Second, in the training we also want to study how to help you manage your time. In other words, we need to study how much time you should spend from now on when you go to visit and take care of the baptized saints. After you lead someone to be saved and baptized, it may be all right if you do not revisit him in a week, but it is not so good if you do not visit him again for two weeks, and you may lose him if you do not revisit him for three weeks. Not only so, you still have to set aside a part of your time to continue knocking on new doors. You may not be able to knock on as many doors as before, but you must not stop altogether. Therefore, now we have to study how, after baptizing people, we should use our time to continue visiting them and establishing meetings in their homes and how we should allocate our time for revisiting and for knocking on new doors. This needs much research.
After a person is baptized, we still need to continue to revisit, to take care of him, and to establish a meeting in his home. But what should we do in this meeting? And how should we do it? This matter requires our study in depth. After we have led a person to salvation, we must then lead him to grow in life. To lead someone to grow in life, we cannot stay away from the truth; without the truth it is very difficult for him to grow. Therefore, you need to probe for a way to teach the truth to lead people to grow in life. Of course, in the Lord’s recovery there is a great deal of material on the truth. However, we need to draw up a plan concerning which materials to use and how to compile them properly. This may be likened to holding the rudder steady when sailing the boat; otherwise, the boat cannot proceed in a straight course and time will be wasted.
When you lead others to grow in life and to get into the truth, eventually you will be able to lead them into the church life. When people are saved and baptized, immediately they are in the church, but they are not living in the church life yet. Our basic goal is to bring them into the church life. I am not referring to bringing them to our big meetings. Our big meetings at present are a mixture of the old and the new; they are just like the water at the mouth of the Yangtze River which is partly salty and partly fresh. I am concerned that if the newly saved ones come to the big meetings and see the old situation, a situation of the so-called worship, they may receive some bad influence. Therefore, I would rather not have them attend the big meetings temporarily so that not only will they avoid the bad influence, but they will also receive a good impression of the church life in the homes. However, this is not an easy thing to do.
There are less than three months left in this term of training. I hope that you can thoroughly research these points and carefully experiment with them; thus, when you go back to the locality you came from, you may be able to present the results of the training and what you have learned here. Prior to that time, I do not wish to let the churches in the various localities know too much because of the fact that our present practice is not so accurate yet. If they should know about what we are doing here and immediately try to do the same thing and they do not get the ripe fruit, then that will not be so good. Hence, this matter cannot be rushed. It is not until this training has researched enough and has practiced thoroughly that we can present all these things to all the saints. Then you all can be teachers and coaches. In other words, I hope that this training can be like a teachers’ college that specializes in producing teachers and coaches to promote the practice of the Lord’s new way.
Concerning the practice of the new way, at present we already have some very definite steps. The first step is to knock on doors and to baptize people. There are some distinctions between door-knocking and visitation. The goal of door-knocking is to preach the gospel to people, leading them to be saved and baptized, while visitation is to visit and take care of those who have already been saved and baptized. These ones are not only familiar to us, but they have also become our kinsfolk, our brothers and sisters, in the Lord. Hence, when we go, it is to visit them. Therefore, door-knocking is to contact new ones, the unsaved ones, for the preaching of the gospel, while visitation is to revisit someone who has already been saved and baptized.
The second step is to visit the newly baptized ones and establish a meeting in their homes. In the home meetings we need to do the following three things: First, we need to help people get into life and grow in life; second, we need to help them get into the truth for their advancement in life; and third, we need to carry out our basic goal, which is to lead them into the church life. Primarily and for most of the time, this church life should take place in the homes.
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