By 1984 the recovery had come to a point of being dormant. At that time I felt burdened to go to Taiwan to study our situation. I was endeavoring to bring us into the God-ordained, scriptural way to meet and to serve for the building up of the church as the Body of Christ. Through five years of study, from 1984 to 1989, the Lord clearly showed us the God-ordained way.
The term the God-ordained way was invented by us, and we saw that this God-ordained way revealed in the Scriptures is of four steps: begetting, feeding, perfecting, and building. We need to beget, to produce, new believers. Then we need to feed them that they may grow. Then we need to perfect them, not by one teacher but through the mutual teaching in the groups. In the groups everyone is a teacher, and every teacher is a student. Through the mutual teaching in the groups the new ones are perfected unto the work of the ministry as pointed out in Ephesians 4:12. This makes them qualified to prophesy, to speak for the Lord, for the building up of the church. To take the God-ordained way is by these four steps, but how do we carry them out? We found out that the way to carry out these four steps is by the vital groups.
In 1949 we started the work in Taipei with about three to five hundred saints. Within less than five years, we grew to fifty thousand. During that period of time, I felt we needed the groups. Just to have the halls for the district work was not adequate, so we set up groups. We decided to have about twenty saints to a group, but the groups grew to fifty, sixty, and seventy saints. Some even grew to one hundred. The group leaders were very active ones in the church life.
From 1958 to 1984, however, the church in Taipei had gradually dropped the practice of group meetings and unconsciously drifted back to focus on the Lord’s Day message meeting with one person speaking and the rest listening. In every hall there was a speaker to take care of this message meeting. We had drifted away from the practice of the group meetings to a kind of Sunday morning service with one speaker.
We have to realize that a big and top advantage of the group meetings is that they should make everyone function. Our vital groups have not yet reached that standard of making everyone function according to the God-ordained way with its four steps: to beget, to feed, to perfect by mutual teaching, and to prophesy for the building up of the church.
After we released the truth concerning the group meetings, the churches attempted to pick up this practice. But what they eventually had was not vital groups, but mostly dormant groups. I became very clear within that in order to come out of our dormant condition we must stress the practice of the vital group meetings.
Recently I felt burdened to use the term vital groups. My understanding in using the word vital is that a vital group is living and full of activities. You may be a living person, but if you do not know how to take any action, you are not vital. Children from the ages of five to seven are vital because they are not only living but full of activities. Spiritually speaking, we may be living but we are not vital because we are not living and full of activities. To be vital is to be living and very active, full of activities. The vital groups are groups which are living and full of activities. If the saints who have the burden to be in the vital groups do not move, do not act, in any kind of meeting, the church is finished.
We have made it clear that the way to produce the vital groups is that each of us must take the lead to be vital. In order to be vital, we first must have a thorough fellowship with the Lord. Then that fellowship will bring us into a kind of realization that we are totally sinful. Then we will be brought into a thorough confession of our sins. Spontaneously, we will re-consecrate ourselves. We will pray, “Lord, now I would like to consecrate myself to You anew.” Then that will bring us into a prayer life. No one can pray unceasingly without reaching this stage. When we pass through the stages of fellowship, confession, and consecration, we enter into a prayer life. It is in this prayer life that we pray ourselves into the Spirit—the essential Spirit, the economical Spirit, the all-inclusive Spirit. Then we learn how to follow this Spirit by exercising our spirit. If this is the case with us, we are really vital. Actually, this is all revealed, unveiled, in the New Testament, especially in Paul’s Epistles.
The overcomers are the vital members. If we read the seven epistles to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3, we can see that the overcomers are vital. The overcomers in God’s economy will be the ones who give God the way to consummate this age, to bring Christ back, and to recover His title and right over the earth through Christ’s reign. Christ will reign and the overcomers will reign with Him as His co-kings. We must remember that to be vital is to overcome.
When we are vital, we will have a burden to contact others. This will not be something done merely because the elders made a decision. The elders may make a decision to divide the saints in the church into groups and call these groups vital groups, but they may be dormant groups. If we merely arrange the saints into groups and call them vital groups, that is something formal. That is just a movement. Eventually, these groups will be the same as the old groups. This is not the way to have the vital groups. We must abandon that way and take the vital way.
We will not be vital if we do not pass through the stages of fellowship, the confession of our sins, re-consecration, a prayer life, and the filling of the Spirit. Also, we need to have a thorough and intimate fellowship with one another. We may come together as groups, and yet not have this kind of fellowship. Instead, we are all very reserved. We open up ourselves to a certain extent and no more. We like to cover and hide many things concerning our situation. As a result, there is no thorough fellowship. When there is no thorough fellowship, there is no thorough blending. Then we cannot see the proper mutual intercession, the proper mutual care, and the proper mutual shepherding. This shows that we are not that vital.