Since my first use of the internet in 1995 right through until 2005 I had become a porn addicted hypocrite. I rarely confessed and when I did, the discipling I received was flaccid. In the summer of 2005 I confessed to my wife who compassionately saw I needed help. One of my best friends at the time came to me with news of an anti-porn conference being held in Belfast. I was desperate. Four of us attended in an act of radical repentance. Oliver Greenwood travelled to Belfast from London. Two others came from the Belfast ICOC. All of us were regular users of porn. It was life changing, not because of the denominational Christians (mostly older women and men) or the former female ‘porn’stitute’ who spoke powerfully yet with such dignity. Nor was it because of a 65 year old Welsh man with a shock of bright white hair who boasted of 20 years of purity which filled me with jealousy! All these were inspiring. In every break we four disciples had a Discipleship group. We vowed to hold one another accountable and we followed through. I was able to pray in a visionary way again. There had been a glass ceiling on my prayers in many ways due to the natural guilt that went with my habit. Within 6 months of our repentance the Spirit had led all four of us to join the International Christian Church in three different cities both sides of the Atlantic! As a direct result we have had a World sector in Europe since that time.

So, is masturbating to internet porn like REAL sexual immorality? Exactly HOW alike is it? How does God feel about it and what are the natural consequences? These are major questions relevant to the church due to the increase of internet porn consumption since 1991.

Recently, right after our European Missions Conference 2019, when I returned to Birmingham I sat down with my wife. I asked her to sit with me for 5 minutes and look at a pornographic image on our TV screen. [I wanted to get a reaction from my readers about how immoral it actually would be! Just to be clear, I did not do that. I just wrote that sentence to help my readers see that would be crossing a line]. Is it like ordinary lust where I’m in the street and see a woman half dressed or like walking past and lusting over a series of lingerie stores in a shopping mall. On the scale between a lustful thought and plain old physical sexual acts with someone other than a man’s wife where does internet porn sit? Matthew chapter five, verses twenty seven and twenty eight are pretty clear!

Consider a worst case scenario. Child porn. An actual child has been molested. How much lesser of a sin is it, to look at that child being molested as if you were present? What are the consequences? Research has been undertaken that seems to suggest that incidence of reported rape has decreased since use of pornography has increased. Research clearly also shows a correlation between porn and sex crimes. I will reference this later. Is it OK for one child to be raped so that millions of people can fantasise and leave real children alone? Some people seem to think so! Is it true that porn isn’t really hurting anyone?

I recently correlated the growth of the porn industry with the decline of the ICOC and it confirmed something I have suspected for years. Would it come as a surprise to know that many members of the ICOC began masturbating to porn in the 1990s at exactly the time when the growth slowed and came to a halt? I can say for certain this is the case and it has remained so for the last 28 years.

Look at the following statistics from a Christian website for denominational churches:

68 percent of church-going men and over 50 percent of pastors view porn on a regular basis. Of young Christian adults 18-24 years old, 76 percent actively search for porn.
Only 13 percent of self-identified Christian women say they never watch porn—87 percent of Christian women have watched porn.
57 percent of pastors say porn addiction is the most damaging issue in their congregation. And 69 percent say porn has adversely impacted the church.
Only 7 percent of pastors say their church has a program to help people struggling with pornography.
(charismenews)

It is clear from these statistics which are widely available on the internet that church religion is riddled with impurity and the regular use of Internet Pornography. This goes for both male and female members of denominational churches and also applies to rank and file members and those in leadership. This is, in actual fact, a lifestyle of attending a religious group as well as being involved in sexually immoral practices. A porn habit sears the conscience of a true believer toward God and the opposite sex but it is widely known and accepted as normal behaviour in modern society. This also follows the pattern of pagan religions described in the Old Testament common among the nations that surrounded Israel. These included the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Amorites, the Edomites, the Moabites and (after they had been corrupted by the Moabites), the Midianites.
[When Moses left Egypt the first time, Midian was a monotheistic people worshipping the Most High God’ (Exodus 2:16-22, 4:24-26, 18:9-12). By the time 40 years had passed Midian had been absorbed into pagan religion with its immoral practices (Num 22:2-6) and allied with Moab to the extent that the execution of a Midianite woman (Num 25:6-9) was sufficient to stop the plague brought on the Israelites by their sexual immorality with the Moabites and Midianites! The Midianites were held responsible (Num 25:16-18, 31:1-2, 7-9, 14-18, 32-35). God’s punishment on those who corrupt His people is specific and full of His justice. The Israelite man who took the high born Midianite woman Kozbi (Num 25:16-18) to his tent (Num 25:6) thinking that he was OK, because Moses had married a high born Midianite (Ex 2:16, 21-22) 40 years prior back when they were a faithful people, was greatly deceived but only until the spear of Phinehas hit him between the shoulder blades! There is a lesson here too for those members of the ICC who fall away and think there is a refuge in the religious practices of the ICOC because they were at one point in the past, the movement of God.]

It is my opinion therefore, that God’s people that were the ICOC, since 1991 are slowly becoming a type of new-age pagan religion. Like the Israelites they had the right relationship with the one true God but the ICOC squandered their sonship in line with a master scheme of Satan to infiltrate their homes and personal devices with 1000s of prostitute services leading to porn fuelled masturbation addiction. This is a huge piece of the puzzle in answering the question ‘why did the ICOC fall apart?’.

I was a member of the ICOC when it disintegrated into hundreds of separate groups in 2003. I was one of the many porn addicted men that brought on the Lord’s fierce anger against us and my unrepentant heart helped lead to the apostasy that has set in since then. I was baptised in 1990. From 1995 until 2009 I had regular private access to the internet and lived a religious life that was punctuated with regular communing with images and videos prepared for me, mainly by thousands of professional sex workers. My usage of porn increased as my access became easier, cheaper and more private. At times I only used on a monthly basis ‘white knuckling’ my temptations. One expert in porn recovery, porn-free for over a decade put it this way:

“If you only masturbate once in 3 months you are enslaved and captivated by porn. You are probably not enslaved if you are more than 1 year free.”

By this definition I was enslaved for most of a decade. At some point in this process I accepted the double standard as a life style. Accountability and disciplinary process in the ICOC was not consistent and this contributed to the frequency and longivity of my addiction and the setting in of lukewarmess in my view of the world and the church. One of the main reasons I joined the International Christian Church was my desperate need for discipling with the full biblical panoply of strategies especially including rebuking sin which was non-existent in public preaching and private discipling in the ICOC in 2005. I was overwhelmed with relief to receive the familiar voice of challenging preaching of the Word of God when I visited Portland for the 2006 January Winter Workshop. It brought many a tear to my eye. Tears of relief and repentance. I had become part of a fallen Midianite Kingdom once full of faithful and true worshippers but in 2005 I came home.

Perhaps the temptation to be sexually immoral has been one of the greatest pulls on the people of God (as with all of humanity): to follow the desires of the flesh and to commit sexual acts outside of marriage leading to all sorts of consequences and punishments. Sexual immorality is listed first in a number of the sin lists in the New Testament. It has a whole chapter in the law in terms of forbidden sexual relations (Leviticus 18). It is hardly surprising that sexual immorality is one of the main reasons for believers to fall away throughout the whole Bible. I will clear up one issue that may be bothering my readers right here. My wife refused to look at porn of any kind! I hope that my question to her highlighted the philisophical issue sufficiently for my readers. Porn is sexually immoral!

As the people of Israel entered and settled in the Promised Land they were surrounded by tribes and groups that were worshipping various different pagan gods and very often the worship involved some kind of sexual impurity or sexual immorality and in some cases child sacrifice, an ancient form of modern abortion and so also a consequence of the pagan’s sexual practices. When they eventually took over most of the promised land they were of course bordered by pagan nations and this provided its own challenge (Isa 65:1-5). After the conquest of Canaan, throughout the period of the Judges, we see the people being polluted by the beliefs and practices of the surrounding pagan tribes. Years earlier in the desert before the conquest of Caanan the Midianites and Moabites had given the people of Israel a taste of the kind of sexual pleasure they could have if they involved themselves even in a small way in pagan religious practices. This stain remained on Israel for their whole period as a nation and it is seen particularly during the period of the Judges (Jos 22:17). This period immediately follows their time in the wilderness where they had fallen into the worship of the Golden Calf (fashioned after Egyptian deities) and then the Baal of Peor with the Moabites and Midianites.

The struggle with attraction to the Pagan religions did not start with the Moabites. The father of the nation of Israel (Jacob) had at least one son (Judah) who married a pagan Canaanite woman (Gen 38:1-5) whose culture was well known for immoral life styles (Gen 18:20-21). This practice also became accepted in the ICOC after 2003! Of course, this is only natural after more than a decade of habitual porn use. Judah (ancestor of Jesus) incidentally committed sexual immorality with ‘prostitutes’ too (Gen 38:15). It was therefore not surprising that the people could at some point, be seduced by greater numbers of women, coming to them to deliberately seduce them. This is what happened to the Israelites camped in the desert only weeks before the people crossed the Jordan for the initial conquest of Caanan (Num 25:1-9). Clearly, one of Satan’s best weapons (2 Cor 2:11) right before the biggest victories of God’s people is the sexually loaded attack. As stated in my introduction the ICOC came under this attack in 1991 and to this day they have not recovered. I am providing a timeline here to show the correlation between the church growth tipping points identified by Andy Fleming in his paper against centralised leadership and the rise and growth in Andy’s church, the ICOC, of habitual masterbation fueled with internet porn addiction.

PORN ICOC TIMELINE

1991 First Internet browser released to general public.

1991 First ICOC crisis growth recorded in San Diego and Boston ICOC.

1991 to 1992, the number of new hard-core titles released increased by 500%

1992 Crisis growth spreads to Sao Paulo and London ICOC. Continues chronically in San Diego and Boston.

1992 to 1993, the number of new hard-core titles released increased by 500%

1993 crisis growth continues in London and spreads to San Francisco

1993 to 1994, the number of new hard-core titles released increased by 500%

1994 crisis growth returns to San Diego after a one year reprieve and continues to a three year stretch in London.

1994 to 1995, the number of new hard-core titles released increased by 500%

1994 Richard Gordon, created online credit card transactions for porn sites. Suddenly memberships and downloads statistics soared.

1994 Dutch porn company ‘Red Light District’ invent streaming video

1994 Boeringer, S. B. (1994). Pornography and Sexual Aggression: Associations of Violent and Nonviolent Depictions with Rape and Rape Proclivity. Deviant Behavior 15, 3: 289–304;

1995 Allen, M., Emmers, T., Gebhardt, L., and Giery, M. A. (1995). Exposure to Pornography and Acceptance of the Rape Myth. Journal of Communication 45, 1: 5–26.

1995 after seeing some decline in growth in previous years Chicago ICOC hits the first Tipping Point after which it never recovered. All subsequent years were negative growth.

1995 Public furor in USA over internet pornography started with the publication of a study, “Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway,” in The Georgetown Law Journal.

1995 July 3, Time magazine cover story showed a young boy at a computer keyboard, bathed in blue light, eyes wide, mouth opened in horror. “CYBERPORN,” the cover line screamed, “a new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is.

1995 to 1996, the number of new hard-core titles released increased by 500%

1996 3 key churches outside the USA hit Tipping Points, Moscow, Manila and Lagos. None recover. Furthermore 1996 saw 10 more of the churches over 2000 in membership hit Declining Growth Points, bringing to 13 out of 16 those large churches seen clearly with hindsight to have been in irreversible crisis.

1996 US Census Bureau, the number of homes with computers was skyrocketing—approaching 36 percent of US households, up from 22.8 percent in 1993, and just 8 percent in 1984. One in five Americans were now using the internet.

1996 to 1997, the number of new hard-core titles released increased by 500%

1997 On June 26, 1997, after more than a year of heated debate about the censoring of the internet, the United States Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act for violating the First Amendment.

1998 Boston and Johannesburg ICOC hit their Tipping Points.

1998 porn addicted campus age kids hit the universities.
“Children born in the 1980s onward are the first to grow up in a world where they have access to the Internet beginning in their teenage years,” the researchers write, “and this early exposure and access to Internet pornography may be the primary driver” of this INCREASE.
Eleven is the average age that a child is first exposed to porn, and 94 percent of children will see porn by the age of 14.
(charisma news 2019)

2001 All 16 of the ICOC CHURCHES over 2000 members had hit the Tipping Points. THERE WAS NO ‘MOVEMENT’!

2018 According to Carvaka Adult Toys’ research, there are at least 30 million unique visitors checking out online porn every second of every day.

“Lesbian” was the most-searched-for porn term on the world’s largest free porn site in 2018. (Pornhub Analytics)

—————-

HARD TO PROOVE?
It is particularly interesting that one of the first clear cases of falling away due to sexual immorality is Noah’s son Ham. It has been the subject of much debate whether or not Ham actually sinned by simply gazing upon his father’s nakedness. Noah’s drunkeness was a mitigating factor (Gen 9:21). What is clear is that, whatever he did and for whatever reason he did it, he sinned and the sin was punished by God (Gen 9:25). It is quite often the case that when someone falls away and particularly if it involves sexual sin, that not everyone remaining faithful knows the details. This leaves people guessing and feeling somewhat in the dark. Such was the case with Ham. We don’t know the details of how Ham was taken out by his sin. Some mystery surrounds Ham’s fall. Was he incestuous, homosexually attracted, vulgar or voyeuristic or a combination of these? We don’t have all the facts. Isn’t that sometimes the way! I think this is providential to have as one of the first cases of sexual immorality and falling away in the Bible. It can be the case that when someone falls away they don’t want anyone in the church to know exactly why. I put forward the argument that this can often be because they know what people will think, when they find out that they left the church for a sexual partner. When they were in the church, they knew people who left the church because they wanted to be in a sexually impure or sexually immoral relationship and they heard the kind of conversations that people had. Mature disciples will try not to be overly condemning of these individuals and hope that they will come to their senses and realise the error of leaving the Lord. Nonetheless, oftentimes discipline might have to be applied to those people who leave. This is also something that those who fall away into darkness may want to avoid. Sometimes they may simply just be ashamed and have a certain knowledge that what they’re doing is wrong and so they don’t want to broadcast it. Some may even have the motive of not wanting to be a bad example to other people that they know might fall away because of their sin.
In any case falling away because of sexual sin is not something that is broadcasted unnecessarily within the church. The church members try hard not to slander those who leave. Sometimes there is a necessity for the person who has left to be marked and in this case it will be made public. But that is not always necessary and in some cases it may even be shameful to discuss what has happened and so it’s not a matter for public discussion in the church.

Of course, in many other cases it is clear the people have left the Lord to be in a sexually impure relationship. Those who do so may broadcast the fact on social media and even directly to members of the church who they’ve been friends with sometimes in a very provocative way. In the case of Ham he found his father naked and went and broadcasted Noah’s predicament to his brothers who responded in a much more righteous manner by covering him up.
This case of Ham has in fact more of the dynamics of porn than sexual intercourse. In the same way that people who are sexually immoral want to slip away from the church quietly in many cases it is also the case that not all of the porn addiction is confessed. This sin is surrounded by secrecy and shame (Eph 5:12). Members who masquerade as Christians will find it it inappropriate or even random to be asked about their internet purity.

Our worst persecutors could not have conceived a bolder attack on such a grand scale as the growth of the porn industry and its effect on the Kingdom of God on earth. Since 1991, the World consumed huge resources (at least 100s of billions of USD), to put in high speed internet services by cable and Over The Air.

Not only did the ICOC consume large amounts of porn content during their decline but they were simultaneously spinning their wheels in the manure infested world of ever increasing porn addicts (Mt 24:12) trying to reverse the negative growth with hard work. Since 1991 there has without doubt been a steady increase in wickedness throughout the entire world. Without a radical counter cultural porn detoxification process, involving biblical principals of repentance, the church will face a world that is not only harder to convert but which will resist retention in the church due to a lack of true repentance before baptism. It typically took a few weeks to get through First Principles bible studies with an open candidate in the 1990s. Porn and masturbation came up usually during the second week. That gave approximately a week or two of abstinence before baptism which is not near enough time to deal with deeper issues relating to porn addiction. With no post baptism strengthening, it is not surprising then that the retention rates dropped steadily in the 1990s. Not only were longer standing members becoming addicted but more and more candidates for baptism were already addicted. Andy Fleming’s paper erroneously lays the blame for the ICOC’s negative growth with the central leadership practices of the ICOC. Douglas Jacoby’s recent lesson on falling away misses this crucial point entirely and Gordon Ferguson’s solutions to the current 2-3% growth rate of the former ICOC churches does not mention porn.

At the EMC 2019 I had a brief and powerful conversation with the lead Cyber Evangelist for the ICC, Jeremy Ciaramella, who is also the designer of a purity course in the Phoenix ICC for breaking habitual porn use. But special discipling arrangements exist in all ICC churches to escalate church discipline on members who stubbornly refuse to repent of this immoral and damaging sin. I have seen men in our leadership warned before the church and a number of brothers removed from the membership and restored. I am also aware that those who have left our fellowship (including those who are ‘moving’ to the former ICOC churches) have done so as unrepentant in this area and I firmly believe many would have persevered if they had dealt with this sin.

Over 3000 years ago, the pagan Moabite King, Balak received high grade intelligence from his false prophet, Balaam (Rev 2:14). He became a true disciple of Satan that day! He had discipling on persecution from a false prophet insanely greedy for the bounty Balak had offered him to stop the advancing Hebrews (2 Pet 2:15-16). ‘Balaam.. taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by committing sexual immorality.’ His teaching still rang clear in the ears of men and women of the ICOC from 1991 onward and still does to this day. Porn fuelled masterbation uses real women and is actual sexual immorality in God’s eyes. It is not impurity as in the case of masterbation without porn. God’s fierce anger burns against His people when they refuse to see this fact and He is limited in how many souls he can save with such a people. Having spoken to a representative sample of brothers from both the former ICOC churches and the ICC I am fully convinced that our growth rates are linked, both to our attitude towards how we deal with porn addiction in our membership and those we study the Bible with, as well as how many of us are actually already engaged in this immorality. The former ICOC recently reports 2.4% growth. The ICC approximately 27% growth. This indicates that statistics reported above for denominational churches most likely apply to the former ICOC churches today. Some of my more sceptical readers will imagine that these claims are very hard to prove. I beg to differ. Just have the boldness to go and ask all the men that you regularly meet with for church on Sunday ‘When was the last time you masturbated using internet Pornography?’ You can prove this for yourself! The future of the church on Earth will be largely dependent, in our generation, on how radical we are in introducing a counter cultural revolution against pornography and masturbation. Andy Fleming is wrong. Douglas Jacoby is wrong. Gordon Ferguson is wrong. Blaming Kip McKean or Central Leadership for the falling away of the ICOC while we are still indulging in a lifestyle held captive to Satan’s scheme is fantastical thinking. It is truly ridiculous to relegate the history and present reality of God’s modern day movement to the genre of Fantasy and Myth (2 Tim 4:3-4). So many still have not sought to understand what God is doing in the ICC. When God’s anger is burning against us we need to repent. The spear of Phinheas is and always has been the only answer! Repent.

Remnant Rats 8.1

RR 8.1 Catastrophic Christianity – Money and losing your Salvation – settling for less