For most of the following year (1996) I served variously as MC, script writer, actor, singer and musician for Street Level, a Christian theatre company based at the Elim Pentecostal church in West Croydon, Surrey. We were a group of three consisting of myself, and two Croydon girls, married company leader Sally and 19 year old Esther, and we toured several shows around schools in various tough multicultural south London areas including Croydon itself, as well as Thornton Heath, Crystal Palace, Norwood, Norbury and others. 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 quite deprived backgrounds - were incredibly receptive to our productions, and we were greeted by them with an almost uniform affection, which was a surprise and a delight to me at least, and for a few brief months in 1996, Street Level was on fire with afranticcreativityleadingto shows with a radical Christian message performed to great success for the benefit of some of the capital’s least privileged young people. Until things started to go wrong.
 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”. This I set about doing, and after some weeks of labouring over what turned out to be an unwieldy and often violent epic marked by scenes of the blackest humour, my spiritual health started to suffer. What’s more, I'd started to tire of the long and costly early morning train journeys to Croydon via Wimbledon or Clapham Junction. As a result I started slowly withdrawing from Street Level, which wasn't very kind of me because I think Sally had 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 afresh crew of young Christian actors. As things turned out, "Paul Grim's Progress" 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 this time, I'd defected from Cornerstone to the Thames Vineyard Christian Fellowship based near Twickenham, having heard that the Vineyard movement contained members whose spiritual gifts were exceptional. My curiosity aroused, I went along one Sunday evening and had a powerful experience which made me want to stay. As I'd done with Cornerstone I joined a Home Fellowship group where I did part of the Alpha course, which had been pioneered by Nicky Gumbel of the famous Charismatic Anglican church Holy Trinity Brompton. I'd visited HTB at some point during this period, which was witnessing the height of the revival movement known as the Toronto Blessing, as well as other churches affected by the Blessing, including Pioneer People in Esher, where I'd seen Gerald Coates preach.
 In 1999, I was appointed chief musician for Liberty Christian Centre, the small suburban church I was attending at the time which 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. 

 While a new beginning came towards the end of 2000 when I was made lead singer for a Swing band called Nuages - after the famous instrumental by French Jazz guitarist Django Reinhard - this was counterbalanced soon afterwards by the sad dissolution of Liberty. And so, in early '01 I made yet another return to Cornerstone, only to leave it for the last time in late summer 2002.
 This sudden exit came in consequence of a desire born of intensive 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’ssaidanddone,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.
 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, in other words 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 church which emphasizes the Calvinist Doctrines of Grace, 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 Baptist fellowships 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, it goes without saying that a person can maintain that Christ won’t return until after the millenium,orthatthemillenium lies in the past, and still be a saved Christian. These are justifiable differences in scriptural interpretation.
 Before 2003 which was my year of nonstop 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 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 such as “Prophecy Today” and the works of Barry R Smith. 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.
 I emerged from that year of intensive 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.
 Until recently when I became a member of Duke Street, I hadn't been settled within a church since 2001, which points to a restlessness which 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. But 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 nonstop research and the fervid taking of notes. The most recent topic of this kind was the purported spread of pagan religion in the antedeluvian world following the destruction of the Tower of Babel when God confused the languages, and I couldn't wait to be free of it. Words, ideas have such preternatural power over me, but then I'm highly sensitive on a psychological level, and perhaps others too. Whether this is genetic or environmental or both I can't say. I find myself deeply troubled by speculation regarding aspects of the antedeluvian world such as the Nephilim unless these come from strictly Biblical sources - and I greatly admire the courage of true Biblical Watchmen - but it's an area I'd rather leave be for the sake of my peace of mind, especially when the non-canonical books of the Bible such as the Book of Enoch are brought to bear.
 The truth is 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 possibility. From time to time however, I'm tempted to venture beyond my comfort zone into the realm of the mysteries of the Bible and history. It's hard for the intellectually curious not to wish to do so, and the Bible makes it clear that in the days immediately prior to the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, knowledge shall increase (Daniel 12:4), and this may well be via the miraculous medium of the World Wide Web. But a love of knowledge, as well as extreme sensitivity, which may also be on the increase, are in my view dangerous qualities unless anchored to true Biblical faith.