Growth movement

Watching an introduction session to Grace School of the Bible, Jordan said, “The issue in the ministry is to present every person you minister to as perfect. It’s to bring them to the place of being thoroughly and completely equipped to function as a member of the Body of Christ.

“The Bible’s got a lot to say about growing and becoming established in the faith. Eph. 4:11 says, ‘And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers.’

“How else is the Body of Christ going to be built up and edified? It’s through the work of the ministry. How’s it going to be carried on? By perfected saints. It’s the only way.

“The Word saturates you. It produces growth. Ministry comes as the result of spiritual growth. You know what happens when you grow? You begin to move.

“I remember down in Alabama we’d sit out on a hot August evening on an 80-acre field, out front of the farm house we lived in, and my wife and I would just relax out there. It’d be hot and we’d be fanning and trying to get cool in the evening.

“About every third year, Mr. Adams on that farm, he planted corn and I always hated it when he did. You ever heard corn grow? You’d sit out there in the August night heat and hear it pop. It sounded like popcorn going off. It was those stalks expanding. You were literally hearing it grow as it stretched.

“When you grow there’s movement. As you grow spiritually, momentum and movement follows and it increases. The way to get people to go do the work of the ministry is to get them to grow up because that movement and activity and work will be a natural byproduct.

“Romans 15: 14 is my heart’s desire, to be able to say this about myself and about those people to whom and with whom I minister, and if I had a verse I wanted to say about you coming out of the School it would be Romans 15:14.

“We’ve made a commitment to follow Paul. If I want the work of the ministry to be done, I’ve got to produce some perfected saints who the doctrine then goes and motivates to do the work of the ministry.

*****

“Back in the early ’70s I sat down in a little farmhouse out in the Autauga County, Ala. (it wasn’t even a city) out in the middle of nowhere, 17 miles from the nearest town. I’d been through high school and college and been through Bible school, and then I went up in those woods in that territory and started a church and got involved with a local ministry.

“I lived in a house trailer on the farm with my wife. All three of my kids were born there. We had enough money to go to town three times a week. Two of them were on Sunday. One of them was on Monday to buy $10 worth of groceries for the week and any of the rest of the time I wanted to go in I had to hitchhike. I went back and forth many times just that way.

“But I had a lot of time to study. And after about six months of that out there in those woods I realized I didn’t know what in the world I was doing! I said, ‘Lord, I’ve been to school, I’ve learned everything they taught me in school. I read all the time. I’m just taking stuff in and I don’t have any idea what I’m doing! I can tell you what every theologian said that’s been published, and I know what all the Neo-orthodox’s say and Neo-evangelicals; I know what they all say, but I don’t know what to do!’

“And I said, ‘Paul said perfected saints do the work of the ministry. I desperately want to know how to be a perfected saint.’

“That’s when I began to find the design in Paul’s epistles for it. I spent seven years of my life working this stuff through.”