Welcome to this new series on the ministry of the Apostle as presented in our Cave of Adullam Apostolic Training School.

This book has been prepared from the live teachings given in the school course and is used for those doing both live and distance learning with the school.

So as you read through the materials, imagine that you are enrolled as a student with us. Or perhaps after reading through this you may want to enroll as a student.

You can find all the details on our Apostolic School website which you will find at:

https://apostolicschool.co.za

I have been training apostles for nearly 20 years, and it has taken me that long to accumulate the kind of materials that I will be presenting to you.

Some of the first materials that I will be sharing here are brand new, which I haven’t already taught before. We will be covering a lot of new ground that we have never covered before.

So by the time you are finished this course, you will hold in your hands something very unique. But first, I want you to understand exactly what an apostle is.

Illustrations of What an Apostle is

We will be looking at this in a lot of detail as we consider some specifics on the Apostolic functions. But I want to give you first an overview of where we are going.

To do this I am going to share a couple of my experiences of the past as illustrations. They will be little pictures that will help you to understand this.

Into the Army

Many years ago, when I was only 18, I was called up to serve my country at that time, which was then called Rhodesia but is now known as Zimbabwe. I was called up to do my national service.

It was something that every young guy had to do. It was compulsory the moment you left school. Well I had just finished my schooling, and I got the papers in the mail that said,

"You have been called to nine months of free holiday on Government expense."

Of course it was not a holiday at all! In those days it was only nine months, but it was bad enough.

And so I went in for my military training, and I discovered that your body could be made to do things that you didn’t know it could do. I found out that you could be pushed to limits that nobody had ever pushed you to before and it was pretty tough.

I had a good education and qualifications from school. I had a very good, high level of intelligence.

So very soon after I had commenced my basic training, they began to separate the people and to take those whom they considered would be intelligent enough to be more than ordinary soldiers; ones who could rise up and go a cut above the rest.

They called it the Officer Selection Board, or the OSB. If you were chosen to go on the OSB’s course, that meant you had a chance to jump out of the ordinary run-of-the mill training that everyone else was doing, and go to a higher level.

When you completed that training, instead of coming out as a little private with maybe a couple of stripes, you would come out with some of that confetti or fruit salad on your epaulet.

This meant that people had to salute you and call you ‘Sir’. You would be an officer.

This was exciting, and I thought,

"Imagine if I could just go there and study with my great intelligence, instead of going through the hard, tough stuff all of these guys were going through."

They were doing all the heavy bootcamp stuff; all physical things. But now I could use my intelligence and become an officer.

But I found out that the Officer Selection Board was the same thing you went through as an ordinary soldier, multiplied by about 20.

The pressure was 20 times greater. They put greater demands on you. You had less privileges and basically it sounded like hell on earth. I didn’t have the character at that time to even dare to give it a try. I said,

"I’ll just stay an ordinary soldier, thank you very much. The price is too big for me to pay."

Some of my friends went through it and they told me about it. And I thought,

"Man I am really glad that I didn’t go for that!"

Later on I had to salute some of those guys and call them ‘Sir’, because they had risen up and were a higher rank.

An Intense Training

The Apostolic Training is like the Officer Selection Board. It is not run-of-the-mill ministry. It’s a higher level that is going to carry great privileges. People will revere you and look up to you, and you will carry a title. But I want to tell you that there is a price to pay for it.

You enroll in Officer Selection when you sign up to do this training course with us. Those who have been through some of our other training courses may have felt like they were a bit pressured. Especially those who have gone through our Prophetic Training.

But this is a level of training unlike any others. And many who start the course suddenly wake up to the fact that this is a new level of learning.

So you are in the army now, and I want to either scare you off or challenge you. I hope you will all make it through. Often our classes start off big, then get whittled down to a couple of people only, because some students cannot keep up the pace.

Do you have what it takes? We are going to find out pretty soon.

God Initiates Training

As we began to train apostles almost 20 years ago, God began to show us how to train and how to release people into training. It is not a simple matter of someone prophesying over you and saying,

"Thus says the Lord, I have called you to be an apostle."

It is not a simple matter of saying,

"I’ve started my own ministry and my own church, so that qualifies me to be an apostle."

It’s also not a matter of people calling you "Apostle". You see Apostolic training has to be initiated by God. In fact all training of the Fivefold Ministry has to be initiated by Him.

At the higher levels of the Prophet and Apostle, we teach that there are actually two main stages that you go through. There is a preparation stage and a proper training stage.

The Call to Training

For the prophet, the preparation stage can take about 30 years of your life. It starts from birth. The training stage comes when God specifically releases you, usually by prophetic decree from a senior prophet who is going to train you. He will say,

"I am releasing you now into training for the Prophetic Office."

Until that happens you are not officially in training yet. I don’t care if you have been attending a Prophetic School for years, how many prophetic books you have read, or what Prophetic Ministry you have done.

Until you are officially released into that training by the Spirit, and then have completed that training, you cannot qualify.

We do this with our students. Once a student is officially released into Prophetic Training their life becomes hell for about nine months, until God says,

"You have qualified."

Then in God’s time not ours, and when they least expect it, the student is placed in Prophetic Office and released.

Prophetic training usually takes about nine months from the time that you are actually called to training. The apostolic I’m afraid takes a bit longer.

The apostolic in fact goes at several levels of training. This means you have a preparation level, training 1 level and a training 2 level.