The Christian and His Comfort Zone: Endurance, Reformers, and the Arena (Part 2)

I have one more thing I want to read to you. This is the one I want to leave with the church. Before I read it to you, I want to tell you a few stories, and I may have to ask for one of them to be cut off. Look, I’m not Bakht Singh. I’m not Prem Pradhan. I’m not Watchmen Nee, but I did live in this century, and I have been outside the institutional church. When they arrested Watchman Nee, and this is a terrible story to tell, but it makes a point. The Christian missionaries hated the man and were glad to see the communists arrest him. They put him in a room, made him face the camera, then brought in a group of unclothed women, took a picture, and published it on the front page of their national paper. They hung Watchman Nee in a cage in the city square of Shanghai so that the crowds were supposed to come by and be derisive and yell at him and all that stuff. He stood there in that cage and sang Christian hymns to the crowd. I had the privilege to live among the men who were Watchmen Nee’s age, the men who had been imprisoned, the men who fled, the men who lost everything. I keep asking, where are those people? And the sisters who gave their lives full-time to back those men? I lived among those people.

In the Philippines, I lived with two Chinese women who had been the servants in the house where Watchmen Nee lived, so that the people there could have all the time they needed to serve the Lord. Beta Sheirich was in that house. Miss Fischbacher, Mary Jones, and Miss Rabbacher were all there on Hardoon Road in Shanghai backing that man. According to Mary Jones, he did not die in prison of a natural death, but I saw her just before she died. She said, “Gene, that’s not true. He kept winning people to the Lord,” and they told him that if he wins one more person to Christ, they’re going to take him out and shoot him. Well, they took him out and shot him because he wouldn’t stop.

Hated by the Christians, despised by the government. T. Austin Sparks was probably the most disliked minister in England up until his health failed. Someday, will you make me tell Prem Pradhan’s story because it reaches beyond any of those? Now I can speak firsthand, and I can tell you that that man and I were probably closer to one another than anybody else in the world that either one of us was close to. He told me a story that when he got saved, there was nobody else saved in Nepal. So, when he came out of prison, all of his people in prison would come out with him because each one of them had to spend a year in jail if they got baptized, and they’d go out and start church, and then they went out and preached the Gospel, and they made about $75 a year. I’m going to get off the subject just a little bit.

You’ve never heard of a gentleman named Sunga from Thailand, and he was in my home, and Prem was telling about how they had their conferences and riverbeds and how they did this and that they brought all these people in, and Sunga kept saying, “How do you do that? How do you do that?” There must have been about 50 or 60 people in the room, and we’re all white men. We have no idea what he’s talking about; we’re Americans, middle-class. “How do you do that?” Prem understood perfectly. He said, “Oh, brother, all year long we raise chickens. We go to the market to sell chicken. All year long, we raise pigs. We take pigs to market and sell them in Kathmandu. We take millet, we grow much millet, and we take it to market, and we sell it. And then we take all the proceeds we sell, and we give it to the Lord, and then we buy more millet, and we eat millet with what we got from chickens, and that’s how we have conference.”

When Prem was in one of those times when he wasn’t in prison, he started a fellowship of Christian workers. He had led every one of them to Christ. The second time he got out of prison, there were people there who were called Christian “Presence”. Does that word mean anything to you? You are a missionary who signs a document that you will never utter the word Jesus Christ in public. You will not preach the Gospel, but you will do your humanitarian work, and they were beginning to get in there. I’m okay if I get angry; you just forgive me. So, they, the missionaries, began telling the Prem Pradhan story, and it got in the newspapers here, and it got in the churches, and the missionaries came home, and they talked about wonderful Christians, Prem Pradhan, who went to prison and these people he led to the Lord. Listen to Prem’s own words to me. “Gene, they raised $1 million. They build hospitals. They build schools,” I said, “Prem, what did you get to carry on your work?” “Nothing. Maybe I will get a front sofa. I got some old rotten vegetables.” That’s all. That’s the way he said it. No, I don’t like the institutional church. You don’t think they do things like this nowadays? I’m talking about American missionaries, friends of yours, friends of mine. Don’t take that personally. He got out of prison, and the missionaries had taken over the fellowship of those Christian workers. Bought them off, and Prem went to the meeting, and the missionaries met him and said, “You are not allowed to be part of this fellowship of Christian work.”

He went back again and again to prison. He didn’t have a stress level. He didn’t have a comfort zone. He didn’t have a place where he wore out endurance, and he was like that the day he started. I have been one of the most honored men in the world because, as far as I’m concerned, what Prem did outstrips anybody ever anybody ever did except Paul, but he matched him. You’ve never seen a man with scars so deep in his wrists and in his ankles. Nothing would grow there. He wore it for so many years. Come out and start churches, get thrown back in jail. I think I told you the day I met him; he had spent half of his Christian life in prison. As dear as a man who ever lived on this earth, the most choice servant I think I ever knew. He almost died right here in this town, right here. He came and stayed at Mike and Carisia’s home, and I said, “Mike, did y’all prepare a bedroom for him?” Well, brother, we had some other guests there. Didn’t you put him in a room? Please tell me this isn’t true. He lay on the living room floor with a pillow under his head. I said, “Mike, you can’t do this.” He said, “He won’t sleep in a bed.” I went to Prem asking for forgiveness. I wanted to be shot. I wanted to die. “Oh, no problem. I always sleep on the floor. Floor and pillow. All I need.”

Where do you get men like that? Bakht Singh raised up the greatest work ever done by a Christian in all of Christian history, unless you can find somebody else who started 6,000 churches and had over half a million people at his funeral. But I’m going to tell you something. When it came to the work, Prem Pradhan was meaner than a stick, meaner than I could ever hope to be. I can tell you why you have to be. And Bakht Singh is just unbelievable. He ran that thing because he was Bakht Singh. Of all of those men, by the way, only one of them knew how to drive a car. Did you know that? And that was Bakht Singh. He had an old truck that he drove all over India. Temperature 180 degrees…or whatever it is. I’m serious. Check it out. It’s humidity.

I have a story I need to tell. I think I’ll tell you a little about it. I don’t think you can understand in our day and age how, in a little town like Santa Barbara, how ruthless the institutional church can be. Now, I want you to know something. We’re innocent. We didn’t do anything in this world but meet. We didn’t say anything ugly. We were just there. I walked into a Logos bookstore and bought a book. This man started warning me about Gene Edwards, and he started rattling off this and the other, how horrible he was and what he had done, what he had said. I handed him my card, Earl E. Edwards, and he kept raging against Gene Edwards. I asked him one question. Have you ever met him? “No.” I said, “Do you ever hear him make any of these statements?” No, but I’ve heard about it. So, I got in the car, and he came out and said, “You forgot to sign your credit card.” I went out there and wrote my name. There were people all over Southern California who knew my name. There was an entire chapter written about me concerning the Jesus movement and what was going on in Santa Barbara, and I thought it was one of the most wonderful compliments a man could ever get. They called me a mystic who had raised up a church that was a group of Christian mystics.

Now, here we were, people who could holler and scream. They heard us 10 blocks away and depicted us as mystics. We were stopped on campus; someone set our meeting place on fire. The police said, “We got one truckload of dynamite hidden somewhere in this town. We don’t know whether it’s to blow up the bank or to blow you up.” By the way, that dynamite was found later, and it was wet, and they couldn’t blow it up at all. It was dug out…it was out there in one of the vacant lots. It had been hauled in there. We still don’t know what it was for, but that was the kind of thing that we had going.

I had an experience there of Christians who would join us, and this is the kind of thing that none of those other men would ever tolerate. I remember a guy’s name, believe it or not, was Tombstone, and yes, he made tombstones. Now, maybe he changed his name, and he said, “You people, this is the most wonderful thing in this world, but you’ve got to get rid of Gene Edwards, or he’s going to ruin this whole place.” You’re supposed to laugh, saints. I was responsible for that group of people, and I was holding it together, but there would be somebody like that who would come in, gather four or five people, talk to them, leave, and take them. Nothing ever happened.

We had a brother who was so Christian and so religious, and he took about 10 people out of the church, moved to some town in California, and was never heard from again. The people who followed him really thought they were going to follow another Watchman Nee, but that man had no stress level whatsoever. Every time there has ever been someone attempting to split the church, I have always let them do it. The reason I say this is that Christians get in their flesh under a lot of pressure when there are a lot of lies and rumors going around, and I have never sat in a room in my entire ministry where Christians went at one another. Not for one second in my whole life ever. And to avoid it, I’ve always let them have the church. Now you stand on the horns of a dilemma. You do everything you can to make Christians strong, stand for their church, read the riot act, if necessary, but quietly, to those who would damage or split the church, and then people get hurt. Or you can let them split the church, and people get hurt.

Let me explain. Every time anybody has ever tried to divide the church, and they do it by gossip, and they do it by this and innuendos, and why we could do it better, and so on, they never understand that they can’t get a unanimous vote on that. When they begin drawing people to themselves, the other half is destroyed. If I step in and prevent it from happening, the group that was trying to split the church gets destroyed. I’m not Solomon, and I don’t know how to resolve this, but I have backed away and turned it over to those very people who are my enemies to prevent ever having a clash, and it’s destroyed one half of the people, sometimes more than half. There’s been no exception to this, and every time, without exception, these have been men who felt they could do more and better than I. And except for the one I just told you, which went on to become a denomination without exception, all the rest fizzled out—totally fizzled out. You know why? I’ve told you why for the last two hours. Can you explain it? Would you give it back to me, somebody? Their stress levels are too low. Their comfort zones are too high, and their endurance is almost zero. In St. Cloud, a brother moved in, and you could tell within a day of his being there, he came to split the church, and he did. He went door to door with this great big vision. By the way, he’s the man who said, “I’ve only read one book in my life, and by the way, it was a book I wrote,” and he had this great vision. This is what the church ought to be. I let him have it. Boy, half of the people were just so crushed, but they were so angry at him. He lasted three weeks because he had one tiny little problem, and that was the people who were not happy with him. People who were there in the Gene Edwards crowd. He didn’t know how to deal with it. Three weeks later, I got a letter from his wife blaming me for all of it.