Today we want to spend some time to see the situation concerning the ministers of the word in the local churches.
According to our past custom, the churches in every locality have always maintained the Lord’s Day message meeting. In the co-workers’ meeting in Hankow, we saw quite clearly that there was no need for a local church to maintain the Lord’s Day message meeting, because this kind of meeting is not a church meeting. The messages recorded in The Normal Christian Church Life speak concerning this in a very detailed way. The prayer meeting is a meeting of the church. The supplying by the ministers of the word in 1 Corinthians 14 is a meeting of the church. The table meeting is a meeting of the church. The Lord’s Day morning preaching meeting, however, is something of Catholicism and Protestantism; it is not a meeting of the church. Actually, it is a meeting of the work rather than a meeting of the church.
Although there is no need to maintain the preaching on the Lord’s Day in a local church, what has been our experience in the ten years since the meetings in Hankow? We are still maintaining the Lord’s Day message meeting, following what the nations around us do. It seems that many localities cannot endure the absence of preaching on the Lord’s Day. Because the nations around us have preaching on the Lord’s Day, we find it hard to relinquish it. We have followed the nations. In the ten years from 1938 to 1948, we have seen that the preaching on the Lord’s Day is not a meeting of the local church; what we saw in Hankow was right. However, we have been unable to leave it even until today. What is the difficulty?
I think a big reason for this is that there would be nothing with which to replace it if we abolished the Lord’s Day preaching. The nations practice this, so if the brothers in our midst do not, it would be very difficult to maintain the meetings in their localities. Since the people in the denominations listen to a message, we seem to feel that it would be very hard if there were no messages to listen to when they come into our midst on the Lord’s Day.
Therefore, within these few years not one locality has successfully carried out what we saw in Hankow. We still have the problem that we had before the meetings in Hankow. Before the meetings in Hankow, we saw that it is wrong for a brother who is a worker to always remain in the same place. Brothers who are workers should be scattered to many localities. But today it seems that a worker still needs to live in a particular place in order to maintain the Lord’s Day message meeting. As long as we need to maintain the Lord’s Day message meeting, we build up the pastoral system. If we need to maintain the Lord’s Day message meeting, then there is the need for a worker to live in a place to do that work, since local brothers have no way of maintaining the Lord’s Day message meeting. I hope that when you brothers have time, you will again read the messages given in The Normal Christian Church Life. The meetings for edification, the table meetings, the prayer meetings, and the gospel preaching meetings are all meetings of the church, but maintaining the Lord’s Day message meeting is the behavior of the nations and not something of the church. We admit our failure of the past ten years; we cannot be proud.