Since this is the case, you can see that the supply of the word is very important. We need to preach the gospel, edify the new believers, and have mutual and special edifying. Therefore, many, including the sisters, need to go out, group by group, in twos or threes, so that every locality may be able to stand on its own.
Without this, today’s problem will remain. There will still be a need to maintain a Lord’s Day message meeting. You have to overturn this habit of listening to messages. You must overturn it completely. The Lord’s Day is the time for all of us to go out and save people. If this habit is overturned, it will be impossible to ask the brothers and sisters to just listen to a message on the Lord’s Day.
Perhaps there will be times when we pause for a while and have a conference for a whole week. If co-workers come, we will have a feast for one whole week, and then we will go out to work again. In these few years I have especially seen what God has done in the hearts of brothers everywhere. Gradually, the church must preach the gospel and do the work. This way is already quite clear.
You will probably ask what the new believers should do in the second year after listening for a year to the fifty-two topics, which neither advance nor change. The answer is that you need to send them out in migrations. If not, we will definitely have to build a “Solomon’s Temple,” because there will not be a place that is large enough to meet in.
Therefore, after a group of believers has been raised up at the end of a year, you have to deal with them concerning their going on. They then will care for new believers. At the same time, you have to cause them to see that living on the earth is for preaching the gospel and for the Lord’s interest; they cannot choose their own professions or their own places to live. Thus, we will see that we can send out five hundred or a thousand people after one or two years. If a place does not have the church, there will be a church there after one or two hundred people have been sent out. After a few years we can send many out to places where the gospel has not yet come. We must send them out group by group.
In Acts there are two different ways of preaching the gospel: one way is that of Antioch, sending apostles out to preach the gospel. The church has paid special attention to this way throughout these years. However, Jerusalem had another way of preaching the gospel which was different from that of Antioch. Jerusalem’s way of preaching the gospel was that of sending out a group of people through migration to preach the gospel after they were saved. After reading chapters eight, ten, eleven, and twelve of Acts, you will then realize that whether they went out because of persecution or whether they went out according to arrangement, the migrations for the preaching of the gospel were always right. As soon as one is saved he should go out. It would also be good if among us there were three to five brothers and sisters who wanted to go to preach the gospel to a certain primitive tribe. If, in a certain place such as Jerusalem, many have been saved, you must then send them out. If you do not send them out, persecution may come. When you send people out, you will find that they will go to preach the gospel. Workers, we should never think that people are always gained by the workers. Sometimes, the workers go out and gain people, but sometimes the sent-out saved ones gain people. We must take both of these ways.
If we can carry out migrations on a large scale, I believe that it will not be many years before we take China. If, as before, we are saving people one by one, there will be no way to do this even after a thousand years. Today the total number in China who claim to believe, not counting Catholics, is merely a few hundred thousand Protestants, perhaps six hundred thousand. After more than one hundred years of gospel preaching, there are only six hundred thousand! Among these six hundred thousand, we do not know how many are saved. Therefore, if God will work here, I believe there will be a prevailing way for the gospel to go out.
Therefore, you need to see that the supply of the word in a locality is already sufficient. At the same time, the former habit also needs to be changed. This is a basic requirement. As soon as a person is saved, he should not be one who desires to come and listen to messages. Rather, he should be one who realizes the need to work right away, to preach the gospel right away, and to save people right away, carrying out these things without delay before God and hurrying to save people.
At the same time, if we want to be strong in the matter of preaching the gospel, we need new apostles to rise up. This is the purpose of Kuling. If you find new brothers and sisters who are able to go on, you must send them here when they have learned something of this way after two or three years. We will coordinate with you. We will ask them to live here for one or two years. Then we will send them out and let them begin to work from place to place. I hope we can coordinate and go on in a good way. I believe this matter is a great thing.
Regarding the supply of the word in a local church, I hope that we would not make the Lord’s Day message meeting our center. If the Lord’s Day message meeting continues to occupy the central position in a local church, there will be no way for the gospel to advance. We must allow two or three brothers to rise up in every local church to preach the gospel on the Lord’s Day and continue this work there. The rest of the brothers and sisters will continue to help. I believe that all of the former problems will go away. We might have problems in other areas, but there will be no problems in the area of preaching the gospel. Once we have the preaching of the gospel, all the other problems will also be easy to resolve.