Jan 10, 2026
Union with Jesus • Apr 01st 1990
Making Christ Central Part 2
The way we think about church, ministry, and the Bible is often rooted in tradition, not the raw reality of the first century. Gene Edwards offers a profound challenge to the structures we have accepted for generations, including the system of seminaries, the Sunday morning service ritual invented in 1540, and the practice of paid ministry. He argues that many church practices, like relying on isolated verses to form doctrine, are fundamentally flawed because you “can prove anything in the world by weaving verses together”. Instead, Gene Edwards urges believers to create and use a comprehensive model of the first-century church to test our current beliefs and traditions. He suggests that if we simply arrange the New Testament epistles in chronological order, it would expose the true nature of the early church and “shake you to your core”. This message is a sincere invitation to seek the organic, original expression of God’s people, recognizing that the church itself, described as a “beautiful girl,” is our greatest evangelism. Gene Edwards believes that by doing our homework and holding up a true model of the first century, we will find a right to stand outside of organized religious systems.
(Continued from Part 1)
Let me finish the story of how we got our seminaries, and we ought not to have them, and they are destructive, and they are not good, and they are not helpful. I know, I’ve been through one. It took me four or five years to recover from going to a seminary. Oh, listen, it’s hard to get that stuff out of your head, and it’s all basically Aristotelian and Platonic. I sat there for four years, and I learned more and more about less and less until I knew everything about nothing. I know you heard that statement, but I look over my transcript, and I think, good grief, when did we ever get to the point? And we never did.
The Church of Jesus Christ and His people have taught me what I know. I did not learn what I got from a seminary. The Lord Jesus, in me, has taught me. And the church has taught me; His people have taught me. The brothers who have gone before me have taught me. I want to finish the story because I think this is funny, even though it’s a little embarrassing. They (the Catholic Church) made two decisions. They had two problems: corrupt people, corrupt clergy, and an ignorant, untrained clergy. So, they started the seminaries. That still left the problem of corruption and immorality. And they came up with the source of why the Roman Catholic Church had become so corrupt during the Renaissance, prior to the Reformation. It was all those nude statues. That’s what they figured it was. It was all those nude statues. So they commissioned men to go out all over Europe with plaster of Paris. And if you’ve ever been to Europe and gone to the museums, you find the well–placed fig leaf, which was to cover up the source of the immorality and the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. Every time I think of a seminary or a Bible school, I always think of that fig leaf. It’s not dealing with the problem, saints.
And so, we get up on Sunday morning, get dressed really pretty, and have a fight with our husband, our wife, and our children trying to get to church. We need to be in church by the time we get there because we’ve sinned against everybody in the family. (laughter) We put our kids in this little bitty, all this pretty little clothing, and we get our Bible, and we walk in there with this big smile, and we subject our children to Sunday school. I tell you, the two things that I could think of that would help us more than anything else on this earth would be to get rid of all the Sunday schools…three things…burn down all the church buildings and shoot all the preachers. Well, while I’m at it, can I take one more sacred cow and plug him good? I think a sermon…the sermon, the Sunday morning church service, good grief alive, I was about to leave out the main one.
Have you ever noticed that, whether you’ve been Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, or Pentecostal, we all basically have the same order of worship? You could not tell the difference if you were a heathen and had never been to them. Do you know where the Sunday morning order of service came from? Well, it was invented in 1540 by John Calvin, and today, I sat in seminary classes and had my seminary professors prove to me that the Sunday morning church ritual was in the New Testament. It was invented by John Calvin, and he wasn’t thinking of the Bible one bit. He was putting together a ritual for his church in Geneva, and it has pervaded the entire Christian world. As far as I’m concerned, it is the most boring thing ever perpetrated on the human race. I mean that. I have tried to slip that into every book I’ve written in some way or other. I think the Sunday morning church service is the most boring thing ever invented by the mind of man. Now, if you want to do something interesting on Sunday morning that’s a little more interesting than church, go down into the basement, put your clothes in the dryer, pull up a chair, and watch them spin-dry for an hour. It is not as dull as a Sunday morning church service. Will we live long enough to see these things cracked open?
Well, I’m going to take one more final jab here before I go to point two. I hope you won’t be offended. I really am aware that there were two ways this was done in the New Testament, and I honor both of them, but I’m going to stand for one of them for the simple reason that it’s not practiced; the other one is. There are two ways for the ministry to be carried on. I’m talking about men called of God who minister. One of them is by receiving income from the fellowship of believers. Not salary, but income. That’s the “Peterian way”, that’s the way Peter did it. But there is also a Paulinian way, the way Paul did it. When I think of Barnabas and Paul going down to catch a boat to Cyprus on their first church-planting voyage…not a missionary journey…we haven’t got time to talk about where missionaries came from. They didn’t come out of the New Testament. Those two men…I want you to look over here. Here are a million Jews in the whole world; they’ve got 12 apostles and hundreds of churches. And here, for the rest of the population of the world, us heathen, us uncircumcised and unwashed, there are probably…the population of the world at that time was somewhere between 75 million and 150 million, and God sent only two men to them.
Now, those of you who are urgent to get the world converted—and we don’t have time to go into where soul winning, and evangelism came from either—that is not New Testament either; it all has its origins historically, accidentally, and in tradition. But anyhow, when those two men went out, can you and I conceive the truth that they were not paid? That they worked throughout their entire lives for a living. Which means those two men, with somewhere between 75 and 100 million people to convert…those two men were not full-time workers, and they were not part-time workers. They were spare-time workers. Paul of Tarsus worked for a living.
When I left the religious system in 1963, I must tell you why I left the religious system, for two reasons. One very profound reason: because I was bored stiff going to church, and the other one was even more spiritual. I decided to give it up for Lent. When I left the religious system, I decided…and determined…I would go the Paulinian way. And I made a discovery: you don’t get a lot done going in that direction, but I am determined, brothers and sisters, to boast that I have not been paid as a minister of the gospel since I left the religious system. I became a schoolteacher and worked as one until just recently, and my health broke to the point that I could not teach anymore.
You ask, Where are you getting your income today? My wife now works for a living. I won’t get much done in my lifetime. I will not do much, but I worked for a living. And you know how much you’ve suffered as Christians since you left the religious system? You know what you’ve been through? You remember? You’ve been… you’ve been… You walk right through the northeast corner of hell, that’s what you’ve done. Say it is true; is it not? There is suffering and agony out here, so propitious that most of us can hardly comprehend it. I taught school 40 hours a week, and I raised up the house of God 40 hours a week, and we went right through the jaws of hell just like you have. All I want to tell you is, it can be done. The only other thing I want to say to you is that I think salaries are the most corrupting and debilitating thing we could ever do to the ministry. Oh, wow. I got some amens to that one. These guys must be living by faith, eh? Well, praise the Lord.
Now I’m going to take a shot at living by faith. I hate to do this to you, brothers, but there are no scriptural grounds for living by faith. Either the church supplies you, or you work for a living; you don’t live by faith. Living by faith was invented by a man who’s supposed to have a great place in the history of Christianity, and I’m going to shoot him right now, cold-blooded, and say that was a fraud. Now, do you know who I’m talking about? Boy, I’d better think up his name fast. His name has slipped my mind, but he’s from England, and he had orphanages. George Mueller coined the term “living by faith.” That…I’m sorry…I know you all think George Mueller is the greatest thing since peanut butter and sliced bread. George Mueller had a problem. George Mueller said, “We never mention money, and we live by faith.”
And so, he got… and he’s the guy who invented this…he got his orphanage choir, and he went all over England, going into churches with his little orphans back there behind him, singing, telling churches from one end of England to the other, “We do not solicit money,” and he’s had all these great stories to tell. This was a corrupting influence that entered the church of the living God. We’re still doing this years later: “We live by faith. We don’t mention money. Now our little choir is going to sing, and let me tell you all the wonderful ways God provided for us.” And the little kids got up there and sang. Little tears were coming down their eyes, mainly because they needed to go to the bathroom, and so was born on this earth “living by faith.” Well, let the church of God take care of you or work for a living, but stop your hitting. Say amen. Y’all still here? This is part of our evangelical mindset that needs a really good cleaning, brother.