen years, or more, and which evoked with a heartrending intensity 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 then not just in my own life but those of my entire generation. And so I was confonted at once with the devastating transience of human life, and the devastating effect the passage of time exerts on all human life. 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 ceded 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, which was one of the most prestigious of its kind in the world. But once again the Lord blessed my family, and she made a full recovery. I found the course magnetically compelling on an intellectual level, although I knew that as it went on, there was a strong chance that writing about contemporary Literary Theory would come increasingly to disturb me, and perhaps even compromise my integrity as a Christian. As things turned out, I did leave the course although only on a provisional basis. This was a time in my life marked by what appear to me now as an extraordinary succession of sudden starts and endings, and subsequent to my quitting UCL I was appointed chief musician of a worship group for the church I was attending at the time, Liberty Christian Centre. Liberty was a satellite of London's famous Kensington Temple, and I'd been recommended for the post by my friend Marina, Russian wife of Pastor Louis, late of New York City. She went on to become worship leader, alternating as such with Martha, another close friend, originally from Peru. It was Louis 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. Soon afterwards I also quit my position as a telecanvasser for an e-commerce company based in Surbiton, Surrey, thereby bringing a fairly lengthy period as an office worker to an end. Since then I've worked only casually in various fields of employment including telemarketing, leafleting and as a television extra. Another beginning came towards the end of 2000 when I was made lead singer for a Swing-flavoured band which became known as "Nuages" after the famous instrumental by French Jazz guitarist Django Reinhard, but soon afterwards this was counterbalanced by the heartbreaking dissolution of Liberty. And so, in early 2001 I returned to my first spiritual home of the Cornerstone Bible Church, a large fellowship affiliated to the Word of Faith Movement and specifically Rhema Ministries of Johannesburg, South Africa, pastored by Ray McCauley. Before defecting to the Riverside Vineyard Christian Fellowship, I'd gone to Cornerstone for about two years from early 1993, in fact, had attended my very first service there even before becoming a Christian in '92. Drunk at the time as I recall, I'd sat next to a beautiful blonde woman of about 55 whom I later discovered to be a successful actress who at the height of her career in the sixties had appeared in television cult classics "The Avengers" and "The Prisoner". Apart from an elder from the Jesus Fellowship, who'd laid hands on me at a meeting of theirs in central London, she was my very first Christian encourager, if only very briefly. However, I was never to see or speak to her again as I didn't return to the church for several months, and by the time I did as a new believer, I think she'd moved to another church. We kept on missing each other, and she died in June 2001. I've never forgotten her. I left Cornerstone yet again in late summer 2002 in consequence of a desire born of internet research to seek out places of worship existing beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic family of churches. Spiritually speaking, this'd been my whole world for nearly a decade, to the degree that I barely acknowledged any other church as worthy of the name Christian, although I had engaged on a similar search of short duration some years previously. My quest led me to churches known as Cessationist which is to say they don't believe in the continuance of the supernatural Gifts of the Holy Spirit such as Tongues and Prophecy. It also took me to the Sermon Audio website, and I downloaded so many online sermons there that my computer may have crashed as a result. And then there were the discernment ministries, some cessationist, others not, which I visited, pouring over church history ancient and recent for hours on end. I learned alot from them, but I've not returned much to them since. When all's said and done, there's nothing that can lure me from the pure Word of God which has ensured the survival of the Church of Christ for over two millenia. Some Fundamentals and Non-Essentials Among the churches I visited during the wandering year of 2003 were Bethel Baptist Church, Wimbledon, Christ Church, Teddington and Duke Street Church, Richmond, all located in the pleasant and affluent outer suburbs of south west London. Bethel is what is known as an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church, and therefore KJV only, which is to say using the King James Version of the Bible alone. I attended three services at Bethel and fully intended to return for a fourth and so witness the preaching there of David Cloud of Way of Life Ministries, something I was looking forward to doing given that I was familiar with his sermons from the Sermon Audio website, but never did. I was held up at Wimbledon British Rail station for over an hour on my last Sunday at Bethel, and this experience may have put me off travelling by train to church. But the truth is I'd left too many churches in my time and was tiring of the position of new boy brought about by perpetual church-hopping. I now believe church-hopping indeed luke-warm fellowshiping in general to have the potential to be a serious danger to any professing Christian. Christ Church is a Free Church of England fellowship, The Free Church of England having separated from the established C of E in 1844 in response to the High Church Anglicanism of the then Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts. It's resolutely 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 being 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 Free Grace, or rather, Grace Baptist church, while Bethel is free-willist. In consequence, many Calvinists would describe it as Arminian after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius. This isn't an entirely accurate description in my view given that true Arminians maintain that salvation can be lost, while most Independent Fundamentalist Baptists are upholders of what is known as the eternal security of the Saints. In short, they are neither Calvinist nor Arminian, which is an oxymoronic statement to some believers. 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 commandements. Also, while I believe that Christ will return prior to establishing his reign on earth for a literal thousand year period, which makes me a pre-millenialist, a person can maintain that Christ won't return until after the millenium, or that the millenium lies in the past, and still be a saved Christian. These are justifiable differences in scriptural interpretation. Previous to my year of nonstop study, 2003, I knew next to nothing about the foundations of the faith, and yet still possessed a degree of discernment. What's more I had no clue as to the differences between Calvinism and Arminianism, Covenant Theology and Dispensationalism, Cessationism and Continuationism and so on. But I was still saved by the Grace of God; and I don't believe anyone is either saved or damned by believing one or the other of these distinctions. That said, true saving faith must produce fruits, such as repentance, and adherence to sound doctrine. At the same time, I was fairly well versed in the subject of the prophetic interpretation of the Bible thanks to having been introduced to this early in my Christian life by Spencer and Grace Nash, through various magazines and books, including "Prophecy Today". I emerged from that year of nonstop study at peace again with the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement, and yet conscious as never before of the importance of adhering to the fundamentals of the faith once delivered unto the saints. But this didn't last. I recently had to make yet another return to the world of discernment through online research. 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 unity can never be at the expense of the uncompromised purity of the Word of God. |
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