Acts 9:31 says, “The church throughout the whole of Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace, being built up; and going on in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it was multiplied.” Verse 47 of chapter 2 gives a description of the early believers in Jerusalem: they were “praising God and having grace with all the people. And the Lord added together day by day those who were being saved.” The situation of the churches in Taiwan is similar to that of the early believers in Acts. We have peace, we are being built up, we fear the Lord, we have the comfort of the Holy Spirit, and we are praising God. However, there is one thing that does not seem to match the situation. In Acts the Lord “added together day by day those who were being saved”; that is, the number of believers increased day by day. In recent years our numbers do not seem to have increased. Our present rate of increase cannot compare to the increase that we experienced during our first eight years in Taiwan.
In 1949 there were about five hundred saints in Taiwan who had come from the mainland. Later these saints spread to various places on the island. In 1955 there were close to twenty thousand saints in Taiwan. These figures indicate that we had a rapid rate of increase. In the last ten years, however, our increase has slowed down. During this period, there was a turmoil among us; hence, it was not so easy for the work to advance. Even though the churches in Taiwan have been in harmony and oneness for the last two to three years and the co-workers have also been in one accord, our rate of increase has been very slow. The church in Taipei has not experienced a ten-percent increase during the past three years. Although the number of districts has increased, the total number of saints in attendance has not. I believe that this is the situation in all the churches.
The churches today have more provisions than we had twenty years ago. At that time, the saints were young, and our financial capability was less than a tenth of what it is today. In spite of all these factors, our present rate of increase is very slow. This situation is worthy of our study and examination before the Lord.
Furthermore, very few new co-workers are being gained. This means that very few saints are answering the Lord’s calling to be set apart by the Lord and be useful in full-time service. We cannot use human methods, such as opening a kind of school to recruit young people in order to cultivate and produce some useful ones. Such a method is useless. Our situation should be that year after year new ones are called by the Lord, raised up by Him, and set apart by Him. Regrettably, we do not have such a situation among us.
At present the work is not spreading. It seems as though we are only maintaining the status quo among existing local churches. This is in contrast to our situation a few years ago when the work was always spreading and opening new areas. Now only a few local churches are being raised up. One reason for this may be that churches have already been established in most of the major cities. Furthermore, most of the serving ones are in the major cities, and it is not so easy for them to go to smaller places. Initially, the scattered brothers and sisters moved to the major cities for the raising up of local churches. Now it is not common for the saints to move to smaller places. People tend to concentrate in large cities rather than small towns. For this reason, it is not easy to raise up more churches. In view of this situation, we must rely on the workers going out rather than on the saints being scattered in order to raise up new churches.
In the Bible there are two ways for the work to spread. The first way is for workers to go forth and establish churches in various places (Acts 13:2). The second way is through the scattering of the saints (8:1-4). We cannot rely on the saints being scattered to smaller towns. Hence, the spread of the work depends on the co-workers’ going out. Since the co-workers have been unable to go out, it has been difficult for the work to spread. As a result, the work and the testimony of the church are limited to large cities. This point is worthy of our study.
There are three matters that require our attention: the slow rate of increase in the churches, the lack of new co-workers being produced in the work, and the way to spread the work of the Lord’s testimony from large cities to smaller cities and from smaller cities to towns and even to villages. We must examine these three matters before the Lord. An additional matter that is also worthy of our attention is that very few who were baptized have remained.