Weekly Pursuit—Week of June 23, 2024

From now on we all have to run the race by practicing to contact people. This is not an easy thing, because we do not have this habit and practice. We need to have a change in our natural being. We should not excuse ourselves by saying that we were born to be a certain way. We may have been born to be a certain way, but we have been born again. We have had a second birth. We have been regenerated. Our being generated made us an old creation, but in regeneration God has made us a new creation, so we must be new persons.

After regeneration we experience transformation. Transformation is not an outward correction or adjustment but an inward, metabolic change. A number of us were born as persons who cannot contact people easily, but this training requires us to have an inward change, a transformation. We need to pray, “Lord, grant me to have a change in contacting people. I don’t like to contact people. I don’t like to be invited by others to contact them, nor do I like to invite people to contact me. I don’t have this kind of disposition. Lord, You know that I don’t have this capacity. So You have to transform me, Lord.” We have to cooperate with the Lord to be transformed.

I would propose that from tomorrow morning you begin to contact people by using the telephone. Before you drive away from your home, you can make at least one phone call to someone. This will begin to build you up with a habit of contacting people, knowing people, and becoming interested in people.

We also need to contact people before and after the church meetings, especially the Lord’s Day morning meeting. This can be the best time for us to contact people. On Saturday we could call a certain brother and say to him, “Brother, I have seen you quite often, but I have not had a time to talk with you. How about we come to the meeting tomorrow half an hour earlier to have some fellowship for about twenty minutes?” This kind of contact with the saints helps a lot.

After the Lord’s Day morning meeting is also a good time to contact people. I have observed that many brothers and sisters contact only their familiar acquaintances after the meeting. They do not go to contact the new ones in the meeting. Thus, the new ones are left as orphans. Before the meeting and after the meeting we should create an intimate and loving atmosphere in the hall. When the new ones come in, they should be able to sense the warm care and intimacy among us. A new one may not have even heard the gospel yet. He may not even have believed yet. But he will be impressed with the loving atmosphere, the intimate atmosphere, among the saints in the meeting hall.

When we contact the saints and the new ones in this way, it helps us to function in the meeting; it makes it easier for us to prophesy. Suppose I come every Lord’s Day morning, yet I do not contact anyone, and no one contacts me. Then every face looks cold to me. When I stand up to prophesy, to speak for the Lord, it is difficult because the people seem so cold. After speaking a little bit in such a cold atmosphere, it will be hard for me to continue. But if everyone is so familiar to me, some will smile at me while I am sharing. Their smiling tells me to “sail on” in my speaking for the Lord. We must have such an atmosphere in the church meetings, an atmosphere in which people know that we really love one another. We are really a big, loving, intimate family with brothers, sisters, and parents. Some older ones are really our parents in the Lord (Rom. 16:13; 1 Cor. 4:15). (Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1993, vol. 2, “The Training and Practice of the Vital Groups”, ch. 4,  pp. 310-312)