Interview with Jim Elliff on Itinerant Ministry

Rural Church Podcast 2.0

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Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom

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I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

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The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

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Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

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Jesus in a local, visible congregation. Welcome to the

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Ruled Church Podcast. And you guys always know that when you hear my voice first, that's because Quatro is not with me.

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But I'm not flying solo today. I've got with me on the podcast today Brother Jim Ellis.

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Jim is an elder with Christ Fellowship Kansas City, and he's also the president of Christian Communicators Worldwide.

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And so I'm just going to go ahead and let Jim tell you a little bit about their church and about the ministry of Christian Communicators Worldwide, and then we're going to get into a discussion about a tenor in ministry.

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So Jim, tell us about your ministry. Thank you, Eddie. Great to see you again. Yes, I'm a pastor of a church, one of five elders in a church.

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It's 20 years old this year. So it's actually a network of house churches in the

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Kansas City Northland area. So we each pastor. We're equal pastors in these five churches, but we need about two more immediately.

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We're just getting packed out. So we've been doing that a good while, and that's been a huge joy.

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I mean, incredible experience and a very different experience than typical church life.

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And though I'm involved heavily in all kinds of more traditional churches and spent much of my life in that vein, we don't think what we do is the only way.

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I just want to say that, make that clear. But it's a choice we made. And then the other thing, which is not connected, but there are overlaps, obviously, and benefits we have toward each other.

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But we have a separate ministry, and I've had this ministry now for 38 years. And that's about your age, isn't it?

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I'm a little older. I'm 44. Was your age at one time when I first met you, probably.

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No, we've had a great time there. It's called

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Christian Communicators Worldwide, essentially a writing and teaching, itinerant teaching ministry.

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And then we write books and so forth. And so that's been going on beautifully all these years, and we've benefited a lot in our understanding of how to run this thing through George Miller, which we may mention a little bit later,

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I'm not sure. But he had a big impact on my life very early on, 55 years ago, when

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I first read about his life. Yes, sir. I believe that you and I first met, it'll be 10 years this coming

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January. I attended that Bible intensive that we had with the brothers from the

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Bible church over there by the lake. Hey, that's right. We were looking at that beautiful lake, and we had a great study, didn't we?

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I remember that. I really did. And so coming up on 10 years.

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So that's amazing what the Lord does. That's right.

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So let's jump into our discussion of itinerant ministry, because I know that's a big part of what you and Steve and the other brothers with CCW, you guys do a lot of traveling and speaking.

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So what is itinerant ministry? Kind of how would we define it?

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That's a great question. I don't know if I ever looked up an official definition, but, yeah, just it is a traveling, a moving ministry where you're called upon to, or go on your own initiative to various places to use your spiritual gifts.

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And it could be evangelists, which is dear to my heart.

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It's not all that I do, but I have done quite a bit of that evangelism. And then also teaching ministry, particularly,

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I think in our day, those are the two things that stand out mostly. So our ministry,

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Christian Communicators Worldwide, is principally about a teaching ministry.

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So we go and teach the Bible in churches and try to edify

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Christians. But, again, we also get into evangelism at times, but we're not principally known as evangelists,

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I don't think. So maybe for the purpose of our discussion today, we know that there are people that are going and they're traveling to dig wells or to take clothing or to do medical things, and those are helpful things that people can do.

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But for the purpose of our discussion today, we're going to be thinking in terms of teaching or some kind of proclamation of the gospel or teaching the

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Bible type of spoken ministry is what we're going to be talking about. Absolutely, yeah, that's right.

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So that's a difference, and that's the more traditional way to think about it. And the rest of it are helpers and support, missionaries and so forth, which is really critical a lot of times.

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So the beginning is always a good place to start. So the Scriptures, especially in the

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New Testament, we see examples, three that come to mind. We think of John the

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Baptist, and he is out in the wilderness. He wasn't in a religious setting, and he was proclaiming.

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And then even more so, we see Jesus, because he's traveling around Galilee and these different villages and then traveling to Jerusalem.

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And then the Apostle Paul making his missionary trips. So how does the

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New Testament teach us about and model for us itinerant ministries?

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Yeah, well, you've mentioned it. It's just incredible how much of the

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New Testament is built around the teaching and evangelism of itinerant people.

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When you stop and sort it all out, it's really incredible. And we could add to that for a while,

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Peter, at least, and he seems to have settled down eventually. And then

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John, who also seemed to settle down around the Ephesus area eventually and kind of worked with the circle, perhaps worked with a circle of people around him, and Peter in Turkey someplace.

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But it is an incredible part of our history and our background as Christians, and we have depended heavily on itinerant people from our very outset.

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So it's interesting how some pastors don't care much about itinerant people, but then maybe itinerant people are kind of messing up too.

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So we might get into that in a minute. So maybe along those lines,

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I've heard you talk about Paul and his missionary helpers or his apostolic helpers or however we would want to word that.

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Could you maybe speak a little bit to that idea of kind of the network of Paul's missionary work with these different workers, kind of how you see that as working in the

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New Testament? Okay, well, a little explanation background I think would be helpful. The word apostle is interesting because we know there are 12 original apostles.

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Some people say capital A apostles sent out by Jesus, and then one filled in Judas' place.

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And then we have Paul, who also saw Jesus as included in some ways as those critical apostles.

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But the word apostle is the Greek word and the Latin word of the exact translation,

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I mean the exact Latin definition or Latin word rather for apostle is missionary.

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And you'll notice in your Bible, when you read through the Bible, you don't have the word missionary any place. And that should get disconcerting because we carry on a lot of stuff.

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We do a lot of things about missionaries. So anyway, missionaries were –

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I think that's a legitimate word to use, probably came from the Jesuits, but because of the

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Latin base. But yeah, so Paul had a – actually

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Schnabel, who wrote a definitive book on Paul's life and ministry. I love that book, and I encourage people to get it, use it for reference, and read it all the way through.

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He said that Paul had 39 workers listed in the

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Bible. Some of those were more local. Some of the women, particularly I'm thinking of Euodia and Syntyche.

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Remember, they had little problems. I was actually just preaching on that Sunday. I'm already on my way through Philippians.

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Oh, absolutely. Well, you brought through then. So yeah, they were called his workers.

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But Paul had some principal ones like Timothy and Titus. They were not –

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Timothy and Titus were not pastors. They were definitely under the direction of the

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Apostle Paul. And then we have some that you just see popping up here and there, like just different ones that show up.

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And so they're going, and some of them travel a little bit with Paul. Some of them spend a lot of time just being directed by Paul to sort of duplicate his ministry.

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You know, when you think about ministry, when you think about help in a ministry, you think about two things.

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You think about people doing things that you can't do or you don't have time for, or secondly, people replicating your ministry, extending your ministry by replication.

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Most of what the Apostle Paul did, I think – I think he probably had both kinds of help. But most of what

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Paul was doing with these 39 was, in a way, replicating his work to a certain extent.

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Like the women might not have been planting churches or teaching men, but they could evangelize women and extend the work that Paul was doing when he came in to evangelize, which was his first thing as a missionary, right, to get converts and then to bring them together in churches and train them.

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And some of those workers, would you say some of those names that we would associate with Paul could have been just members of the local churches that he's working with that are coming alongside him, maybe even deacons in those churches?

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Absolutely, yes. Deacons, right, that's a good point, and I think that's true.

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Some of them were temporary workers or maybe on call when he was in the area to help out in a certain sense or would go with them.

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He often had a coterie of people around him, and we don't get hints of that here and there, you know, names that we'd thrown in.

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And so he was a guy running a pretty good -sized operation, you know, and he had helpers everywhere, and these workers were dear to him.

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I mean, this is the way he did his work. He was a missionary enterprise, you know, when you think about it.

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We're not sure about the other apostles, how they did things. The Lord hasn't given us insight into all of that.

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We'll wait to get that later, I guess. Yeah, and even the Lord Jesus was, you know, as we've already said, he was going from place to place, you know, sharing the gospel.

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He was. He definitely was. Yeah, because in a sense, he's the apostle from God to come to the earth, right?

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That's right, yeah. Yeah, so I would say apostles evangelize first.

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They evangelize. They congregationalize. They teach the people the basic doctrines and practices and traditions, apostolic traditions, the way the churches were run.

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They leave and keep in touch, and then they're recruiting other workers to help and so forth to extend their work.

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So this is the kind of work that they did as missionaries. Good model for missionaries today. You know,

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I think an excellent model for the way we should be thinking about doing missionary work.

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And he might stay a good while. You know, he might stay three years some places. Like Ephesus, he was training right out of the school of Tyrannus for three years, but he was teaching believers there.

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The Bible is very clear that these were disciples already that moved with him over to the school of Tyrannus, and he was able to use that building to actually teach people.

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And all of Asia heard the gospel because of that. So, you know, these people like Epaphras, I would think, from Colossae, you know, came, got training, went back, started churches, and there was this web going on.

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And that was a longer stay. And sometimes he was providentially hindered from going anywhere.

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So he had a longer ministry in Rome because he was under arrest. Yeah, yes. But he still used it for ministry purposes.

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Yeah, he was indefatigable, wasn't he? Wherever he was, in prison, he was all about the business.

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He wasn't just another location, right? Right, that's right. Another way to do the work, right? Yeah, that's good.

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That's good. So kind of pulling it forward, you know, it's amazing how fast these discussions can go.

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So let's go ahead and jump. We're going to jump a long way. And let's jump all the way to George Mueller.

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And we don't have time to recount all of George Mueller's life. You and I would both encourage anybody, if you've never read or heard about George Mueller, you know, there are several good biographies.

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There are. You can pick up about George Mueller dealing with his work with orphanages in Bristol.

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But I know toward the end, and you'll know this better than I do, but I know toward the end of his life, he spent, was it maybe the last 20 years really traveling around doing a lot of that type of ministry?

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Yes. Let me before. Yes. Go ahead. Go ahead. Let me throw out something first before we talk about that.

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There's a new website by a friend who is putting up out of, usually out of print books, although our books are, a couple of our books are done in audio.

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It's all audio of out of print books. And the first book I read on George Mueller, which is wonderful.

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George Mueller of Bristol by A .T. Pearson is one of those that it's beautiful audio.

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It's free. And it's, it's called scroll reader, S C R O L L R E A D E R, scrollreader .com.

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And it's just totally free. You can listen and I would really encourage people to like the, you'll like the audio of George Mueller of Bristol.

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And there's, there's plenty of other great missionary biographies and so forth on that, that are going to, it's just growing every month.

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So you're, you're going to like that. James Jenning is putting it together. It's excellent. Yeah. So that's a way you can catch, get into this life of George Mueller fed and clothed over 10 ,000 orphans without asking anybody, but the

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Lord. But he tried to be a missionary when he was a young man. And one of the, one of the groups he tried to work with was the

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London missionary society. He felt, however, that he ought to be directed by God, not by any man.

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And you have to, you know, you know, determine whether that was the right view or wrong view, but he, he, he was, he was convicted that way.

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And they politely refused him. In fact, he tried five different times then to be a missionary and he was unable to do it.

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So in the providence of God, this opened up, this ended up in him going to a small chapel and meeting his

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Henry Craig and going to Bristol to preach. And then eventually in Bristol, seeing the needs on the streets of these orphaned kids and starting the orphanage.

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So that, so he ends up, ends up taking 2000, taking care of 2000 orphans at a time, just by trusting the

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Lord. So no story like George Miller, no story like that. It's just incredible. And so when he turns 70, which just around the corner for you,

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Eddie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So when he turned 70, when everybody's kind of hanging up their preaching boots, he, he finds a window where he can go and begin to travel around the world and evangelize and support the work of missions and, and do in a sense missionary work, though real temporarily in most places, but he was a great help to a lot of people.

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And he took these trips, some of them a year in length. I think one of them was two years in length.

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And I think of a guy in his eighties, let's say. So he did this up until he was 87. He had married a new wife.

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First wife had died and he had married a, frankly, a stronger wife and she, and the younger wife.

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And she needed to be, because she'd have to prop him up. Sometimes he fainted sometimes, you know?

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And so here he is as an octogenarian and he is preaching, preaching the gospel and teaching in churches in an incredible way.

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I think he was 81 ,000 miles in total. It's several times, about eight times around the globe with travel in the conveyances of the day.

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And that is so amazing considering that we are talking about the 1800s.

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We're talking about, he's not jumping on a plane, you know, he's getting on a boat for weeks at a time.

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Oh, yeah. Yeah. And he's preaching on the boat, you know? And trains and wagons and all those kinds of things.

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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the printed material, he was big on printing, using printed material. And in those days, you know, people would pay attention to what they were handed.

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And so that was very quite valuable as well. He would, he would do that every place. Right. So, yeah.

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So we see, we see the biblical examples that we've talked about and we see that God has used this historically.

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So now kind of moving into our day, what are some, how should we be thinking about itinerant ministry in our day?

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How it ought to function today, do you think? Well, I'm pausing a little bit because there's so many differences between the, the work of itinerancy in the first century and today.

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Today, you know, we schedule, you know, times to come and speak at young and, and all that kind of, they didn't really do that.

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They kind of showed up. Yeah. He was there. He was there.

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And yeah. And it just wasn't quite the same. Exactly.

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But yeah, I, I, I don't know. There are several things to think about. I do believe that we need more people to be itinerant teachers.

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Actually. I think there's a little bit of a gap and it's especially true overseas. I remember years ago when

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I was in Romania and I was speaking, had the privilege of speaking in some of the few of the large churches as well.

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And he really emphasized to me what we need here in the churches is we, our people are in desperate need of teaching the

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Bible. And I consider this man a good teacher anyway, but he was right about his assessment there.

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I think we've been in something like 40 something countries and, you know, yes, we always evangelize. I love the gospel.

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I just, I'm all about the gospel. I could talk about that a long time, but what the, there, there is a crying need for people to teach and, and support the work of teaching that's going on in the churches.

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So we even do our Bible intensives where we've got English speaking people overseas, you know, we're trying to get people to learn how to learn how to study the scripture and, and then teaching critical truths in a way that they should want to model that in, in, for the most part, the more exegetical way, you know, more careful expositional way, just because maybe they don't often see that.

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And it is kind of eyeopening to be around that. So I think there's a lot of need. And one of the reasons people don't do that, frankly, is the, the nationals churches in a lot of overseas places are not very supportive of their, of their teachers.

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So it's hard for them to have a life of teaching, you know, be itinerating mostly

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America's very generous in a different way than the rest of the world experiences, even in Europe, actually.

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So, so you'll find a lot of dearth sometimes of good teaching. Something to think about when you travel.

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And I know personally, I've benefited from the itinerant ministry that you and Steve and Marco and Cole and all the brothers with, with CCW have had, because you guys have come and shared with us, you know, better methods and we've studied the scripture together and it's been, it's been a great blessing.

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So what are some dangers of itinerant that, that we might see both for the people traveling and doing the ministry and also maybe dangers for the congregations that would consume some ministries?

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Okay. I'm going to get through with this and I'm thinking several more than I've heard. Well, we may have to have you back on again.

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Well, I would do that for sure. But you know, one of the things is that especially in America, I think is the, is the danger of, is the danger of teaching or preaching for money.

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I think that's a really critical area. Way back in the beginning of our, for instance,

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I've heard people say, oh, I have to take all these extra meetings because I just got to pay the bills.

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Well, that's a really wrong. That's a wrong in it way to think about what we do.

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So we decided, I mean, our particular approach was different. We decided in the beginning of our ministry, 38 years ago, that we would just preach for, preach and teach for free and, you know, just look to the

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Lord only and never ask anybody for money. And so the Lord supported all of our work into the few millions of dollars over these years to help us do everything we do and give away our books and do different things, you know, like that travel.

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And it was a special sort of sense of God's direction, but I don't think that somebody is necessarily an error, you know, to ask for instance, for, for, for money, but we felt the danger was

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I, I've just grown up in a ministry world and lived in a ministry world now, 57 years of ministry.

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And I've just watched all this and it's such a danger. We just, we just really felt like God was guiding us to do something that was far removed from that and can prove that also at the same time that God answers prayer.

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And so he is more than blessed and helped us in that all the time, you know, through all these years.

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Yeah. And I would say maybe another danger would be the tenor, you know, we often joke that the, that the visiting preacher can say the stuff, the preacher that's there can't say because he's leaving.

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However, he also, but it can work the other way. He wants to get invited back.

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And if his concern is with getting invited back, maybe, maybe that changes something of what he teaches.

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Yes. Weakening your message and so forth. Yes. I think that's right. But, and by the same token, though,

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Eddie, it's a, it's a, you walk a tightrope in a way because you may have convictions.

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For instance, I have several, you know, my wife says I can't afford any more convictions, you know, we don't have friends already, but, but you know,

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I, we've developed convictions and, and, and so forth, but, you know, we want to know that we're supporting the church and not coming in to divide the church or, you know, to, so for instance,

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I have some views about divorce and remarriage that are different than a lot of people. And that's okay. We understand that.

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We understand that. So we might come to a church and not put out that book. You know, if we know they have, they teach a different thing, we're trying to be supportive, but we'll make sure the pastor gets, we want them to think about that, deal with that.

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So, you know, you're working with pastors. You, you want to be helpful to, you know, extend and strengthen their work.

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Yeah. We might have to have you on the Rural Church Podcast sometime, some one of these days just to talk about the, the divorce and remarriage issue.

27:19

So we're running out of time because, because of the meeting platform that we're, that we're using.

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So we've got about, we've got about nine minutes. So I'm going to jump to, I've got two more questions, two more things that I really want to make sure we get to.

27:37

So, and I mentioned this earlier before we started and you, and you said you didn't know if you would have a lot of expertise in this, but I still want to ask your, your, your thoughts on it.

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I have, I have been greatly blessed by your graciousness and the way that you interact with people online.

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I've just noticed that the way that the, that you, you really refuse to be drawn into a debate, you know, in a, in a, in the comments on a

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Facebook post or something like that. And I think it's, that is greatly wise and beneficial.

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That being said, how does a tenor at ministry differ from, say someone who's got a

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YouTube channel or a Facebook page? They've got, they've got ministry that goes beyond their local congregation, but that's not the same.

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I would say it's not the same as you personally going to places and being with people.

28:42

Yeah. It's more equivalent to people in the past who would write books, for instance.

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So they're, they're taking some, they're promulgating some truths that they have.

28:56

Yeah. So, but that's different than I tenor, tenor see. And I think that's, it is a thing.

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It's a thing, even in the, it's a thing even in the Bible and writing ball writing letters, for instance. So I think there is that aspect of having a broader work.

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And, but I tell you, you know, with AI and other stuff that's happening, we're going to find,

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I think, find ourselves appreciating more localized and depth kind of work in, in, in the future in some ways.

29:35

So is it, it's, yeah, we're probably about, we're probably going to experience some real testing and see change in a little bit with what's coming up.

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But yeah, I felt, I have felt called in a way to both because I've almost always had a church and felt like digging deep was made me a more authentic person, person that helped pastors and had life experience.

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And then a great part of my year is spent traveling though. And we worked that out carefully.

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And so I've forgotten where I'm going with all this, but I said those things.

30:14

No, no, that's, that's good. You know, I'm just thinking about, thinking about the, those things, you know, even maybe somebody listening to this right now, and it's not like Quatro and I've got a million listeners or something, but I know myself listening to podcasts or listening to other kinds of media.

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I can get a sense of, man, I really know that guy. Well, I don't really know him because he doesn't know me.

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Whereas when we, when we're, you're doing a Bible intensive and we're all together for two days, well,

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I'm not only hearing from you, you're hearing from me. And there are more unique and real genuine, authentic relationships being formed in that case.

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That's not mediated by this other. Yes, but you're, you're, you're hitting on something very, very important.

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And, and, and I think people ought to adjust, especially, I love rural churches. You know,

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I've always had a real affection for that. And, and the, the, sometimes we, you know, disparage, you know, think about just maybe the small compass of influence we have.

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You have no way of knowing how much of the world you're impacted from the place you are.

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No way anymore that any more than that Deacon who was preaching in East Anglia knew about that young disheveled man sitting over in the corner with 18 people there on a snowy day,

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Charles Spurgeon. You just don't have a way of knowing who you're impacted. And, and I think the in -depth mission is very appealing to me actually.

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Sometimes I, I kind of almost pined away for what, for that kind of ministry, just going very deep with people and knowing them and then knowing you and being authentic among those people.

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So we have to work really hard. You have to work extra hard to be authentic, can be trans, translucent in a way, let people see in your life.

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You have to work very hard when you're doing a broader ministry to try to do that. At least you can't be successful fully.

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So, so kind of to close out, share with us a little bit about how the

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Bible intensives work and then tell everybody how they could find out more about, you know, ministry of CCW if they wanted to, if they wanted to get in touch with you guys about having you come do a

32:49

Bible Intensive. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Bible Intensive is one of the things that we do like this next week.

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I'm going to do two conferences in many above Minneapolis. I mean, yeah,

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I'm sorry. Yes. Above Minneapolis, Minnesota area, but you know, so we do those too, but Bible Intensives are really one of our great loves.

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And so Bible, we would be happy to try to do that with you. Contact info at ccwtoday .org.

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That's our website, ccwtoday .org. Info at ccwtoday .org

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will connect you. And my assistant, Steve, Steve and I are the main ones who are doing

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Bible Intensive and he can really help you. And we will get something going

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Lord willing that can be a blessing, hopefully a blessing to you. And yeah, we do quite a few of those.

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And through the year, through these last dozen years or so, when we maybe 12 or 15 years ago when we began doing them.

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So I think we can help you with some ideas there. And also we typically can stay over on a

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Sunday, maybe a Sunday morning and speak to the congregation at one of the churches involved. So these could be done for groups of leaders, or it can be done for all the men, or we like to usually do all the men or all the women.

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We can do that with women as well because we're intimate together for a longer time.

34:22

And at ccwtoday .org they can also find your print materials. Your books are all free.

34:29

They're all without costs. As long as the Lord supplies us money, we'll supply those books. Plus they're

34:35

PDFs, but hard copies can be ordered and distribution.

34:41

The only thing we ask is when you order it, you just commit to read it, putting it on your shelves, not anything.

34:50

That's a waste of God's money. And obviously it costs a lot to do this. So doing that is really good, or you have a strategic use for it.

34:58

So a lot of our books have questions in them for Bible study use and mentoring. And you can take people through some of these books and we try to get them in the scripture.

35:08

So you can look that over and see what you think. We'll share it with you.

35:14

Yeah. We actually, we use Brian's book in a Sunday school class several months ago.

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And now we've got a Sunday school class working through Steve's book in Acts 13 and 14.

35:29

Yeah. Those two books are single text books that have a lot of background and good exegesis and get you in the scripture, don't they?

35:37

That's right. Yeah. So yeah, definitely. Those are good choices there.

35:43

They'll work for your classes. Yeah. Well, Jim, it has been so great having you with us on the

35:49

Rule Church podcast and we'll have to get you back on and maybe pick out a more controversial subject next time.

35:57

Okay. Great to talk to you. Take care. All right.