The subject of this message is quite simple—speaking in the way of life—yet I do have a heavy burden. Today we are here at nearly the end of the twentieth century. We have studied church history, and we have read the biographies and classic writings of the Lord’s servants through the past centuries. Even we ourselves have passed through Christianity for a long time and we have experienced very much of the church life. Today we are in the United States, which is the leading country of Christianity, full of Christian activities, Christian denominations, Christian groups, and so forth. In spite of all this, if you were to look at the present situation, you would be mostly disappointed. What could you see today? You could see the Catholic church, the big denominations, all the middle-sized Christian groups, the small ones, and the churches in the Lord’s recovery. It is not very encouraging. Rather, every situation is quite disappointing, or at least somewhat disappointing.
The disappointment is mainly in two things. First, there is no building. After twenty centuries of Christian history, what is the issue today? The issue apparently is just big Christendom, which still remains here. Including the Catholic members, the Christians today comprise at least one-fourth of the world population. Among so many Christians, many are false ones, nominal ones, yet still a good number are real ones. Among the genuine ones, however, we could see very little building.
Second, you see ignorance in today’s Christianity. Most of the Catholic members just follow their kind of superstition. They believe that a statue in front of the cathedral can do something for them. This is superstition. They also believe superstitious stories about angelic activities which are said to have occurred centuries ago in Spain, France, and Italy. Things like this just fill up Catholicism. In the Protestant denominations you could also see ignorance, even with the Lutheran church, which is established on the belief in justification by faith. If you were to ask a devout member of the Lutheran church to give you a short word on justification by faith, I do not think he could do it well. This is a strong indication of ignorance. Actually, this is not just ignorance but darkness. Even among the genuine believers you could not find many who are in the light.
Is there any building in today’s Pentecostalism? Is there any light? Rather, I would say, the superstitious waves have also invaded Pentecostalism. They like to talk about dreams, to speak great prophecies, and to practice healings. I have attended some healing campaigns and I did not see any genuine healing. All I saw was a performance with some kind of artificial healing. The leaders knew this was false, yet everybody believed in these healings. This is superstition without any building or enlightenment.
Now, let us consider our situation. Forget about others and let us criticize ourselves. Are you built up? How much have you been built up? I must admit that we are better than nothing. If you compare us with those with nothing, you have to say that we have something. How about enlightenment? For the past eleven and a half years, we have had two trainings annually. In each training thirty messages were spoken and printed. Many of you have hundreds of life-study messages on your bookshelves, but I do not think ten percent of these messages are in your heart and in your mind. Our situation is just like a housewife whose husband bought a lot of groceries for her, but she never cooked them.
In October, 1984, I fully realized that we must have a thorough change in our way of meeting, or in our way of taking care of the saints in the meetings. We have to change. I call the old way the “lazy way.” If the groceries are bought and stored, yet there is no labor to cook them, that is just laziness.
Whether a nation is strong or weak mainly depends upon its people, its citizens. If you have strong, proper families, surely you will have strong and proper citizens. Then the country will be strong. If you do not have proper families, it is hard for you to have a proper society. The families are the real and basic factors to build up the society and to build up the country. To build up a proper and strong family, first you need to take care of the feeding, and second the education. If the wife does not take care of the children properly in these two things, in eating and education, you should not expect that this family will be proper. The future of this family will be pitiful. The wife, the mother of the family, has to labor in cooking. You can spend four hours to cook a meal or you can spend ten minutes to cook a meal. A proper meal is both nourishing and tasty. It also should not be too expensive. These are the principles you have to keep. To do such a thing, you need to labor. You cannot go to the grocery store and pick up the things in a light way. As the wife, the mother of the family, you have to labor very much. I would propose to you that for breakfast you need to labor one hour. This includes purchasing, preparation, cooking, and presentation. For lunch you need at least an hour and a half, and for dinner, at least two hours. You may say, “We can’t make it! I have to go to work, I have to study, and do many other things.” The choice is up to you. If you want to gradually commit suicide, not only for yourself, but also for all your children, it is up to you. It depends on what you want. Do you want a healthy family? You may argue that there are not enough hours in the day, but I would say, “If there’s a will, there’s a way.” Young people surely can squeeze their sleeping time from eight hours to seven hours. Just squeeze a little bit, this way and that way, but do not squeeze the cooking time nor the eating time. If you cook with too little time and you eat too fast, surely you would not be healthy. How good you are as a wife or as a mother is measured by the time you spend cooking. Any unhappiness in a family is mostly due to inadequacy in cooking.
In Christianity the way to take care of the members of a church is the lazy way. There just is not much cooking. I hope that all the leading ones, not just the elders, but all those concerned for the church, those with a sincere concern for the Lord’s recovery, including myself, will have a turn from the old way. Since you are the housewives and the mothers in the church, you need to labor in the word and in teaching (1 Tim. 5:17). Paul says the overseers must be “apt to teach” (1 Tim. 3:2). This phrase does not mean to teach accidentally. It is to teach in a habitual way. Apt to teach implies a habit, a desire, or an appetite to teach. The overseers, the elders in the church, should be like this, apt to teach.
In 1 Timothy 5, Paul says that the elders should labor to the extent that they could not work at a job. “Let the elders who take the lead well be counted worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in word and teaching” (v. 17). The double honor includes financial supply because they are laboring so much; they are fully occupied with the need of the church. For a human being to do anything, there is the need of time. If you are fully occupied physically and mentally, you can do nothing. “Labor” in this verse is to labor in the word and in teaching.
According to this yardstick, all the elders are not so diligent. They do not labor in the Word much, and they do not labor in teaching adequately. The elders are always afraid to be charged to speak, because to speak is a hard thing. Yet you have to realize in our practice of the church life, the speaking of the elders has been mainly to give a message. To give a message is easy, but to take care of the church as an elder or to do some cooking all the time for the saints is hard.
In the elders’ training held in February, 1984, I told the elders how they should take care of the meetings. As an elder you should not go to the meeting to occupy the entire meeting with your speaking. That is not the way to build up the church. The way to build up the church is to gather the saints together, encouraging them to speak, even charging them to speak one by one. Every time you attend a big meeting or a small meeting, you should labor very much before the meeting in the Word. You should get yourself equipped and prepared with something before you go to the meeting. You should let all the saints have the meeting. In case they do not have anything to open the meeting with, after just a few minutes you have to serve them a cooked dish. That means you have to give them a living word lasting less than ten minutes that is rich, enlightening, stirring, and watering. Then you should turn the meeting to all the saints. Maybe a few will continue to say something. After that, it may stop. Then you have to do something again to serve them with another dish. By this way, you will train all the saints to function in the meetings. This is not so easy; it requires a lot of preparation. This needs a lot of laboring. According to my observation, to take care of a church as an elder is harder than just to go out and hold conferences. To hold conferences is quite an enjoyment, but to stay in a locality to take care of at least four or five meetings a week is not so easy. To take care of the church is a heavy burden, and the heaviest point of this burden is to take care of the meetings. This is just like a mother or a wife in a home. For the mother to take care of the cooking for her family is a really hard job.
Yet, you have to realize that in a family such a good mother has to do another necessary thing, that is, to teach her children. You must not only send the children to school, but also take care of the children in doing their homework. When they come home with their school lesson books, you have to charge them to work on those lesson books, and you have to teach them. Then you can expect that your children will be reared in the proper way both physically and mentally. Physically they get the proper home-cooked food from you, and they also receive the proper education. To be such a wife you need the qualification and the labor. This is especially clear in this country. Not only in this country today, but in every country on this globe all the families know this. The wives have to feed the children properly and have to teach their children that they may gain an education. A church is a family and the elders are actually the mothers. They should cook and they should also educate.
This is why I say strongly that we need a change in our system. Our present practice is mainly to give a message. A message at the most could only stir you up, affording you some inspiration. Such a meeting is not an educational matter. To carry out some educational teaching we need something like a lesson book. Fifty-two weeks a year, every week, we need at least one or two lessons, consecutively, in a good sequence.
To educate children is a difficult job. School buildings must be built, schools must be set up, teachers must be trained, faculty members have to be organized, and classes have to be set up. So many things have to be done just for passing on the proper knowledge of the human culture to our children for their education. Also the mother has to coordinate with the school, knowing how to send the children to the school, what grade they will be in, and how to take care of their lesson books, charging them in homework and so forth.
This is a good illustration, but such a church as a family I have not yet seen. The elders still are doing just a kind of routine work according to the traditional system of Christianity, that is, to gather people together, sing a hymn, have some prayers, and give them a message. This is easy to do, but to take care of the meeting, as a housewife taking care of the children in cooking and in education, the elders have to labor. It is no wonder that Paul says that overseers must be apt to teach and the elders have to labor in word and teaching.
This is my heavy burden. All the elders have to change their mentality, to have a real turn from the way that we are taking today. We must turn our attention to the new way, that is, number one, to cook, and number two, to teach. Just as a housewife, you have to cook with adequate time the proper, nourishing, tasty, and inexpensive food for your family. Also you have to teach. Even though you send your children to schools for education, still at home you need to do the home teaching. If the mothers could not do the work of teaching at home, the children would have a hard time going on in their education. Today in every local church, the elders and the leading ones, including the sisters, should practice this. They should continually cook proper meals for all the saints, and they should always be apt to teach. To do this you need to labor much.
Among the Protestant denominations, the Southern Baptists have the biggest membership. They depend mainly upon their Sunday schools. Though their lesson books are not so deep or so rich, they are very practical. Their Sunday school lessons were not prepared or written in a light way. To write anything in a general way is easy. To write lesson books is not so easy. You must collect all the extracts on a certain topic and then organize them in a very economical way. You cannot write too many pages, nor can you list too many points, yet you must cover all the crucial points of a certain subject. Nearly all of us have an education, yet after graduating from college, who can compose one lesson book? Let those who have learned mathematics try to write a lesson book on mathematics. It is not easy.
This illustrates that to teach the saints to be proper teachers is not easy. You may know something, but to teach it is not easy. We need to practice. The Southern Baptists appreciate their Sunday school lessons. Many would not miss their lessons because of the benefit they may receive. This is one reason the Southern Baptists have such a large membership. They emphasize three things. Number one, they preach the gospel. Number two, they hold revivals, and number three, they teach Sunday school using their lesson books. This is not to say that we are to follow them or to imitate them. But there is a principle here: if we depend upon big speakers or good teachers to speak to us every week, or if we depend upon eloquent speakers to stir us up periodically, that will not work.
I would like to share a strong testimony of something which occurred recently in Taipei. During October, 1984, while visiting there, I did my best to help them change their way. I encouraged them to turn their attention from the big meetings to the small home meetings. Right away they took my word and set up 399 small group gatherings totaling approximately 4,000 saints. Now, about eleven months later, a phone call has come from Taipei. A leading one told me that last weekend 1,104 people were baptized. He stressed that there was no large gospel-preaching meeting, nor any splendid activity. These 1,104 people were brought in by these small meetings and individuals. From January, 1985, until now, they have also baptized four to five hundred college, high school, or junior high students. In addition to this, the church in Taipei has sent out in July twenty gospel teams formed through the small meetings to the nearby small cities and towns to preach. With this kind of move they baptized over 800 people. All totaled, the church in Taipei baptized over 2,500 people this year. This was not by big evangelists holding big gospel campaigns, but by small meetings. If every small group would bring in one new person per week, there would be 400 new ones weekly. At the end of one month there would be 1,600 people. It is no wonder 1,100 people were baptized last week. This is the reaping of their labor for the previous months. The total seems quite large, yet with 400 small groups, this averages to less than three new ones per group per month. If every group brought in three, the total number would be 1,200.
To practice such a church life the elders, leading ones, sisters, and brothers are always busy. Just to take care of the baptisms, there is the need to do a lot of work. In Taipei, hall one, besides the general meetings, they have small training groups. The newly baptized ones are taught certain lessons for approximately seven weeks. I believe that all the new ones should receive some type of training right away.
As we can see there is the need for somebody to carry out some specific kind of work. In Taipei, due to these 400 small meetings being active, all of the saints are busy. The entire church is stirred up, charged with something to do. Thus far I have only received confirming reports that these small group meetings do work. Now I am waiting to hear how they labor in the Word and labor in teaching.
In the home the mother should cook and teach. This is on her side. On the children’s side, they have to eat properly and must learn to study properly. I believe as long as you have a good, diligent mother doing the proper cooking and teaching, most of the children will cooperate with her.