Traveling LIGHT

If you read through the Book of Acts and look at Paul and his travels, you’ll notice he very seldom was ever by himself.

“Paul had big entourages going with him,” says Jordan. “Why would he take a guy from Berea, and a guy from Thessalonica and a guy from over there? Why was he taking these guys around with him all the time? He just wanted somebody to carry his briefcase? No, these are guys in training, because the best way to learn something is to go do it with somebody who knows how they’re doing it and for them to let you do it and watch you do it and then help you. It’s a growing process.”

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The Plymouth Brethren Movement (named after the English seaside town of Plymouth) started in the mid-1800s. Within a 25-year period the group had taken the gospel all around the world.

“Michigan preacher Tom Brusha met some people in a Holland fishing village on the coast who understood right division and they had never heard of anybody in America,” says Jordan. “They weren’t interested in meeting anybody from America. They didn’t need us.

“Because they’re fishermen, they went down the coast in Europe, around Africa, up into India, and they had fishing ports where they could stop and stay and meet brethren from their fellowship. There are people all down the European coast and all down through Africa and all up over India who understood some of this stuff in the 1800s!  A man from New Zealand once gave me a book about right division written in the 1800s.

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“What the Industrialization era did to Christendom is it took everything out of the local church and out of the hands of the local ministries and put it into the hands of institutions and the cookie-cutter kind of assembly-line process and the seminary and education system you see today.

“Seminaries and bible colleges are built on a similar model that came out of the Industrial Revolution where you send people off somewhere and you have a cookie-cutter thing that makes them and then you send them out through the process, and what that does is it builds the alma-mater mentality. It builds loyalty to the institution.

“Brother Marvin Taylor, who comes out an Independent Baptist background, says when you’re in Independent Baptist circles, people talk about being independent but all you have to do is ask the guy where he went to school to know what he’s into.

“That’s backwards of the way it ought to be. The local church is the institution God established for the work of the ministry. He never established anything beyond that, and so what our philosophy has been is to try and help ministries that way.”

“The church isn’t the building; it’s just a tool. Just like the songbook is just a tool. You can’t remember all the words so you put them in a book as a memory aid. Pianos and organs are just tools to try to keep us on tune.

“The local church is the Believers gathering together. It’s not a glorified Bible class. It’s a group of saints gathering together around the truth for the purpose of the work of the ministry--evangelism and edification.

“When you look at Paul’s ministry model, what he does is he goes into a town, finds a strategic location, goes in, preaches the gospel, gets some people saved, gets them established in the doctrines of grace and understanding of who they are, and then entrusts that work of ministry to those local people.

“Paul would leave them and go to the next place and leave a ministry there. Now, that whole scenario of the way Paul does the work of the ministry is the way God designed it to be, so if you’re going to train people that would be the logical place.”