Oh my friend, how utterly wrong you are. Some of the sweetest, saintliest men of God that ever lived were itinerant preachers. Circuit riders, often called, because being itinerant just means having somewhere to go, by careful planning, and regularity, just like Jesus and Paul, only with horses, and not your supposed aimless wandering, which is nothing but a fiction. Some of our American circuit riders were instruments of God in the Second Great Awakening, among whom I can count one of my great great grandfathers. Godly men whose sincere and powerful preaching of the word by the Spirit of God brought the light of the Gospel to rich and poor, in the cities and the mountains, famous generals, humble shopkeepers, wherever they were needed, men who were twice as poor as average poor preachers, having no steady place to call home and care for a family of their own. But they cared for the family of God, and they will have their reward accordingly.
Peace,
SR
Fine, but please don’t refer to Christ as an “itinerant preacher.” It conjures images of anyone with white robe, bare feet, long hair and beard, like Indian shamans going about preaching their “own” interpretations of Scripture adding to Biblical anarchy.
The “Second Great Awakening” was an American version of this. We have a disparate assortment of individuals with no common credo at the forefront of a movement that mixed a Protestant reformation ideal with political issues like seeking temperance reforms and abolitionists who strived for the downfall of slavery.
Groups like Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses all had this “itinerant” moment such as Brigham Young’s wagon trail. These are all heretical beliefs that led the great English essayist Hillaire Belloc to write in his book “The Great Heresies” that unlike other heresies, Protestantism “spawned a cluster of heresies.”
Petrine authority is not given to anyone and everyone to go teach anything and everything. Christ singled out one person Peter upon whom He founded His One Church, and solemnly bestows on Peter and His successors One authority to instruct in One truth. For those of us who believe in Petrine authority based on reason and faith, on oral and written traditions, on ritual and practice, and on divine revelation, (all such factors that went into the early Church fathers who sorted the books we call the Bible), apart from Catholicism, the rest is all apostasy.