The most difficult area with the home meetings is their contents. In the big meetings the main emphasis is on one speaker. If the speaker is rich, the contents of the big meetings are also rich. But in the home meetings there is no big speaker. Instead, those who come together are all “small potatoes.” What content do these small potatoes have? If you want to see a spiritual giant, you have to go to the largest meetings. If a person were not a spiritual giant, how could he gather an audience of one hundred thousand? How could he maintain such a meeting? But as we know, not everyone can be a spiritual giant, just as not everyone can be the president of a country. In the human realm, not everyone can be the principal of a school or even a teacher. It is not easy to find one among ten who can really teach well. In the spiritual realm, there are many who are saved, tens of thousands, but they are all small potatoes. One can only find a few spiritual giants. In general, there are more small potatoes.
Let us now look at this matter from the Bible. On the day of Pentecost three thousand people were saved. On another day five thousand were saved. They all were filled with the Holy Spirit, meeting from house to house. Were there many spiritual giants among those few thousand? According to the record in Acts, we see a man called Stephen. In Acts 7 there is a long message given by him. Then there was the evangelist, Philip, who had the experience of being caught away. However, in the Bible we cannot find one gospel message preached by him. In Acts there is also a record of one named Barnabas. But again in the Bible we cannot find a record of his preaching. After these three, we cannot find any other names. If there were outstanding ones among those eight thousand, they would not have been omitted by Luke, the author of Acts. The preaching of Peter, message after message, is recorded in the Bible. Even the lengthy messages of Paul are recorded. From this we can see that at that time, besides Stephen, Philip, and Barnabas, the believers were all more or less at the same level. They were all small potatoes.
By reading the Bible in this way, we discover that what the Bible does not record is more meaningful than what is recorded. The first time Paul went out to preach, he went out with Barnabas. But Barnabas did not preach. Whenever there was the occasion to preach, it was Paul who spoke. In the Bible there are prophets and teachers. Yet the prophets and teachers are not necessarily spiritual giants. If Barnabas were an outstanding preacher, then Luke certainly would have recorded that fact. Probably the preaching of Timothy was also average, for among the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, not one was written by Barnabas or Timothy. Only Paul was a real spiritual giant. Among the twenty-seven books, he alone wrote fourteen of them. Here I want to point out to you all that for the church to be built up, it must be general, and it must depend on the small potatoes.
The strength or weakness of a local church does not depend on spiritual giants, but on each small brother or sister. The Bible likens the church to a cultivated field, the farm of God (1 Cor. 3:9). A field planted with grains of wheat will be full of golden grain at harvest time. The field will be all even, just as if it had been cut by a barber. There will be no exceptionally high ones, nor any exceptionally low ones, but all will be the same height. The church is God’s growing crop. The normal ones are all on the same level. It is the extraordinary ones who are abnormal. But our view is not like this. When we go to visit the churches, we always look at the few outstanding ones. If there are a few outstanding ones in a certain church, that church appears promising to us.
Based on my fifty years of observation and from my experience, I know that wherever there are outstanding ones, eventually that local church will have problems. Those local churches with ordinary believers are the ones which go on steadily. Those churches which depend upon able speakers are in a good condition for a short time, like the blossoming of the night-blooming flower, which does not last long. Their good condition does not last because the spiritual giant does not live very long. Moses said that the days of our lives are eighty years if we are strong. Even if a man lives to be eighty, the span of his life is only a handbreadth. After the spiritual giant has passed away, it is all over. But with the small potatoes, one generation follows another. Those born of the small potatoes are all small potatoes. They go on for generations. Paul has passed away. In these two thousand years, many would have liked to listen to Paul’s preaching, but he passed away. There is not a second Paul on the earth. Yet there are many small potatoes. Those whom the Lord has saved on the earth are all small potatoes. We must change our concept. God has no intention to use spiritual giants to build the church.
In Ephesians 4 there are apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers (v. 11). But they are not the ones who build the church directly. Those who build the church directly are all small potatoes, which are all the members (v. 16). All the members of the Body hold Christ in love and grow because of Him. Those apostles, prophets, and gifted persons do not build the church directly. They can only be counted as middlemen. For a local church to be built up, it must rely on a group of ordinary people. They are all average persons with nothing outstanding about them. The more ordinary the saints are, the more normal the church will be, and the longer its good spiritual condition will last. The principle in the Bible is that God uses gifted persons to save people. Then, after the people are brought in, God uses all the saints to build the church directly. Therefore the Bible speaks of the meetings that are from house to house. The church must have home meetings.