How to Have True Church Life in Small Towns and Rural Villages

You might go home alone, talk to your husband or your wife about how far this group will go, and how many problems the group has. Why not head for higher ground? You can do it. And someone said something to me very beautifully one time. They pointed out a verse in the Song of Songs that says, ‘If you go with me, they will follow.” If some of you will say, “Yep,” there’s a very good chance most will follow. There will be some who will not, those who simply won’t be mellow throughout all their lives. God can’t give any of us mellow all our lives. The church of Jesus Christ, the body of believers together, literally must be strong enough and bound together in unity and oneness to kick down the gates of hell.

Now what are you saying “yes” to? Well, actually, you’re saying yes, I’m going to go visit some of the churches, and yes, I’m going to go visit those sisters, and I want to talk with them. I would encourage you then to come back and tell everybody what you saw. You’ll probably see some folks get uncomfortable, and others get excited. And you’re going to see that, yes, it’s true, it’s very, very difficult for a group of people to stay together in the midst of a cohesive decision that is one beyond just the minimum, the absolute minimum that it takes, to keep a group of people coming together and sharing with one another.

If you choose that route, you have chosen to be a Bless Me Club, in which you have cut yourself off from the cross and suffering. But worse than that, more than that, simply the fulfillment of the purpose of the Church of Jesus Christ here on this earth. That’s not going to be fulfilled by a group of people pouring into an auditorium every Sunday, sitting down on a wooden bench, and then going home. It’s going to take that cohesive body of believers who have accepted the great, broad, panoramic sweep of the depths and the heights of what the church is.

Well, let’s say you make it. You go and visit other groups. You go to some conferences and ask every conceivable question. Remember, some will not like you doing that, and some will be fearful. But you will never, I don’t think, get a corporate decision for all of you to go this way, or even to investigate this way. Well, what do you do after that? I would say that if you come home and feel this is the way you should go, I’ve always said that, until the making of this recording, you can do the following things. You can move, or you can hope and pray for that one unbelievable thing: when somebody who knows church life, and is not a threat to your health, comes and helps you, or your bones can bleach in the wilderness and die. You can always go back to the denominational church, and I highly recommend doing so if you decide not to move forward. Oh, considering that I’m not speaking about now, but the day will come when your group splinters or dissolves or fades away. That’s usually what it is.

Coming back, changing the subject, you say, are you also meeting? No? Well, we get together every once in a while. We went out for Mary’s birthday. Aren’t you meeting? I don’t know. We just, no one’s called a meeting lately, and folks begin to go somewhere else. Somebody moves. Somebody else gets their feelings hurt, and it dissolves. By the way, that’s the most merciful and painless thing that can happen, which is that the group fades away eventually.

Alright. Let’s come back to those. You can move. Well, Gene, I can’t do that. There’s my grandmother, and this house, and I got this 200-acre farm, or whatever it is. We’re about to face retirement. You can hope someone will come to help you. A few days ago, I said in a meeting, I want you to think of the United States of America for a moment. I turned to the young man, 38 years old, who had been called to the Lord’s work for these very things, and I said to him, if you were in perfect health and had all the money you needed to travel, and you just had everything stacked in your corner just correctly, how many churches could you handle at one time? He thought and said, “Ten.

My response to that is that’s an absolute maximum I could conceive of. I said to him, ” Brother, how many churches could you plant in the remainder of your lifetime?” He thought and said, “Perhaps twenty.” And again, I would call that the absolute maximum. That’s twenty churches, and that’s the only brother I know in the United States of America, other than myself, who could possibly raise up a church that was not damaging to your health. That’s twenty. I’d like for you to know that neither he nor I is going to come to your village or small town, and pour out our lives on what it takes to build a living, breathing, functioning body of believers. We already feel our lives are wasted, and we get so little done. We just wouldn’t do it in a small town, a village, or an open area, and you need to face that. The chances of it happening are just so astronomical that they’re not even calculable.

Well, when that is said, then folks have to start coming up with theories of hope. Maybe we can do this. Maybe we can do that. Maybe, uh, why not one of us do it? Or, I don’t know, let’s get Brother so-and-so down here. We really enjoyed his visit. And there’s your choice. You’ll still dissolve, or you’ll turn into a church with a pastor. You will dissolve one way or the other. It just doesn’t go on. As I said, if it were true that it did, there would be a group similar to yours, not too dissimilar to who you are or what you are, in virtually every town in America, every village.

These things have begun before. Dear saints, there was a movement in the United States of America in the 1880s in which Bible study classes were held all over the country. Everywhere. Those things either dissolved or turned into Bible churches. If you’ve ever driven by a Bible church, most of them have their roots…are no more than one or two generations away from those great home Bible study classes that came. The problem with the home Bible study classes is that the Bible was the center; Christ was not. The Bible…you’ll misunderstand me, I’m sure, but the Bible fizzles. After four or five years, you learn the big things, and you have to start looking at the little ones. Then somebody starts telling you to obey this, that, and the other, which you simply can’t do individually. Discouragement or guilt comes. Somebody puts you in the pile. Legalism is bound to come. It is Jesus Christ who is the center of our faith, with the Scripture every day pointing to Him. Alright, I have really drawn a bleak picture here, but I’m really trying to get your attention. Whether you realize it or not, and I do not know who you are, I am saying to you, I am imploring you, say “yes”.

Alright, now then, from this point on, I’m going to imagine you said yes. This is what I would recommend. Anybody got a pencil and paper? I would first of all recommend what I’ve already recommended, that you go to some conferences, visit some of the churches, and spend a good amount of time there. That’s not difficult to do. Enthusiasm can get it done. Disinterest cannot.

Go visit some of the churches. Talk to the brothers and sisters. Then I would say invite some of them to come down and spend a few days with you. There are brothers not called to this work. Boy, they’re not bad men either. They cast a pretty good-sized shadow when they stand up. Just have them come and visit you, some sisters and brothers, and sit around for a weekend and chat, talk, listen to them. That’s one thing. See if they have any suggestions.

What else can you do? Well, let’s hope that the brother I mentioned, or some other brother whom the Lord has raised up since then, will come and hold a weekend meeting with you – once, probably, in all our lives. Once. Gosh, Gene, that’s sure not much. Well, that’s true, but other things can then begin to happen, and that is, you can begin moving toward church life. What I’m about to prescribe, I’m not chiseling in stone, but I will tell you that it works.