SERVING THE LORD BY CARING FOR PEOPLE (2)
When I was with Brother Watchman Nee, he would often say, “Witness, we need the training.” Brother Nee was saved in 1920, and he began the work for the Lord in 1922. After a number of years, he realized that there was the need of training. In 1936 he bought a portion of land and built a center for the purpose of training. However, in August of the next year, Japan invaded Shanghai, and the building was destroyed. Three years after that, in 1940, he rented a place in Shanghai to begin the first formal, year-round training. Every week there was one meeting for training, and many persons remained there all week to wait for that one training meeting.
After the war, the work of the Lord spread widely throughout China, and Brother Nee returned to his ministry. He told me, “Witness, I will not carry out my ministry in the way that I did in the past. What I will do now is simply take care of the training. After 1948 he no longer took care of the church meetings. He stayed on the mountain with many lodgings in order to train people. These trainings were selective; not everyone was allowed to attend. The first period of training in 1948 was about six months long, and the second period in 1949 was also six months long. He charged me to care for the work and fight the battle elsewhere. I was to send the believers as the good material to him to be trained, and after their training, he would send them back to the churches.
After this time I was sent to the island of Taiwan. We began the work there in 1949, and in 1952 we began the training. This training was also selective. I did not train all the saints but trained only the serving ones, including the co-workers, elders, deacons, deaconesses, and all the promising ones. Every year we held a conference for one week to ten days with a large congregation of two or three thousand, which grew to four or five thousand. Each week we would meet on Tuesday through Friday in the mornings and evenings, and in the afternoons we would have practice. On Saturday the trainees would return to their local churches to serve throughout the weekend, on Monday they would come back to the training, and on Tuesday morning we would begin again. This went on for four to six months a year. The work in Taiwan depended mostly upon this training.
The training is not for acquiring mere knowledge. It is for practice and the proper discipleship. The training builds us up in the growth of life, in character, and in dealing with the natural disposition. Character is our disposition plus our habit. We need a change in our character. Even more deeply, the training touches our natural disposition. Strictly speaking, it is not our nature but our disposition that needs to be touched and dealt with. If we are trained in this way even for only a few months, we will see a difference. (The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1973-1974, vol. 2, “The Normal Way of Fruit-bearing and Shepherding for the Building Up of the Church”, ch. 1, pp. 523-525)
The church in Zamboanga 