tHE gROUP mEETINGS
Verses:
Hebrews 10:24-25 Let us consider one another so as to incite one another to love and good works, not abandoning our own assembling together, as the custom with some is, but exhorting one another; and so much the more as you see the day drawing near.
Ministry Portion:
The more we study these two verses [in Hebrews 10:24 and 25], the more we can realize that they refer to the group meetings. The meetings spoken of here are meetings in mutuality. Verse 24 speaks of inciting one another to love and good works, and verse 25 mentions “exhorting one another.” Verse 25 tells us to not abandon the meetings—not the meetings in a general sense but in the sense of “our own assembling together.” This indicates that as Christians we should have “our own” meeting. Before the Hebrew readers of this Epistle were saved, they had the Jewish way of meeting. Now, as Christians, they needed to have a Christian meeting, which they should have considered as “their” meeting. As Christians, we should take care of the Christian meeting, which these verses call “our own assembling together.”
In the church we have different kinds of meetings. We have a meeting on the Lord’s Day. The Lord’s Day meeting is not the same as the Sunday morning service in Christianity, but we do take advantage of the fact that the Lord’s Day is a holiday in most nations. However, Sunday is not the Christian word for this day. Sunday is a term of idolatry, referring to the worship of the sun. To us, this day is the Lord’s Day, and on this day we have a meeting. On Tuesday we may have a prayer meeting, and on Wednesday we may have a mid-week meeting. Besides these, we have the group meetings. Among these four kinds of meetings, we should consider that the group meeting is our own meeting. The number who attend the group meetings should be higher than the number who attend the other kinds of meetings. Most brothers and sisters attend the Lord’s Day morning meetings because the majority of them came from a traditional background. According to this background, “Sunday” is the time for Christians to worship God. If one does not come to the Sunday morning meeting, he is not regarded as a faithful Christian. However, the group meetings should be eighty percent of our church life. If in a local church the attendance in the Lord’s Day morning meeting is higher than that in the group meetings, the saints in that church are still religious and in their traditional way. When in a local church the attendance in the group meetings is higher than that in the church meetings on the Lord’s Day, that church is in the proper way. Whether a local church is in the proper way or not depends in part on the attendance in the group meetings. (The Practice of the Group Meetings, ch. 2, sec. 1)
The church in Zamboanga 