I would like to say again that I hope we would pray-read the verses in the Scripture reading. When we pray them into us, we will be able to see the proper church life with Christ as our life.
In the previous chapter, we saw the main revelations which the Lord has shown us in the past fifty years. In this chapter we want to see the practice of the church life in the Lord's recovery throughout the past fifty years.
The practice of the church life among us started in 1922, two years after Brother Nee was saved. The first local church was established in his hometown, Foochow, in southern China. He and some other young Christians saw that Christianity had deviated from God's way as revealed in the Bible. Not more than ten of them began to meet in a sister's home, but after two years, something very negative happened. The husband of this sister became a popular evangelist among the Chinese Christians. He met a missionary of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Shanghai named Mr. Woodbury. Mr. Woodbury was a man of God, but he was in the denominations. He advised this brother to be formally ordained so that he could be invited by all the so-called Christian churches. An appointment was made for Mr. Woodbury to come from Shanghai to Foochow to ordain this brother.
When Brother Nee found out about this, he gave a message in one of the meetings on the history of the ark in the Old Testament. The tabernacle with the ark was built according to God's heavenly design. The tabernacle typifies the church, and the ark typifies Christ. When the children of Israel were in a normal situation, the ark was in the tabernacle. When they became abnormal, the ark was captured away. In that abnormal time, the ark was in one place, and the empty tabernacle was in another place. Brother Nee was only twenty-one years old, but he could give such a message on the history of the ark, pointing out that we Christians today are in an abnormal situation. In the abnormal situation, God does not care for the empty tabernacle but for the ark, Christ. Brother Nee applied this by saying that God does not care for outward things such as being formally ordained to be a so-called minister. Notes were taken of Brother Nee's message, and I was able to read them nine years later. This message was very revealing.
Because of this message, Brother Nee was excommunicated by six brothers. The leading one was this brother who was the evangelist, Leland Wang. Brother Nee related this entire story to me in 1933. It took him hours to tell me the whole story. Because of his excommunication, the meeting in Foochow became a "marsh" (cf. Ezek. 47:11). Brother Nee referred to this as a halfway shelter in some of his writings. He likened such a meeting to some of the people of Israel coming out of captivity in Babylon but never returning and entering into Jerusalem, staying halfway between Babylon and Jerusalem. Over ninety percent of the people who met in Foochow were converted through Brother Nee's preaching. Many of them came to Brother Nee and told him they did not agree that he would be put out of the church. He told them, however, that he felt deeply that he had to learn the lesson of the cross, so he decided to leave.