THE NEED FOR COOKING AND TEACHING
In October 1984 I fully realized that we must have a thorough change in our way of meeting, or in our way of taking care of the saints in the meetings. We have to change. I call the old way the “lazy way.” If the groceries are bought and stored, yet there is no labor to cook them, that is just laziness.
To build up a proper and strong family, first you need to take care of the feeding and, second, the education…The wife, the mother of the family, has to labor in cooking. You can spend four hours to cook a meal, or you can spend ten minutes to cook a meal. A proper meal is both nourishing and tasty. It also should not be too expensive. These are the principles you have to keep. To do such a thing, you need to labor. You cannot go to the grocery store and pick up the things in a light way. As the wife, the mother of the family, you have to labor very much.
In Christianity the way to take care of the members of a church is the lazy way. There just is not much cooking. I hope that all the leading ones, not just the elders but all those concerned for the church, those with a sincere concern for the Lord’s recovery, including myself, will have a turn from the old way. Since you are the housewives and the mothers in the church, you need to labor in the word and in teaching (1 Tim. 5:17). Paul says that the overseers must be “apt to teach” (3:2). This phrase does not mean to teach accidentally. It is to teach in a habitual way. Apt to teach implies a habit, a desire, or an appetite to teach. The overseers, the elders in the church, should be like this, apt to teach.
The way to build up the church is to gather the saints together, encouraging them to speak, even charging them to speak one by one. Every time you attend a big meeting or a small meeting, you should labor very much before the meeting in the Word. You should get yourself equipped and prepared with something before you go to the meeting. You should let all the saints have the meeting. In case they do not have anything to open the meeting with, after just a few minutes you have to serve them a cooked dish. That means you have to give them a living word lasting less than ten minutes that is rich, enlightening, stirring, and watering. Then you should turn the meeting to all the saints. Maybe a few will continue to say something. After that, it may stop. Then you have to do something again to serve them with another dish. By this way you will train all the saints to function in the meetings. This is not so easy; it requires a lot of preparation. This needs a lot of laboring…To take care of the church is a heavy burden, and the heaviest point of this burden is to take care of the meetings. This is just like a mother or a wife in a home. For the mother to take care of the cooking for her family is a really hard job.
This is my heavy burden…We must turn our attention to the new way, that is, number one, to cook, and number two, to teach. Just like a housewife, you have to cook with adequate time the proper, nourishing, tasty, and inexpensive food for your family. Also you have to teach. Even though you send your children to schools for education, still at home you need to do the home teaching. If the mothers could not do the work of teaching at home, the children would have a hard time going on in their education. Today in every local church the elders and the leading ones, including the sisters, should practice this. They should continually cook proper meals for all the saints, and they should always be apt to teach. To do this you need to labor much. (CWWL, 1985, vol. 3, “The Home Meetings–the Unique Way for the Increase and the Building Up of the Church”, pp. 166-167, 169-170)
The church in Zamboanga 