Building Strong Local Churches | Edwin Anderson

Learn more about the ministry of Edwin Anderson: www.edwinandersonministries.org

Transcript: 

Evangelist Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King, and I am excited about telling people about Jesus. Today, I have a very special guest with me, Pastor Edwin Anderson. And tell us where you’re from and where your church is.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (00:17):
Well, thank you, Daniel, for inviting me to do this. This is a great opportunity. I appreciate this. I’m from High Springs, Florida, which is a little town most people have never heard of. It’s a very small town in North Central Florida. My wife and I founded a church there in 1980, and we pastored it for 43 years. And so in 2023, we turned it over to my youngest son. Of course, he was almost 50 at the time, so he’s no newbie, but he’s been with me for over 20 years in ministry. Turned it over to him, and then we went out on the road. But before we did that, I wrote this book. The Lord instructed me to put some of the things that I felt were very important for pastors to understand that very often weren’t really covered in most training sessions about, like the name suggests, building a strong local church.

Evangelist Daniel King (01:11):
Now we are together in Mozambique.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (01:15):
Yes.

Evangelist Daniel King (01:15):
We are here with evangelist Christopher Alum and doing a great gospel crusade. And you and your wife came and did a pastor’s conference. And so for three days, you gathered together all the pastors from this whole area in Chimoyo, and you were teaching them about how to build a strong local church. And it was so beautiful to see some of what you and your wife were imparting to them. Your wife was talking about how to build a strong family and building your family in the ministry. And then you were talking to them about the church. And so let’s just talk some about what is the church and how do we build a strong local church and why is the local church so important to what God wants to do here on this earth?

Pastor Edwin Anderson (02:04):
Sure, sure. I wrote this because I felt that there was a lot of misunderstanding about the nature of the church. And so as I began to study what the church actually is, now everybody knows that the church is the body of Christ. Christ is the head and we are members. Each person that comes to Christ is joined to Christ, becomes one with Christ, but they’re also joined with one another. We’re members of one another. We’re not just church members, we’re brethren and sisters. And so I began to explore what was being taught or what I had always heard about the true nature of the church. And I discovered that when theologians talk about what the church is, they define the church in taking the word church and breaking it down into its syllables in the original Greek. And it means it’s one syllabus is out of and the other one to take.

Evangelist Daniel King (03:05):
The Greek word ecclesia.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (03:06):
Yes. Ecclesia.

Evangelist Daniel King (03:08):
Take out of.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (03:10):
Or it’s actually it’s out of and to call, to call. So they say that the church is God’s called out ones.

Evangelist Daniel King (03:18):
And that’s kind of the idea that you’re called out from a life of sin, you’re called out from your old way of living into the kingdom of God.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (03:27):
And that is a very true and very real doctrinal point. And we find it in other places. It talks about in the book of Acts and over in the book of Ephesians, how God has taken out from Jew and Gentile. And the one in Acts talks about taking sinners out of the world, gentiles and forming a new body in Christ. So that’s a very important truth, but it’s technically not the definition of the word church, ecclesia, because in the translation from the Greek, like I said, they took a literal putting the two syllables, the Greek syllables together. But as language scholars would tell you, the best understanding of a word is sometimes not its etymology, but rather how it’s used in a culture. And so my study went back to how the word ecclesia was thought of, what people thought of when they heard the word ecclesia.

(04:27):
It wasn’t a new word in the time of Christ. I heard one preacher say one time that when Jesus spoke, I will build my church in Matthew 16, that the disciples were shocked because they’d never heard that word. Actually, they had heard that word because the word ecclesia was in the Septuagint, which was translated 200 years before Christ. The Septuagint is a translation out of the Old Testament Hebrew Bible. And we found out from looking at the old Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew word that was translated into Ecclesia meant to summon out of your homes. And it was the word that was used when a sacred assembly or a holy convocation was called. They were called out of their homes and away from their ordinary lives and the Sabbath was very holy, so they weren’t supposed to do any work. It was supposed to be set apart strictly for God and they were to come out of their homes and assemble together.

(05:25):
So that’s the way the word was understood. So the Jewish mind, when Jesus said, “I will build my church,” the disciples probably did question, “What do you mean your church?” Because they understood the church to be the Jewish synagogue. That’s how they related to it. And people were called out of their homes to attend synagogue.

(05:50):
So when I started exploring this, I found out that in the New Testament, 80% of the references of the word ecclesia, now it’s used 115 times, but if you take out the six references to the Jewish, to a non-Christian sentiment like the riot in Ephesus, there was an assembly there. Well, that was the word ecclesia. It didn’t have anything to do with God. So when you take those instances out and just look at the instances when it’s talking about God’s church, 80% of those references are to the local church and only 20% of those references are to the universal church. When I saw that, it stunned me. So

Evangelist Daniel King (06:37):
That shows the importance of the local church, that we need the local church. And I think that’s actually a word that’s very important today because some Christians these days, they feel like they can stay at home and watch the latest, greatest preacher on

Pastor Edwin Anderson (06:55):
YouTube or

Evangelist Daniel King (06:56):
Click on the television and watch them, but they’re not having that fellowship and that shepherding that comes when you have a local church and you have a pastor that you go and listen to.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (07:09):
Yes.

Evangelist Daniel King (07:10):
And why is that so important?

Pastor Edwin Anderson (07:12):
Well, as a friend of mine, Reverend Toucher pointed out to be a true church, to function as a church, some assembly is required. Little play on words. God intended for the Christian community to come together in local churches, and that’s the way it happened in the New Testament. The saints came together to assemble for times of instruction, times for prayer, times for worship, and for the presence of God. Because coexisting with the idea of the church as God’s called together, see instead of it being the called out from the world, the idea of church is called together to meet in God’s presence. The reason that’s important is also because we are the temple of God. The local church, every local church is a holy temple unto God, and we’re a place for the God to move by his spirit, for the presence of God to be in manifestation, for God to do things, say things among us.

(08:15):
And again, that only happens when you’re in company, when you’re in fellowship with other believers and you assemble together because God has something unique for every church to accomplish. And what I found out is that God has something for every individual. We all know that. We all know that God has a plan for our life. The four spiritual laws, God loves you and has a plan for your life. The plan for a Christian’s life though is very closely tied to the plan for the local church God puts them in. And so I began to explore that. I talked about the fact that we are called together for a purpose and that’s why people cannot stay home and isolate. You can’t experience Christ. Tony Cook said this one time, you can’t experience Christ in isolation from one another because we all together bring our supply when we meet and Christ is manifested among us by our gifts.

Evangelist Daniel King (09:14):
We need that connection. We need that relationship. Let’s talk a little bit about how you build your church and your story. So you graduated from Rhema. You were there back when Papa Hagen was alive in the glory days of Rhema. And you came to a small town in Florida and over all these years since you’ve built what is a very successful church.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (09:46):
Yes.

Evangelist Daniel King (09:46):
And for a small town, I would say it’s like a mega church. I mean, it’s not humongous, but for your area – We are in a

Pastor Edwin Anderson (09:53):
Very small

Evangelist Daniel King (09:53):
Town. Very successful. Yeah,

Pastor Edwin Anderson (09:54):
Very small town.

Evangelist Daniel King (09:55):
And so what are some of the things that you’ve… And honestly, most churches in America are relatively small in size.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (10:06):
Yes.

Evangelist Daniel King (10:07):
Between 100, 150 people is the average size church in America, I read somewhere. And I think what would you say to help pastors to build a healthy, strong local church in that type of context? What are some of the things that you did over the years? Because you started with nothing and built it up. What’s your story? What did you do to get there?

Pastor Edwin Anderson (10:34):
We emphasized family life, not just the lives of our members when they were at home and their families, but we emphasized the idea that our church is a family. And one reason the local church is so important is it fits very well with evangelism. We all look at evangelism and we all have our part to play in evangelism, but we think of evangelism as how a great crusade comes to a city, maybe thousands of people are saved or hundreds of city, hundreds of people in a small town and they’re joined to the body of Christ. And that’s how the church grows. But historically that hasn’t been how church grows. The mega or the substantial growth of the church over the centuries has been families that stayed in church in the second generation. The parents came in, they were evangelized, they had children, and then they had grandchildren and people married and the church grew that way.

Evangelist Daniel King (11:38):
So the secret to church growth is to have lots of kids.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (11:41):
That’s part of it. That’s part of it. And that’s why there was a lot of church explosion in the early part of the 20th century after World War II, families grew and churches grew a lot too. And in our church, we had quite a few families, our grandparents and their people their age all had eight to 10, 13 kids sometimes. And they were all marrying people. Of course, there was fresh blood coming in from outside. But that passing down of that heritage, I backslid when I was a teenager because my church didn’t understand some of the principles of faith about holding onto the youth. But even in my backslidden state, there were some limits in my life, some places I couldn’t go spiritually and in darkness. I could only go so far because there was something in me. And yes, it was the reality of Christ, but it was the thing, all of the things really that I had been taught in church.

(12:46):
I knew there were some lines I couldn’t cross. So when I got back into fellowship with the Lord and my wife and I started attending church, we had one two-year-old son. We brought him, we dedicated him to the Lord. Later, we had another son who’s now my pastor.

(13:02):
I saw that in the church, friendships were important. Growing up in the local church, church life was the center of our social life back in the 1950s, 60s, 70s. I know we live in a very complicated and very busy world today, but I stress the importance of pastors and people in their churches make church life a real priority. You might not be able to do it as often, maybe have as many activities as we could in the 1950s and ’60s, but because we had most of my friends were church friends. Now I had my friends in school, but they were unsafe friends. And because my church didn’t really know how to hold onto me, I began to go that direction. But the strongest things that I inherited, I inherited from that communication and participation with my friends in church. We had an entire network of young people that grew up together and we had the same values.

(14:11):
To this day, I came out of the… I was born in 1952, so I grew up in the 50s and 60s up into the end of the 60s before I left church. I came back in the early 70s. Today, I’m in contact with more of my church friends from those days in social media than I am by a large margin, by people that I had gone to school with in high school, college, that sort of thing. Those life experiences and the bonding that took place is so important because like I said, there’s a heritage, there’s legacy, spiritual legacy that’s passed down and it can’t be passed down any other way except through the local church. I used an illustration of a man goes out and witnesses to people, but he doesn’t go to church because he doesn’t believe in a local church. I’m thinking about a particular man right now.

(15:09):
That center that comes to Christ, he’s probably never going to go to a local church because his evangelist, the person that led him to the Lord, doesn’t believe in the local church. So not only is he not going to encourage him to go, he’s going to talk dismissively about the church. So that center man becomes saved. He’s not really going to grow and mature, so his family life is not going to improve. His wife’s not going to be very impressed with his brand of Christianity because he’s going to still be carnal. His children are not going to buy into it. And so this man that gets people saved here and there, he gets one saved. Thank God for that. But the balance to that is bring them into the church so that that new young man can bring his wife. She sees the change in his life.

(16:00):
It may take her a while like it did my wife. She didn’t come to church with me when I first got back to fellowship of the Lord because she didn’t buy it. So it took about three years to where she started coming regularly, but she did come. I won her over.

(16:15):
So then we met other families our age, people with young children. The church is always organized that way in every church within age groups, families get together, young families, older people, seniors get together and do things. That type, the relationships that are formed seem like they’re just natural things, but they aren’t. They’re spiritual. It’s a spiritual relationship of heritage and legacy that’s passed down, and that’s really what causes the church to grow and always has caused church growth.

Evangelist Daniel King (16:50):
In your book, Building a Strong Local Church, you have a lot of very practical advice for pastors. What would you say to young men or women who feel called to be pastors? What advice would you give to them?

Pastor Edwin Anderson (17:08):
Well, if there’s a call there in your life, I would absolutely make plans and be seeking the Lord as to how to implement. Now, sometimes if you are fortunate to be in a good denomination or a group that has good, strong scriptural and balanced ministry, stay in that group and do whatever’s necessary to become allowed to minister in that group, whether it’s to go to their Bible school or whatever, become licensed or ordained. And many times the church organization will help you. Now, we didn’t have such an organization. When I went to Rhema, it was still a very young school and there was no placement opportunities. There was no ministerial opportunities. You just left there with a certificate in your hand and said, “Go in the world.” And a

Evangelist Daniel King (18:00):
Fire in your heart.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (18:01):
Yes, yes, yes. And so we started a church on our own. These days, people have more things offered to them, but for a man or a woman who feels that fire in their heart that they’re supposed to be a pastor, then pursue it. Now, I guess one of the biggest things I had to learn early on was I started this church, I planted this church, and no church comes without problems. And I had to learn to follow my innermost witness in my spirit when issues arose in the church that, frankly, I didn’t have the experience to know what to do. There were things that came up in the early days that I never thought I would even have to deal with in a church. I mean, we had issues with homosexuality and all types of division and strife. Well, I’d kind of been familiar with division and strife, but sometimes I didn’t know what to do.

(18:55):
I’d never been down that road before. And by praying in the Holy Ghost and just feeding myself on the word like I should and ministering to the congregation, there are times the Lord gave direction, but he never gave direction in some type of a vision or appearance or anything really dramatic. All of the major decisions I’ve ever made as a pastor have been as a result of just that still small voice or that small inward witness.

Evangelist Daniel King (19:23):
I like one of the stories you share in your book. Someone came to church and was giving a word in tongues and wanted to have someone prophesy, but you felt led in your spirit, like you were just saying, that that wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. And it turned out he was having a smoking problem and he was in an adulterous relationship and he came in and tried to correct you for not following the leading of the Holy Spirit and you just had to be firm with him. What should a pastor do when there’s problem people that come to church because every church is going to have something like

Pastor Edwin Anderson (20:07):
That happen. This man was actually not a prophet, but he presented himself. I don’t know that he was a false prophet because he wasn’t a prophet at all, but he came to try to infiltrate our church like he had other churches. When that happens, a pastor is charged with guarding that flock, protecting that flock, because just like the sheep out on the hillside, your church members are there for you to protect, to guide them into deeper truth, guide them into a greater understanding of God, knowing the Lord better, knowing Jesus better, being a more productive Christian, all of those things. But to do that, you have to guard them from outside interference because not everybody who comes to church needs to be in church. Now there’s an idea that we – Or needs

Evangelist Daniel King (20:54):
To be in your church.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (20:55):
Yeah. There’s an idea that we kind of grew up with and it goes sort of like this. Everybody has the right to decide where they want to go to church. Well, most people say that’s true, but they understand the balance to that is you need to be led by the spirit. You don’t just pick a church out of your natural thinking, but still, that still needs to be adjusted because people say, “Well, I have the right to choose which church I go to.” Well, isn’t it interesting that no one has ever even investigated what about the pastors? Wouldn’t a pastor have the right to… And wouldn’t a pastor, if a Christian can trust God to show him where to go to church, wouldn’t that same Holy Spirit lead the pastor and witness to him, “This man should be in my church.” Because sometimes, most of the time we welcome anybody.

(21:47):
We don’t put them through a litmus test. But when the Holy Spirit warns me more times than one, I’ve had to go to people and say, “This is not the place for you. I love you, brother. I love you, sister, and I wish you the best.” I kind of said that on credit. I said, “We wish you the best, but this isn’t the place for you.” Because they were doing nothing from the moment they came in but cause problems.

Evangelist Daniel King (22:15):
Because ultimately you’re charged with protecting your flock

Pastor Edwin Anderson (22:18):
And helping your flock

Evangelist Daniel King (22:19):
Grow. And there are wolves out there.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (22:21):
There are. There are. And we’ve had some of these wolves show up in my church. The instance that you were talking about, this man came in. I didn’t know him. I’d never seen him before. He came in with a woman with him and after the praise and worship, he gave what sounded like a message in tongues. I had a witness, that’s not the spirit. That’s not the move of the spirit. No one gave an interpretation and we just went on. Well, the next week, this was on a Sunday night, the next week, the next Monday or Tuesday, a man called me, whom I didn’t know, and said, “Do you have such and such a man in your church? Has he shown up at your church?” This man was a believer from another church in town. I said, “Yeah, he was here Sunday night.” He said, “Well, did he have a woman with him?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Well, that woman is my wife.”

(23:19):
So he came to that man’s church and the pastor there let him minister to his congregation for several weeks. That pastor just opened the door and let this false prophet come in, and his revelations were all nonsense. They weren’t biblical. And then he left town with a member’s wife. When he came to my church, I detected something was wrong. I didn’t know what it was. Well, then this man told me, so now I know the story. So the next Sunday night, the man shows up again. Only he doesn’t know that I know what’s going on. So at the same point in the service, he gave what sounded like a message in tongues, and I just immediately… It was really a sweet part of the service where the presence of God was good, and it was not the presence of God. He was not ministering by the spirit.

(24:05):
So I just took up an offering. I said, “Come on, ushers. We’re going to receive the offer.” It changed the whole flow of the service to avoid that awkward silence where people are waiting on an interpretation. Well, he came in after the service and rebuked me because I was not sensitive to the spirit, and the church didn’t receive his word in tongues as from the Lord. So I tried to kind of be nice to him and I just said, “Well, sometimes we all miss it, don’t we, brother?” So he would go on down the road. Well, he didn’t take that pushback. So he came back and said more, challenged me again. And so I noticed that he smoked because I could smell cigarettes, so I challenged him on that, and that kind of stepped him back. But a reasonable person would think, this conversation’s not going to go the way I want it to leave.

(24:54):
He came back to me the third time, and so I just stepped up to him and I said, “Mister,” I said, “That woman you’re with is another man’s wife, isn’t she?” And color drained out of his face. There was almost nobody left in the auditorium that night. There were a couple of people. I really wish somebody had been videoing it because it was so good. Color drained out of his face and he kind of stampered and he said, “Well, the Lord has told her that she’s not bound to that marriage anymore.” And I said, “That’s not true. That’s not scriptural.” I quoted from the book of Romans that a man is bound to his wife as long as he lives, so forth. When he saw that I knew his jig was up, then he left. Well, I never heard from him, but I’m thinking about the damage he did in that previous church.

(25:40):
No telling how many churches that man came into and corrupted those churches. When that happens, when the man, even after he’s exposed, that pastor’s got a lot to deal with

Evangelist Daniel King (25:53):
Because

Pastor Edwin Anderson (25:53):
He’s got to pull a lot of stuff up that got sown. It’s

Evangelist Daniel King (25:56):
Not easy being a pastor, but I think that shows why it’s so important to be led by the Holy

Pastor Edwin Anderson (26:02):
Spirit

Evangelist Daniel King (26:03):
And to be sensitive to the voice of the Holy Spirit because he’ll help you.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (26:07):
Those are just some of the things. I tell pastors, when God called you, He equipped you and He put inside you, you might have to develop them, but He put inside you every gifting and operation of the Spirit that you need to successfully pastor your church, and you can trust Him. You can trust the Holy Spirit.

Evangelist Daniel King (26:26):
Amen.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (26:27):
Amen.

Evangelist Daniel King (26:28):
Well, your book is excellent, and if someone is interested in finding out more about your ministry or maybe inviting you to come minister at their church or to get a hold of your book, what’s a good website to find out more about you?

Pastor Edwin Anderson (26:42):
Edwin Anderson Ministries, surprisingly enough, edwinandersonministries.org.

Evangelist Daniel King (26:48):
Wonderful.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (26:48):
Yes.

Evangelist Daniel King (26:49):
Well, Pastor Anderson, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast.

Pastor Edwin Anderson (26:53):
Thank you, Daniel. I appreciate it. Bless you, brother. God bless

Evangelist Daniel King (26:56):
You. Yes,

Pastor Edwin Anderson (26:56):
Sir. Amen.