We hope that all the churches today around the globe in the Lord’s recovery will practice to have one out of twenty saints as a job-dropping full-timer. If your church has one hundred saints meeting together, five full-timers should be produced. The other nineteen should endeavor to supply this one full-timer. The job-dropping full-timers should not sit in the church office to do desk work. They should go out two to three hours a day, five days every week, to visit people by knocking on their doors. Also, all the churches should practice to have one out of four saints who would go out to knock on doors once a week for two to three hours. If there are one hundred saints in your locality, you must have twenty-five weekly door knockers.
We have estimated according to our experience that one full-timer going out five days a week for two to three hours to visit people’s homes by knocking on their doors can get one person baptized every week. This is reasonable and very conservative. Within fifty-two weeks a full-timer will get fifty-two baptized. The one out of four saints in the church who go door-to-door part-time for two or three hours every week can get one baptized within eight weeks, or two months. Then every year such a weekly door knocker will get six baptized.
If there are one hundred saints in your locality, five should be job-dropping full-timers who knock on doors five days a week and twenty-five saints should be weekly door knockers. The five job-dropping full-timers can gain two hundred sixty within a year, and the twenty-five weekly door knockers can gain one hundred fifty. This yields a fourfold increase. Half of these new ones may be a failure, but you are still left with a twofold increase in a year. If half of this amount is discounted, the church would still have a one hundred percent increase of solid, living, remaining ones. This is reasonable and very conservative, but you need to practice it. The Lord said that all the authority in heaven and on earth had been given to Him, so He charged us to go and disciple the nations (Matt. 28:18-19). We do not necessarily need to go out to disciple those in faraway countries. We can go out to disciple our neighbors. Why would we not first disciple the families in our city?
I believe all the churches can increase at least onefold yearly. I also believe it will be very easy to have a twofold increase. We have been very slow and low according to our rate of increase because we have been influenced, captured, and kept by the practice of today’s Christianity. We must drop this! We all should pick up the Lord’s new way and pick up a new view of the practice of the church life.
You have to consider whether you should be a full-timer or not. If you have the burden to drop your job, you should fellowship with the leading ones and with your fellow brothers and sisters to see whether you should be one of the twenty to be a full-timer. Then at least one out of four should be a very prevailing, weekly door knocker. This has to be under the elders’ supervision to get something properly done. If we would do this, we will have the increase. In the past twenty-three years, the highest rate of increase we had was about forty percent. But in the last ten years, due to the defamation of some books, the rate of our increase has been just about three percent.
According to what we have practiced in Taipei recently, we can gain a solid increase if we are willing to take the new way to be trained to be full-timers and to be weekly door knockers. Endeavor to be either a job-dropping full-timer or a weekly door knocker. If you cannot go out for some reason, pray for this matter and stand for it. Because of our experience and the encouraging statistics, we expect to evangelize the entire island of Taiwan within five years. Now there have been over seven thousand baptized in Taipei and over two thousand new home meetings set up by the trainees within three months. The full-time trainees now have to endeavor to take care of the newly baptized ones and the newly established home meetings.
If we take this way, the Lord will have a living testimony, not a church life in big halls but the church life practiced in many homes. Every home will become a station of the gospel, a station of the truth, a station of life, and a station of the church life. I hope to see that each one of these homes would be a station to spread the gospel, the truth, life, and the church life. Many of the new ones the Lord has gained in these homes began to knock on doors immediately and spread the gospel to their relatives. This kind of preaching is much more prevailing and effective than to hire preachers. Christianity kills the preaching capacity of all the saints. The saints just donate some money; then they use the money to hire some preachers. But now the new way is to stir up every saint to be a very prevailing, effective preacher in their homes. Every home will be a “gospel chapel,” and every member of that home will become a preacher.
I hope that all the saints’ homes will be stations to spread the gospel, the truth, life, and the church. Many of those in the new homes in Taipei immediately have become Christians in this way. One home has brought in over a hundred new ones within a short time. Among these ones many have their homes opened up to be stations of the gospel. There are many “gospel chapels” full of preachers. This is the new way.
We have to forget about the old way—to donate money, to hire seminary graduates to preach the gospel for us, and to form a kind of mission to go out to the other countries to disciple the nations. Let us disciple the neighbors first. Then we can go out to other countries.
We have also charged our new trainees to learn other languages. All the trainees have to learn English and Greek. German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean are other languages of instruction. Many who are learning Spanish are preparing themselves to go out to the Latin American countries. Eventually, many full-timers will go throughout the world to spread and propagate the Lord’s new way.
I hope that all the churches would pick up the view to have a revolutionizing change, dropping the old practice of today’s Christianity and picking up the Lord’s new way.
A message given by Witness Lee in Irving, Texas, December 21, 1986
(The Lord's New Way and His Ministry Today, Chapter 1, by Witness Lee)