If we all practice this for the long run, people will be brought into the church; every month we will bring forth new fruit. Each month ten or twenty people may be brought in through all the living and functioning members. Some may labor for half a year and still have no fruit, but they still must go on and labor. Perhaps after twelve months of labor they will bear fruit. Over the long run we will have fruit. If each one bears one fruit yearly, our number will double each year. This is a good result. If we labor as a daily duty, it should be easy to bring one person in twelve months. Do not expect to have a fast result. Rather, we must do our duty and labor with patience.
I was raised in Christianity, but when I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I rebelled and gave up Christianity. Then my second sister, who is older than I, was saved, and she asked a pastor, a true brother in the Lord, to help me. That pastor came to me once a week for several months. Every week he came just to sit with me. He did not say much; he only said, “Please come to our church next Sunday. Will you come?” I was not in the habit of doing that, so I did not go, but the next week he would come again and do the same thing. Perhaps once in eight or ten visits he would say a little about God’s mercy or something else. He did this every week for almost half a year. Then the Chinese New Year came. According to the Chinese custom, people have many things to do at the close of the year, so the pastor said, “I realize you have many things to do, so for a few weeks you must excuse me for not coming.” In my heart I said, “It is good that you will not come.” During this time, of course, my sister must have prayed much for me.
The second day of the new year, according to custom, is the best day for New Year festivities. On that day when I rose from breakfast, my mother asked me where I would go. I could not answer. I said, “Where should I go? Perhaps I should go to the church.” My mother was happy and encouraged me to go. That was the first time I came back to Christianity. Although I was not saved at that time, that was the start of the work of the Holy Spirit in me. This happened through the labor of that pastor. This shows us that we have to labor. It may seem that there is no result for a long time, but sooner or later something will come out if we sow the seed and labor on people.
There are many different aspects to a proper church life, and one aspect is that we must bring people to the Lord. We should not neglect this aspect. We must be balanced. We cannot meet week after week, month after month, and year after year, yet bring no new ones into the church. This is wrong. We should be adjusted in this matter. Even if we are young and weak, we still have to do something to bring people in; then we will be balanced and strengthened. If in a few months ten or twenty are baptized and added to the church, we all will be strengthened by the addition of these new converts. Therefore, we must all encourage one another concerning this matter.
I beg you to have an outreach and take care of unbelievers. We must immediately put this into practice, and we must encourage one another. The brothers often invite the ones they are familiar with to come together. I always shake my head when I hear of this mutual inviting. They should not mutually invite each other so many times; rather, they should invite new ones. Sometimes we may even invite people off the street to eat dinner with us. Some have been saved in this way.
We must take care of unbelievers for the Lord’s sake. Sometimes we say that we do not have time to invite unbelievers, but we seem to have time to invite the ones familiar to us. We should invite some new ones and younger ones. If someone comes to our meeting, we can invite him for fellowship. Then we will see a result. We should not dream; we should labor in a normal way day by day.
In Shanghai in the 1930s there was an elderly sister named Miss Groves, a British missionary who had been working in China for many years. She had a ministry with a certain gift for preaching the gospel. Regardless of how busy she was or what the weather was like, every day except the Lord’s Day, after tea time at 3:00 P.M. she would bring a bundle of tracts and stand on the street. At that time she was about seventy years old. Eventually people testified that they were helped to know the Lord through her ministry. She did this in a weighty way, because she was a person with a burden.
In those years many Western missionaries went to China, especially young women in their twenties and early thirties. Whenever a group of new missionaries came to China, most of them would stay in Shanghai as their first station. This elderly sister would always invite the young female missionaries to her home, not to a big feast but for afternoon tea. On one occasion, almost all the young women had skirts above the knee. After serving tea, she sat down with them, and while sitting she kept adjusting her skirt over her legs, although her skirt was already long. After she did this two or three times, all the young women did the same thing. After that invitation to afternoon tea, all those young missionaries changed the style of their skirts. That was a real ministry to them.
This sister labored in the Lord and for the Lord for the long run. She did not dream that the Lord would give her power from on high; she simply labored in a normal way. If anyone visited her, they could sense the presence of the Lord, because she was a person who always labored. This was truly something for the Lord, and we heard many testimonies from those young missionaries, especially from the young women, as to how much help they received from her laboring in a normal way. In addition, many persons could say that they were saved through her labor. We need to be balanced, and we need to labor for the Lord over the long run.