After a person has believed, is baptized, and becomes a new believer, we should bring him to our prearranged meeting for edifying new believers. In this meeting we will have a special topic for them to get into every week.
Once a person has started coming to the meeting for edifying new believers, he should be placed under the care of those believers in the church who are more mature than he. How should this care be rendered? Those who take care of the new believers must make sure that the new believers are practicing the lessons presented every week.
If they do not come to a meeting, you must immediately visit them and give them a make-up lesson. Of those who come to the meetings, during the week you must seek out the five or ten under your care and see whether they understand the lesson that was shared that week.
At this point I want to have a little fellowship with you brothers, especially with those who are ministers of the word. I think that we all have had many experiences which may have been heartbreaking, shameful, and embarrassing, and even some experiences which made us angry. Today you may have shared a message that was quite high, but if you check with the brothers, the message was like a wind passing over the rooftop. There was not even a breeze next to their ears or even above their heads. If you do not believe it, just ask them to raise questions after your speaking and see what kind of questions they have. I have always said that the questions asked reveal how the listeners are doing; the preaching reveals how the preacher is doing. After a most spiritual message is presented and the listeners are given opportunity to ask questions, you often see that they have veered off considerably, even to the extent that it is beyond what you could imagine.
Therefore, we should not think that the new believers will understand simply because the message was spoken from the podium. You need to go and visit these new believers. This is the visitation of the new believers or the care for the new believers. You have to make the message up for anyone who has not heard it, and you have to see how it was received by anyone who did hear it. They do not have it simply by hearing the sound or by counting the number of times per second my voice vibrates in the air. We want them to hear clearly the words of the lesson. Therefore, concerning this matter, the brothers responsible for the care of the new believers need to labor in a careful way.
Another aspect we need to pay attention to is that all the new believers can immediately take care of the unbelievers. However, we should place a few strong brothers to work together with them. A brother who has been saved for a number of years should coordinate with them and take care of them by leading them step by step. You have to show the new believers that as they have already believed in the Lord, they are priests before Him. All the priests must have a service. Today this service before God is to serve either the unbelievers or the new believers. How well the new believers do in this matter depends altogether on how well you take care of them.
Everyone knows now that fifty-two topics have been prepared for edifying the new believers each year. From these fifty-two topics we will prepare one topic each week to speak on. The older brothers need to be very familiar with these topics and should practice them themselves. After they have practiced them, they have to lead the new believers to practicea lso. Furthermore, they have to become very familiar with the new believers because many of these fifty-two topics stress the matter of conduct, and therefore they require concentrated effort to apply them. After they have done it themselves, they can know the real situation with the new brothers so that they can encourage or even urge them to do it also. This is not something we can take care of merely by listening to messages. Just listening to messages will not suffice; there needs to be the practice. We need to reach the point where we can say, “I have to practice it myself.” Therefore, on the one hand, you have to preach this message to them, and on the other hand, there must be brothers who will make the effort to deal with them concerning the particular topic each week. Go and seek them out, urge them, make them decide, and make them practice. With many problems, it is not a matter of just one visitation, but a matter of caring for them for several weeks or months. With the matter of reading the Bible and prayer, you have to see whether in fact they have read the Bible in an adequate way, and whether they have progressed in their prayer. The church needs to lay great stress on these matters before she can be brought to a proper condition. Therefore, I hope that we, especially the co-workers, would see that it is for this reason that I stressed that the problem today is not a matter of knowledge but a matter of taking the lead. All the local churches need to do this wholeheartedly. Since this work is so heavy, we cannot let it pass by carelessly.