St Mildred’s Church in Addiscombe launched the WOW Church (Without Walls Church) website last May.

It has short talks and, unlike most churches, they are not filmed services but are the preachers talking to viewers at home on their laptop.

Leander Gardner was one of those behind the idea, she told Premier the whole idea started a year ago when they were looking at the St Mildred’s Centre she runs: “we have about 1500 visitors a week but when we really looked at how the visitors’ profile broke down we realised that only 0.7% of our visitors were actually in between the 13-25 age bracket. So we were really missing something important there and those same statistics were mirrored in our church congregation.”

“So the idea of running something like an alpha youth project was really a bit of a pipe dream because where would the people come from?”

The idea came about as Gardner thought about her own children and how they spend time online, so the church applied for funding from the diocese of Southwark. The idea was shaped by a focus group of 13-25 year olds, who helped design the look of the website.

She explained how it worked if you typed a question: “You will connect to one of our specially trained chat hosts. We were supported in this initiative by the Samaritans in Croydon who helped us train our chat hosts, and they will chat to you and they will answer…

In the disturbing 40-second clip posted online and viewed millions of times by people on different social media platforms, the French-speaking clergyman is seen to get noticeably frustrated as a baby cries as he administers a baptism.

While the child is held by a woman thought to be his mother, the priest grabs the youngster’s face before lashing out and slapping the crying child around the face.

Congregants gasp before a man who is thought to be the father struggles with the priest to release the child from his grasp.

People voiced their opinions on the clergyman’s actions after the video surfaced online.

Just seen a video of a priest slapping a baby across the face & now my anxiety is through the roof I hate this world we live in sometimes!

— Leonnie (@littleonetalks) June 21, 2018

One user tweeted: “The video going around of the priest SLAPPING that baby during the baptism makes me sick to my stomach. No baby deserves to be hit ever.”

Me and that priest after slapping my baby… pic.twitter.com/wFhVSPAYfW

— (@KOolAiDKG) June 21, 2018

While another said: “That priest slapping a baby video was so disturbing and just plain evil! Ugh I wish I can unsee it.”

It is unclear who the priest or anyone else in the video is.

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The charity says labelling the believers in the region this way is both unhelpful and degrading.

Explaining why, Tim Livesey, Embrace the Middle East’s CEO told Premier: “It’s very demoralising and it’s the opposite in a sense I think of what Christians in the Middle East would like us to be thinking.

“They would like us to think that they are in many ways really very special and within the Christian global context, very important – and they are.”

Christians make up approximately 5 per cent of the population in the Middle East – down from 20 per cent in the early 20th century.

However, Livesey said the decline can’t solely be put down to the desire by extreme elements within the Muslim majority to eradicate Christianity from the region.

“Persecution is pretty rare… when ISIS was [more active] in Iraq for example – for sure there was persecution of Christians but also of course of non-Christians,” he said.

“So it’s not to say that there isn’t violence in the region – there is – and Christians, along with people of other faith, suffer from that.”

The charity and its partners held an event in Westminster on Thursday to discuss with Parliamentarians and policy makers what life is really like for Christians in the region.

Dr Souraya Bechealany, acting general secretary of the Middle East Council of Churches said Westerners…

The Baptist Union, the Church of Scotland, the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church joined in urging ministers to re-think their approach, aspects of which they said “run counter to Christian teaching”.

Lucy Zwolinska from the Joint Public Issues Team (JPIT), which represents the four churches, told Premier’s Inspirational Breakfast: “It’s about treating people decently.

“Like Jesus promises us life in abundance, we are called to see the good in everyone; when we deny people basic services, when we force them into destitution, we deny that in them.”

Clampdowns on illegal immigrants seeking access to free healthcare or wanting to rent a property are among steps the Government has taken to encourage people residing unlawfully in the UK to leave, in recent years.

Other measures to boost the number of so-called “self-deportations” include threatening employers with hefty fines – and even prison sentences – if they do not check the immigration status of their workers.

It has also become harder for illegal immigrants to obtain a driver’s license or open a bank account.

Insisting that the “hostile environment” policy has gone too far, Lucy Zwolinska said: “This means that it deliberately inflicts destitution on people.

“Now, this in itself – as churches – we think is inappropriate; destitution should never be used as…