In the last three years, I have been speaking on the new way. The purpose of that speaking was to have a complete rearrangement according to the Bible in the ways of meeting and service which we have had for the past sixty years. I have said before that the big meetings and the small meetings are like the two wings of an airplane; you cannot afford to lose either one. I have also said before that the lack of results in our gospel preaching in the past years, in spite of our labor and diligence, was due to a problem in the way of doing things. If the way of doing things is not effective, then naturally the efficiency will be reduced. We have now found out that the most scriptural and effective way of preaching the gospel is to visit people in their homes. This was determined based on the revelation and pattern seen in the Bible, our study of the gospel preaching methods adopted by the various groups in Christianity in the last two thousand years, and our own history for the past sixty years. This was the foundation established by God in the Bible.
After Adam fell, God did not call him while He was sitting in the heavens; rather, He came to the earth to seek him, and said to him, “Where art thou?” (Gen. 3:9). Later, when God wanted to bring His grace to His chosen people, He again did not call man while He was sitting in the heavens; He came to the earth Himself to become flesh, to become a man. While He was on the earth, He Himself went to visit sinners from place to place. He went even to that cursed city of Jericho to visit a great sinner called Zaccheus, and said to him, “Today I must stay in your house.” Then He said, “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:5, 9). The Lord also went to Samaria, a place despised and rejected by the Jews, to visit an immoral woman (John 4:3-4).
When the Lord was carrying out the gospel work on the earth, He did not ask His disciples to go to different places to hold gospel conventions so that He could save thousands of people by simply sounding a call. Instead, the Lord sent His disciples to go out. First, He sent the twelve apostles (Luke 9:1-2); then He sent the seventy disciples. He asked them to go to city after city and home after home to seek out the sons of peace (Luke 10:1, 6). The Lord did not send those who had doctoral degrees, who had positions, and who were capable, to draw people. Rather, He sent those unknown disciples, two by two, to go out to visit people in their homes. Therefore, our going out today to visit people’s homes to preach the gospel to them, to get them saved and baptized, is something absolutely according to the example set up by the Lord in the Bible.
From a human viewpoint, it is not an easy thing to go out to knock on people’s doors. If you were to invite your friends to attend a big gospel meeting where they could sit inside a grandly built chapel with a stately atmosphere, a piano and other musical instruments, a choir, and a famous speaker preaching, you would feel honored. But concerning the matter of visiting people’s homes to preach the gospel, even the brothers, not to mention the sisters, would feel awkward knocking on people’s doors. They are afraid that after the door is opened, they may be rebuked by people. I stayed before in Shanghai where the door from one house to the next was not more than ten feet away, yet the neighbors would not care for one another. If you were to knock on doors to preach the gospel, nine out of ten times you would encounter rebuke. It is not easy to knock on doors in Hong Kong either, and it is even more difficult in northern Europe.
Preaching the gospel by knocking on doors requires you to be prepared to experience hardship, to look at people’s long faces, and even to suffer rebuke from others, yet still to smile at them. This is indeed not an easy matter. This is the reason that this matter of preaching the gospel by visiting people’s homes is not adopted by many Christians even though it is emphatically revealed and testified in the Bible. This way requires us to pay a considerable price, yet human beings would rather avoid the hardship and take the easy way. Today in the Lord’s recovery, if we want the Lord to have a way in the matter of gospel preaching, we must follow this example of the Lord who was incarnated and humbled to visit people, and go to visit people’s homes to bring the gospel to them. This is the most effective way to preach the gospel.