With a heritage like this . . . !

In the 1950s, Life Magazine ran a photo taken from off the platform of the Wilson El station in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago and looking toward the lake. In the background was the large billboard-style sign that still sits atop the old North Shore Church building at the corner of Wilson Avenue and Sheridan Road: Christ Died For Our Sins.

The landmark sign, one you can actually glimpse driving southbound on Lake Shore Drive in the wintertime when the trees are bare, remains a gospel witness to thousands of Chicagoans every day.

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Recalls Jordan, “On J.C. O’Hair’s 25^th anniversary of ministry in 1948, Louis Talbot, the president of Biola University (a private evangelical Christian school near Los Angeles) came to North Shore and spoke and testified about traveling by train across the nation, listening on the radio and hearing O’Hair’s voice preach the gospel of grace and what a privilege it was for him to be part of such a tremendous heritage.

“Do you know the first missionaries to go to the foreign fields preaching the Word of God rightly divided went out of North Shore Church? In fact, in the early days, almost all of the missionaries period who were on the field came out of North Shore Church. The assembly had 800 in attendance at the time and those saints were hyper-focused on sending people to the mission field.

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When Jordan arrived on the scene in the late ’70s, the Northside neighborhood had become one of the most dangerous in the entire city.

“We had people come into the church and mug our folks inside the church building it was such a tough neighborhood!” recalls Jordan. “We literally had neighborhood folks drive in the evenings; only the commuters would come to church because people wouldn’t walk a block and a half they were so afraid of being mugged on the street. The commuters would ride up to the front door before getting out of the car. We had a parking lot with a big storm fence around it and an armed guard over in the bank parking lot would watch your car while you were in the church.

“I’m from Alabama and the first Sunday we went to church, we drove up, got out of the car, went in and came back out to find somebody had swiped the CB radio out of the console. Welcome to Chicago!

“They were nice about it; instead of yanking the harness and all out, they unscrewed it and laid out the bolts and all. They didn’t mess with my car; they just took my radio.

“I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know how to deal with these people and all this stuff.’ I went downtown to Moody Bible Institute and they had a course called ‘Urban Evangelism,’ and I thought, ‘I’m going to find out how you deal with city people.’

“I was in that class three weeks and I thought, ‘This guy doesn’t know either.’ I went from there up to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (Deerfield, IL) and sat down with the head of the missions department, the head of urban evangelism, but he didn’t know how to do it either. He also didn’t know how to reach Catholics. I said, ‘What exactly are you guys doing?’ Well, needless to say, I didn’t go back to see him.

“I kept on trying to think the thing through and one day it dawned on me: ‘You know, I’ve tricked myself into thinking I don’t know what the ministry is but I DO know what the work of the ministry is!

“It’s to take the Word of God and get it into another guy and teach him the Bible and then let it go teach somebody else. I realized, ‘I knew how to do that in Alabama! It’s just different fish. If you fish for bream, you don’t fish for bream like you fish for catfish. And you don’t fish for catfish like you fish for bass. What you do is go find somebody who knows how to fish for bass and you go fish like he fishes.

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“There was a member of North Shore I hadn’t thought about who had a ministry to the inner city. He went into the projects and took out inner-city kids and brought them together. Ed had a group of about 40-50 of them that he called the ‘Scripture Kids.’

“They had to memorize 300 verses of Scripture to get into the group. The average kid in the group knew 1,500 verses. Ed would stand them up and start calling verses and they’d just start reciting them. They’d stand on a platform and for an hour and a half quote verses not knowing what Ed was going to quote; he didn’t even know what he was going to ask them to quote!

“You know how Ed got started? He told me he’d go down into the projects and say, ‘Son, I’ve got a class I’d like you to go to. We’d like you to come. Would you go?’ Nobody ever did that before!

“Here’s a white man walking around Cabrini Greens and a gang member comes up to him asking him what he was doing and Ed said, ‘I’m telling kids about the Bible.’ Ed told me he found out that if he took that black leather Bible and put it right up under a gang member’s face, he’d get them to listen.

“You know what Ed did for a living? He managed apartment buildings. He was no big genius. Ed just knew what the work of the ministry was: Get people saved whatever it takes.”