Carl Halling, Elder at The Church of Philadelphia Worldwide
London, England
Introduction
On April 27 2007, I had the honour of being made an elder of the Church of Philadelphia Worldwide, an online church based at Blogster.com under the leadership of Pastor Lane Nickerson of Urbana, Ohio, and whose web address is: http://unlimited.blogster.com. There are those who might question my decision to be a member of a cyber-church in the first place, and in the course of this piece I'll be debating in favour of my having done so, as well as internet churches in general.
Spiritual Rebirth
Anyone who has read my writings thus far will be more than adequately aware of my condition prior to becoming a Christian in January 1993, so I'm not going to go into any further details about it during this brief defence of the e-church phenomenon. Suffice to say that at least partly as a result of it, my walk with God has not been an easy one. But then, is it not so that while coming to faith in Christ produces the salvation of the soul, it doesn't by any means necessarily also ensure perfect freedom from the consequences of sins committed prior to spiritual rebirth? It is entirely up to God how much or even whether He heals.
While it is true is that the thirteen and a half years I've spent as a born again Christian have been marked by a variety of psychological conditions, it is also true that prior to becoming a Christian I was in a far worse shape than I've been since. After all, I was enslaved not just to alcoholism but to very severe Obsessional Compulsive Disorder, both of which God healed me from, as well as other sicknesses, spiritual and otherwise.
I recently held online discussions with Pastor Lane as to the possible nature of the psychological conditions alluded to above. I say possible because needless to say neither Pastor Lane nor myself are mental health specialists. I do feel confident in saying, however, that depression is involved. By this I don't mean life-threatening despair so much as the long-term, low-grade depression of which chronic lack of normal energy and joy of life (anhedonia) are common symptoms. That said, a diagnosis of unipolar, or major, depression might be premature, as I'm also subject to spells of elated hyper-creativity, although these do not extend to garrulous sociability. On the contrary, I tend to social avoidance. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was also mentioned. Among the symptoms of PTSD as I understand it are a reduced interest in the everyday pleasurable activities most people take for granted, anxiety, irritability, hypervigilance, insomnia and emotional detachment.
It goes without saying that I'm hardly the one and only Christian ever to have struggled with some kind of Pauline "thorn in the flesh", whether mental, physical or spiritual, or a combination of these. If I might paraphrase rock'n'roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis of Faraday, Louisiana, we born again believers have chosen a pretty hard road to hoe. Whatever one's opinion of Jerry Lee, he is 100% correct in his assessment of the Christian walk. In the light of all these facts, can any of us in the Body of Christ honestly refuse to admit that membership of an internet church might be spiritually beneficial to many a believer?
A Church Life
I hope I haven't given the impression so far in this apologia that I never attend church in person nor have any intention of everdoing so again, because nothing could be further from the truth. However, I'm not in close fellowship at the present time, which is to say part of a cell or prayer group. In the past, however, I've attended several, and within a variety of churches.
These include Cornerstone, a Charismatic church affiliated to the Word of Faith movement and based in suburban Surrey, which was the very first church I visited on a regular basis, doing so for about two years from 1993. They also include the Riverside Vineyard Christian Fellowship to which I defected from Cornerstone, remaining there for over a year before returning to my first church.
At some point in '97 I started going to morning services at Kingston Baptist Church in south west London. This was in consequence of a short-lived desire on my part to distance myself from the Pentecostal-Charismatic fold. In '99, however, after having spent some months cycling each Sunday to the 2.30pm service at Kensington Temple, an Elim (Pentecostal) church in Notting Hill, a Kingston-based KT cell group under the leadership of Pastor Louis of New York City beckoned and I answered the call. Late in the summer of that year, this mutated into the satellite church Liberty Christian Centre with which I forged very close ties, serving in the worship group from its inception in early 2000 until well into the following year. The church folded in '01, at which point I returned to Cornerstone and still another cell group, remaining there until the end of '02.
I left in consequence of a renewed desire to seek out churches existent beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic family of churches. Among these were Bethel Baptist Church in Wimbledon, SW19. Bethel is an Independant Fundamentalist Baptist church based on the US model, and therefore KJV only, which is to say utilizing the King James Version of the Bible alone. It operates under the gracious leadership of the American pastor, writer and passionate defender of the Authorised Version (A.V. 1611) of the Bible, Dr Jack Moorman. I was happy at Bethel until one Sunday following the evening service, my train home was severely delayed and I found myself stranded at Wimbledon station for over an hour in consequence. Despite this, I fully inteded to return the following Sunday to see Jack's friend Bro. David Cloud preach at the church, but for some reason never did, and I've stayed away ever since. In addition to Bethel, other traditionally evangelical churches I attended more than once throughout 2003 were Hook Evangelical Church, Surbiton, and Christ Church, Teddington, a Free Church of England fellowship whose rector is a passionately Biblical man with the magnetizing voice of a Shakespearean actor.
By the end of 2003, I 'd begun to make a tentative return to the Pentecostal-Charismatic nation, and since then, I've attended churches both within and beyond its boundaries, among them St Stephens, East Twickenham, a massive evangelical Anglican church, which I found to be incredibly compassionate; and yet, despite a brief period in a home group, I've not been back to the church itself since last summer. Increasingly this year I've been frequenting Duke Street Church, a large Baptist church affiliated to the Evangelical Alliance in nearby Richmond, whose minister is a much respected preacher of the Word of God, his sermons appearing weekly on Premiere, London's Christian radio station. However, despite being urged to do so, I've not sought deeper fellowship within Duke Street.
In Defence of the Cyber-Fellowship
This is as good time as any to return to the subject of the Church of Philadephia Worldwide. As I stated earlier, the church is under the leadership of Pastor Lane Nickerson, an ordained minister from the city of Urbana in Ohio who is clearly grounded in the Word of God and is a Bible-believing man who writes, teaches and counsels in a spirit of justice and compassion. Needless to say, not all internet churches are alike; the CPW, for example, does not hold weekly cyber-services. It does, however, provide pastoral care and prayer, and Biblical counselling on the part of Pastor Lane, who strikes me as having been blessed with a rare concern for his fellow believers, to say nothing of wisdom and discernment.
Typing the words internet church in a browser will result in the search engine in use yielding dozens of virtual churches of every conceivable kind. This fact speaks to me of the very strong likelihood that God is using the internet as never before to reach out to those brothers and sisters in the Lord who for one reason or another struggle to attend church on a regular basis, or for that matter those who attend regularly, and yet might find a degree of spiritual encouragement in a virtual church that an actual one is failing to provide them with.
There may be those Christians who will disagree with all or much I have written so far, and yet for the life of me I cannot understand why. After all, is the internet not the single most powerful and momentous means of communication in history? Of course it is, and therefore I believe that as Christians, we have a responsibility to make as much use of the world wide web as is humanly possible to communicate the Message of the Gospel, and with a fervour befitting the fact that the time is short. For example, Brother Lane Nickerson serves as the Pastor of an internet church, and maintains a regular Christian blog, while I write creatively for the Lord, and have been doing so since, when I posted my very first article at blogster.com during a period of despondancy brought on by ill health. Initially, I was slow to nail my Christian colours to the weblog mast, until Lane urged me to write increasingly in an unmistakably Christian spirit. As things stand, I am on the verge of compiling my pieces into an experimental memoir with a strong Christian message. Serving God via the medium of the world wide web gets more exciting and more challenging by the day.
Epilogue
On the 30th of July 2007, after having completed "Apologia for a Cyber-Church", and earmarked it as the penultimate chapter of my memoir, I published it in its definitive form at the FaithWriters.com website.
Thanks Elder Carl!
On April 27 2007, I had the honour of being made an elder of the Church of Philadelphia Worldwide, an online church based at Blogster.com under the leadership of Pastor Lane Nickerson of Urbana, Ohio, and whose web address is: http://unlimited.blogster.com. There are those who might question my decision to be a member of a cyber-church in the first place, and in the course of this piece I'll be debating in favour of my having done so, as well as internet churches in general.
Spiritual Rebirth
Anyone who has read my writings thus far will be more than adequately aware of my condition prior to becoming a Christian in January 1993, so I'm not going to go into any further details about it during this brief defence of the e-church phenomenon. Suffice to say that at least partly as a result of it, my walk with God has not been an easy one. But then, is it not so that while coming to faith in Christ produces the salvation of the soul, it doesn't by any means necessarily also ensure perfect freedom from the consequences of sins committed prior to spiritual rebirth? It is entirely up to God how much or even whether He heals.
While it is true is that the thirteen and a half years I've spent as a born again Christian have been marked by a variety of psychological conditions, it is also true that prior to becoming a Christian I was in a far worse shape than I've been since. After all, I was enslaved not just to alcoholism but to very severe Obsessional Compulsive Disorder, both of which God healed me from, as well as other sicknesses, spiritual and otherwise.
I recently held online discussions with Pastor Lane as to the possible nature of the psychological conditions alluded to above. I say possible because needless to say neither Pastor Lane nor myself are mental health specialists. I do feel confident in saying, however, that depression is involved. By this I don't mean life-threatening despair so much as the long-term, low-grade depression of which chronic lack of normal energy and joy of life (anhedonia) are common symptoms. That said, a diagnosis of unipolar, or major, depression might be premature, as I'm also subject to spells of elated hyper-creativity, although these do not extend to garrulous sociability. On the contrary, I tend to social avoidance. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was also mentioned. Among the symptoms of PTSD as I understand it are a reduced interest in the everyday pleasurable activities most people take for granted, anxiety, irritability, hypervigilance, insomnia and emotional detachment.
It goes without saying that I'm hardly the one and only Christian ever to have struggled with some kind of Pauline "thorn in the flesh", whether mental, physical or spiritual, or a combination of these. If I might paraphrase rock'n'roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis of Faraday, Louisiana, we born again believers have chosen a pretty hard road to hoe. Whatever one's opinion of Jerry Lee, he is 100% correct in his assessment of the Christian walk. In the light of all these facts, can any of us in the Body of Christ honestly refuse to admit that membership of an internet church might be spiritually beneficial to many a believer?
A Church Life
I hope I haven't given the impression so far in this apologia that I never attend church in person nor have any intention of everdoing so again, because nothing could be further from the truth. However, I'm not in close fellowship at the present time, which is to say part of a cell or prayer group. In the past, however, I've attended several, and within a variety of churches.
These include Cornerstone, a Charismatic church affiliated to the Word of Faith movement and based in suburban Surrey, which was the very first church I visited on a regular basis, doing so for about two years from 1993. They also include the Riverside Vineyard Christian Fellowship to which I defected from Cornerstone, remaining there for over a year before returning to my first church.
At some point in '97 I started going to morning services at Kingston Baptist Church in south west London. This was in consequence of a short-lived desire on my part to distance myself from the Pentecostal-Charismatic fold. In '99, however, after having spent some months cycling each Sunday to the 2.30pm service at Kensington Temple, an Elim (Pentecostal) church in Notting Hill, a Kingston-based KT cell group under the leadership of Pastor Louis of New York City beckoned and I answered the call. Late in the summer of that year, this mutated into the satellite church Liberty Christian Centre with which I forged very close ties, serving in the worship group from its inception in early 2000 until well into the following year. The church folded in '01, at which point I returned to Cornerstone and still another cell group, remaining there until the end of '02.
I left in consequence of a renewed desire to seek out churches existent beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic family of churches. Among these were Bethel Baptist Church in Wimbledon, SW19. Bethel is an Independant Fundamentalist Baptist church based on the US model, and therefore KJV only, which is to say utilizing the King James Version of the Bible alone. It operates under the gracious leadership of the American pastor, writer and passionate defender of the Authorised Version (A.V. 1611) of the Bible, Dr Jack Moorman. I was happy at Bethel until one Sunday following the evening service, my train home was severely delayed and I found myself stranded at Wimbledon station for over an hour in consequence. Despite this, I fully inteded to return the following Sunday to see Jack's friend Bro. David Cloud preach at the church, but for some reason never did, and I've stayed away ever since. In addition to Bethel, other traditionally evangelical churches I attended more than once throughout 2003 were Hook Evangelical Church, Surbiton, and Christ Church, Teddington, a Free Church of England fellowship whose rector is a passionately Biblical man with the magnetizing voice of a Shakespearean actor.
By the end of 2003, I 'd begun to make a tentative return to the Pentecostal-Charismatic nation, and since then, I've attended churches both within and beyond its boundaries, among them St Stephens, East Twickenham, a massive evangelical Anglican church, which I found to be incredibly compassionate; and yet, despite a brief period in a home group, I've not been back to the church itself since last summer. Increasingly this year I've been frequenting Duke Street Church, a large Baptist church affiliated to the Evangelical Alliance in nearby Richmond, whose minister is a much respected preacher of the Word of God, his sermons appearing weekly on Premiere, London's Christian radio station. However, despite being urged to do so, I've not sought deeper fellowship within Duke Street.
In Defence of the Cyber-Fellowship
This is as good time as any to return to the subject of the Church of Philadephia Worldwide. As I stated earlier, the church is under the leadership of Pastor Lane Nickerson, an ordained minister from the city of Urbana in Ohio who is clearly grounded in the Word of God and is a Bible-believing man who writes, teaches and counsels in a spirit of justice and compassion. Needless to say, not all internet churches are alike; the CPW, for example, does not hold weekly cyber-services. It does, however, provide pastoral care and prayer, and Biblical counselling on the part of Pastor Lane, who strikes me as having been blessed with a rare concern for his fellow believers, to say nothing of wisdom and discernment.
Typing the words internet church in a browser will result in the search engine in use yielding dozens of virtual churches of every conceivable kind. This fact speaks to me of the very strong likelihood that God is using the internet as never before to reach out to those brothers and sisters in the Lord who for one reason or another struggle to attend church on a regular basis, or for that matter those who attend regularly, and yet might find a degree of spiritual encouragement in a virtual church that an actual one is failing to provide them with.
There may be those Christians who will disagree with all or much I have written so far, and yet for the life of me I cannot understand why. After all, is the internet not the single most powerful and momentous means of communication in history? Of course it is, and therefore I believe that as Christians, we have a responsibility to make as much use of the world wide web as is humanly possible to communicate the Message of the Gospel, and with a fervour befitting the fact that the time is short. For example, Brother Lane Nickerson serves as the Pastor of an internet church, and maintains a regular Christian blog, while I write creatively for the Lord, and have been doing so since, when I posted my very first article at blogster.com during a period of despondancy brought on by ill health. Initially, I was slow to nail my Christian colours to the weblog mast, until Lane urged me to write increasingly in an unmistakably Christian spirit. As things stand, I am on the verge of compiling my pieces into an experimental memoir with a strong Christian message. Serving God via the medium of the world wide web gets more exciting and more challenging by the day.
Epilogue
On the 30th of July 2007, after having completed "Apologia for a Cyber-Church", and earmarked it as the penultimate chapter of my memoir, I published it in its definitive form at the FaithWriters.com website.
Thanks Elder Carl!
Web Site: | ||
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About Me: | Carl Halling. Born West London 1955. Christian artist (actor, singer, guitarist, songwriter, writer). See Favourite Links below left for more information: Song: Moonstruck |
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