In this message my main purpose is not to teach you to learn the hymns but to fellowship with you a burden regarding your pursuit and learning. Those of you who are presently serving full time have the day off on Monday, are working on the campuses on Saturday, and are attending meetings on the Lord’s Day. Therefore, this leaves only four days a week for studying. In the beginning I had hoped that every full-timer would have half a day every day to study the New Testament, including the Recovery Version and the life-study messages.
The most important thing that we who have given ourselves to work for the Lord can do is to speak for Him. Whether we are preaching the gospel, teaching the truth, ministering life, exhorting the believers, or building the church, we need to speak for the Lord. Hence, it is very important for a person who works for the Lord to study the word.
In 1949 I began the work in Taiwan, and in 1952 I began to conduct trainings. I did this every year for ten years until 1961. Every year there was a great number of saints who attended the training. The highest and best training was the one held in 1953. I am full of thanksgiving to the Lord for the saints who were in that term of the training because they have a strong desire for the Lord and have been used by the Lord. Nevertheless, I still feel that there is some lack because they have not adequately entered into the truth. As far as the truth is concerned, they are much better than the workers in Christianity, but they are still not as advanced as the earlier generations of co-workers among us who were thoroughly trained and perfected in the truth.
Every kind of work will be judged by its fruit. The Lord Jesus said that every good tree produces good fruit and that a tree is proven by the fruit it produces (Matt. 7:17-20). More than thirty years have passed since the training began, and now we can see the fruit of the labor of these co-workers. Generally speaking, the results of their labor are quite good. We all know that the Christian group with the longest history on the island of Taiwan is the Presbyterian Church from Scotland, which has been in Taiwan for almost two hundred years. According to the statistics I obtained three years ago, the Presbyterian Church has a little over eighty thousand members. This is the issue of their labor on this island after almost two hundred years. We in the local churches rank second in terms of numbers with over forty thousand members. However, if we were to count the number of people baptized in the local churches as the Presbyterian Church does, we would have about the same number as they do. This indicates that our work in Taiwan during the last thirty years has been comparable to the work of the Presbyterian Church. Not only so, many Western missionaries have admitted in their reports that the most successful evangelistic work in Taiwan has been the work carried out by the Lord’s recovery.
I am telling you all these facts to prove that I am not invalidating the work of our co-workers during the last thirty years. Nevertheless, there is a saying, “A boat sailing against the current must forge ahead or else it will be driven back.” Therefore, whatever we do, we must always try our best and endeavor to improve. Concerning this matter, this particular group of co-workers, who are a generation younger than I and whom I almost single-handedly trained by myself, has been a disappointment to me. They accomplished only a certain amount in the last thirty years and did not do more. They stopped and did not seek to improve.
In a sense, the work on the island of Taiwan has not gained much profit or made much progress during the ten years from 1975 to 1985. We have merely been maintaining the status quo. By the Lord’s grace the co-workers have not brought the churches into disgrace or decline, but neither have they made much progress. The reason for their lack of advancement is that the co-workers are behind in learning the truth. I am disappointed with them because of their lack of aggressiveness. It is never too late for us to learn, because there is no limit to knowledge. The less educated a person is, the less he thinks he needs to learn. Rather, he thinks that what he has learned is adequate and acceptable. The more educated a person is, however, the more he feels that he is inadequate and needs to learn more aggressively.
The result of my fellowship with the elders is that I have seen a very clear picture. The church in Taipei has over ten thousand saints, and over three thousand of them regularly attend meetings in the twenty-one halls in Taipei. However, the ministry of the word in each hall is very weak. Therefore, there has not been any spreading in our work. Ever since we changed the system in October, many other churches have had a great increase. The churches in Yungho, Hsinchu, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung have had increases of over fifty percent. The church in Taipei is the only exception. Not only has there been no increase in Taipei, but the number of saints has actually decreased by five percent.
When we first began to change the system, I made a statement saying that our practice was in the initial stage. We were like those doing research in a laboratory, trying to find a new way that was according to the Scriptures. Therefore, we appointed the leading deacons in every hall as elders in order to let them try to lead the church. Now, after looking at the results of our experiment during the past one and a half years, the elders and I have found that our numbers have decreased instead of increased. This shows us that there is a weakness here.
The church in Taipei is a church that has great assets and is rich in resources. When I began the work here on August 1, 1949, the number of regular attendants in Taipei was less than one hundred. Five months later at the end of that year, the number of attendants in Taipei had increased to nine hundred. After five more years the number of saints on the entire island had increased a hundred times. The number on the whole island when we first began the work was around four to five hundred, but in 1955, prior to Brother Austin-Sparks’ visit, we had forty to fifty thousand people according to our estimation. In other words, there was a hundredfold increase in less than six years. This was the rate of increase during the initial stage of our work in Taiwan. Now we have a great asset of three to four thousand saints in Taipei, yet after ten months of implementing the change of system, we have not brought in even a thousand. This indicates that there is a big weakness among us.
I came back to seriously and thoroughly study our situation to find out the reason for our low rate of increase. Although I was not able to visit every hall or contact every elder, after a detailed analysis I concluded that the main reason for our low rate of increase is the weakness in our ministering of the word. We must realize that people come to the meetings not because the meeting hall is nice, because the people are nice, or because of other factors. The only reason they come is because of the strong ministry of the word and the transmission of the rich truths. The reason the church in Yungho has had a great increase is that the leading brother studies the Word with the full-timers so that they are strengthened to speak the truth. This attracts people.