HOME MEETINGS
Read and pray: “And when she was baptized, and her household, she entreated us, saying, If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house and stay there. And she constrained us.” (Acts 16:15)
THE WAY OF TODAY’S CHRISTIANITY
The way ordained by God lasted only a short time. Immediately after the departure of the apostles, this way began to wither, and by the second century, according to my knowledge of church history, it had been totally abandoned.
The church in the second century adopted the congregational way according to the worldly pattern. As a result, they needed great speakers, great ministers, great preachers, and great evangelists. They formed monasteries, the old seminaries, to train people.
Today Christianity depends on the existence of seminaries. Without the seminaries, where would the preachers come from? There would be no place for people to be trained to preach and teach. Thus, all the trained and educated preachers and teachers became the clergy.
Therefore, through the clergy, hierarchy was established. This is the organized Christianity of today, and this is the organizational way of the present Christianity. We all hate hierarchy and reject the system of clergy and laity. Yet unconsciously, even today, in some way, some clergy slips in among us secretly.
I fear that even though we are talking about home meetings, we still do not have a meeting in every home, except in a selective way. Some have already said, “Actually, we don’t have great speakers.”
Nowadays, the way of Christianity to worship God is to have a large place with a large number of people gathering with a great speaker. They do not see how necessary the home meetings are. This way, invented by God, has been completely lost by Christianity.
Zinzendorf, three centuries ago, began to practice the church life. In a certain sense, that was very good. However, Zinzendorf said nothing about home meetings. Then, a century after Zinzendorf, the Brethren [United] were raised up in England. They paid much attention to the way of meeting. They wrote books about it.
When I was young, I was with them for seven and a half years. I never heard the term “home meeting.” Every week I attended five meetings among them. All the time I went to that one meeting place. They met only in that one meeting place. They never met in anyone’s home.
In these days the Lord has shown us the deficiency, the loss, and the damage we have suffered by neglecting home meetings. Great speakers with great congregations can only bring people in. There is no way for great congregations to build up the saints.
We can illustrate the way to build up the church by the construction of this place. When we built this place, I presented a preliminary design, and the brothers made the plan.
Every morning I looked and observed. One brother did the purchasing, the trucks unloaded, and others gathered all the materials. If there had been only one brother gathering and accumulating all the materials on the site for nine years, we would have been ruined.
Gathering the materials is one thing, but building by putting all the materials together is another. Look at this building today. In this place, you cannot see a single piece of individual material. You can only see a building.
Another brother was managing the whole group. At that time, we had more than eighty full-time workers, whom this brother organized into groups. One group built the stairs, and a group of sisters manually sanded the stair railing. Everyone was grouped to do a small part of the construction and finally put all the parts together. Now we are enjoying the building.
In the early days of the church life, when the apostles were raised up by the Lord, they built up the church in this way. It was very quick. The church in Jerusalem was built up. Acts 9:31 says, “So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace, being built up.” Within a short time, all were built up.
Can we say that all the churches in the United States are built up? We cannot say that we have been built up because we have never used the way that builds. What is the way that builds? The small groups! The home meetings!
🌿 Enjoy more:
Hymn – “The Church – Her Building”
https://hinario.org/detail.php?tab=1&mainmp3=admin/Uploaded-mp3-Files/0847.voz_piano.mp3&id=926
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