Brother Nee was at Honor Oak in 1938. Twenty years later I was invited to the same place by Brother Austin-Sparks. I stayed there for one month in 1958. Brother Austin-Sparks turned all the meetings over to me. These included both the conference meetings and all the regular meetings. The night before I was going to leave, there was a meeting. I went to the meeting with the thought that I would not be asked to speak since I was going to leave the next day. Then Brother Austin-Sparks came to me and said, "Brother Lee, you have to speak tonight." I said that I did not have any thought about speaking. He jokingly responded by reminding me that I had said that in the church life, we had to take care of the feeling of the brothers. I took his word and went to the platform, without any thought beforehand about what I should speak. When I was on the platform, I asked the congregation to read Revelation 1. Then I shared that the ministry is for the local churches, not the local churches for the ministry. Regardless of how good, how spiritual, and how high one's ministry is, it still must be for the local churches. Regardless of how degraded the local churches are, they are still the lampstands.

Eventually, I found out that Brother Austin-Sparks' way was the opposite of this. His way was to use a group of believers to support his ministry. That meant that his meeting was for the ministry, and the ministry was not for the church. A few years after I gave that final message at Honor Oak, someone told me that my word tore down the whole situation there. The entire month that I was there, Brother Austin-Sparks was always with me on the platform, presiding over the meetings. After the meetings were over, he was always so happy with me because I was speaking concerning Christ as life, just as he did. But after I gave that final message, he quickly walked down from the platform by himself, leaving me there alone. As I walked down from the platform by myself, one of the elders there came to me and said that Brother Nee's ministry concerning the church and its practicality had been rejected there twenty years ago. He said that the Lord had not forgotten this and sent me there twenty years later to remind them of the same thing.

In 1938 and 1939, Brother Nee was fully accepted by the seeking Christians in northern Europe in his ministry on Christ as life. But on the practicality of the church, the spiritual situation in that area did not allow him to fulfill his ministry completely. When he came back to China after this time, he had his first conference on the Body of Christ. He cabled me, asking me to come to Shanghai for that conference. During that time he told me the stories about his time in Europe. He told me that on the whole earth, there was only one group that could "echo" what we had seen of the Body of Christ. That was Brother Austin-Sparks' group. Brother Nee, however, said that there was a big "but." They saw something concerning the principle of the Body, but they did not see the practical side of the church life. Brother Nee told me and another brother much concerning his time at Honor Oak. The other brother proposed that we invite Brother Austin-Sparks to come to us. Brother Nee was really wise. He said that the time was not ripe.