Third, we need to tear down religious hierarchy. The clergy system turns the saints into “laymen.” In Christianity there are two groups of people attending worship services: one group is the clergy, and the other group is the common believers other than the clergy, the “laymen,” who merely attend worship services and listen to the clergy’s preaching. In our church life, however, there are only the brothers and sisters, only the members of the Body of Christ, each carrying out his function. There is no clergy system.
The clergy system is related to religious hierarchy, so in order to abolish the clergy system, religious hierarchy must be torn down. This may not sound like a good idea at first. An ordinary person might say, “Religion is good because it teaches people to do good. If religious hierarchy were torn down, would the world not be in chaos?” Here what we call hierarchy is hierarchia in Greek, which is a group of clergymen from among Christians organized into a system of religious hierarchy. For example, the pope has the highest rank in Catholicism; this is a kind of religious hierarchy.
Some time ago when I was touring the Vatican, there were only seventy or eighty cardinals, commonly called “red-robed bishops,” serving at the side of the pope as his cabinet. Now there are more than one hundred. They are referred to in this way because they all wear red robes. Under the “red-robed bishops” are the other bishops, and under these bishops are still various ranks, all the way down to the monks and nuns. This is the organized system composed of their clergy, which is a religious system. Besides Catholicism, Protestantism also has denomination after denomination, each with its clerical hierarchy. For instance, the Episcopal Church has bishops, the Presbyterian Church has pastors and a presbytery, and the Baptist Church has not a presbytery but a system of pastors. These are all religious hierarchies.
We must destroy and tear down these three things—denominational divisions, the clergy system, and religious hierarchy—because they kill the functions of the saints as the members of the Body. These denominations, systems, and hierarchies depend on domination, and domination is a kind of bondage. This is the reason why Christianity today has deteriorated, degraded, and even become corrupted. Indeed, we see that when the clergy system becomes an organization, it controls, dominates, and puts the saints under bondage, causing them to lose the functions they should have as the members of the Body of Christ.
After years of study and seeking before the Lord, in 1985 we felt that we should thoroughly correct our situation. This is because in all these years, although we have rejected denominations, the clergy system, and religious hierarchy, the way we meet and the way we preach the gospel have fallen mostly into forms; they are too rigid. This is indeed unavoidable, for the church has been on the earth for nearly two thousand years, and the traditional way of meeting after so many years has evolved into the situation of one person speaking and everyone else listening. Christians gather together and hire an eloquent person to speak to the congregation; this is the traditional way of meeting. As for gospel preaching, it is also a matter of finding a large place of gathering and inviting people to come to listen to the gospel. These traditional practices are not evident in the Bible; therefore, their efficiency is very low.
Because of the need for research, I did my best to investigate the statistics of the increase in the number of people in Christianity. After I investigated for a few years, up to the end of October of 1986, the report I received was that four out of the five major denominations had not increased in number, but instead, the number decreased greatly. Consider the example of Taiwan. Currently the population of Taiwan is at least nineteen million, but out of these nineteen million there are less than five hundred thousand Christians. There are more than three million six hundred thousand Buddhists and more than one million Taoists, yet the number of Christians barely reaches five hundred thousand. This means that for every one hundred Taiwan residents, there are only two and a half Christians.
Christianity was first brought to Taiwan by the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. It has been more than one hundred fifty years since then, but today their number is only somewhere between ten and twenty thousand. Statistically, we have over forty thousand people, second only to the Presbyterian Church. In any case, these numbers all reveal that less than three out of one hundred people in Taiwan are Christians. How pitiful this condition is!
The reason behind all this is none other than the traditional practice in Christianity, which not only kills the functions of Christians but also numbs the Christians themselves. This practice renders all the saints “unemployed,” unable to do anything. Christianity has had to take the way of seminaries and of recruiting theology students in order to train a group of clergymen who specialize in doing ministerial work. When these clergymen want to do something, they gather a congregation to maintain their clerical position. This gathering kills and nullifies people’s functions and numbs the people. That is why we can say that this practice has no power whatsoever.
In 1962 I settled down in the United Stated and started to work. In 1964 I began to compile statistics. That year I obtained some numbers: The whole United States had a population of over two hundred million, half of which, one hundred million, were Christians. Among them, fifty-five percent were Protestants, and forty-five percent were Catholics. In other words, there were fifty to sixty million people in Protestantism in 1964. These fifty to sixty million people, after twenty-two years of work, increased by a total of nine million. By simply looking at the number nine million you may feel it is big, but if you look carefully, the base number was fifty to sixty million. This means that there was less than one percent increase per year. Perhaps among one hundred people, not one person had led someone to believe in the Lord in a whole year. Only about 0.5 percent of the people were led to believe in the Lord. This power is really very small.
In the last ten years we also have lost the power of increase here. For this reason we are stirred up and forced to take the new way. At this time, after more than two years of research, not only have we changed the way, but we also have put it into practice. In the Full-time Training, five to six hundred people are carrying out the experiment every day, and after three and a half months of testing, we have seen that it is a definite success. If we walk according to the new way, in one year the total number of people will increase at least threefold, and the number of functioning and useful ones will at least double. I hope that everyone will see this clearly. In conclusion, we are emphasizing putting aside the negative things. We reject denominational divisions, we abolish the clergy system, and we completely tear down religious hierarchy.