Minister to Minister Part 2 – Gene’s testimony

You’ve never seen Japanese. You’ve never seen Japanese Christianity, pure, unadulterated Japanese Christianity expressed in an organic fashion, uninfluenced by the Western mind. Aristotle wasn’t in those meetings, Luther wasn’t in those meetings. The Baptists were not in those meetings. Western men were not in those meetings. They were Japanese people who were experiencing the Lord Jesus Christ, sharing the Lord Jesus Christ with one another very diligently in all things. They were doing it all perfectly, and out of it came something that I’m going to try to explain to you now. And let me try to batter down some concepts if I may.

Listen to me, if you take dirt outside there and just put it in a box and pour water on it, something will grow in it because there are things organic to the soil of this planet. Right? If you have a baby, the baby will just naturally have a nose. Is that not true? It’s organic to the species. The church is not an organization, and you have got an organization; it was born as an organization, it exists as an organization, and unfortunately, it will never die; it will live forever. An organization exists. Excuse me, that is not the church. The church is as organic to divine life as is God’s.

I want to try to explain to you that somewhere on this earth today, there happened what happened in Commerce, Texas, in the summer of 1950. Today, church life was born on this planet, and six months from now, it’ll be dead. And some of you were at some time in your life, you got in on an organic burst of life and saw an organic expression of the body of Christ, and you also saw it die, and you wept over her.

The life of the church has her expression, it is organic to her, it is natural to her, it is innate to her, and left alone and allowed to grow properly, or protected by church planters who know what they’re doing, she will grow up and she will always express herself with certain things if you leave her alone and let her. She has these things in the soil of her DNA.

You had never seen … You’ll have never seen the church of Jesus Christ in an organic American expression. Free of Martin Luther and his stinky rituals he wished off on us that you perform every Sunday. Free of organization, free of man’s manipulation. I have seen something like Paul, I have no right. It’s unlawful to speak of, but I have seen an organic church four times in my life. I saw it as a guest four times in my life. I have seen a Quebec expression, an organic expression of the body of Christ among people who’ve never known anything but Catholicism. I have seen a Japanese expression, and I really just want to call it that for emphasis; nothing ethnic is inferred. I’m familiar with Japanese, and I have seen it once in an organic expression among black people. That’s easy to come by, and I saw it once among people whose testimony was almost identical to Toyama, Japan. They got saved and left alone with a little direction, and it doesn’t look like a Baptist church or a Methodist church or a Presbyterian church or anything else.

Brothers, I want you to understand that there is an organic expression of the body of Christ crying to be born in your land today. Have you heard her cry? Have you heard her? Have you felt her birth pains? In the name of God our Lord, don’t ruin it by coming in with your reformation concepts of the church and blow this thing over. She is as fragile as any baby is in her birth and very susceptible to being eaten by wolves.

They received us, well, I’m just going to put it in the “me”. They received me like royalty; they had been saving up money for months to receive these guests. They had rented a home for us to stay in, right next door to where they met in a home. They taught me something that day in hospitality that I’ve never forgotten, and I’ve never left. We walked into our rooms, and they had gotten western beds for us, and there was a towel, a washcloth, and soap on our bed. It was so warm; they had left us to eat together. We went into a room about half this size, and it was filled with Japanese young people. We ate on the tatami. You know a Tatami, Is that right? It’s a Tatami. It’s called a table and a floor. Their floor is their table, their table is their floor.

We ate our meal there in Japanese fashion. When we finished, the meals were taken out, and the meeting started, and here was a group of people who for seven years had never known a leader. And here’s what I learned, and this was organic. They just did it, they’d had some direction from another country on pencil and paper, and they had done what it was they were told to do, and it had come about, and they had maintained, and they had spiritually flourished during those seven years. They had written all their own songs, and they sang them to Japanese tunes, not to Western tunes. They did not sit in chairs, and they did not sit on benches. You know what they sat on? They sat on their own selves. That’s what they sat on, that was their own, and they sat there and they began singing. They began praying a certain way, they began sharing in a way I had never seen before. And with this oriental mask of a face that never moves nor expresses, you could see these big hot tears coming down some of the brothers and sisters’ faces, and I was looking at something that was just this was it was like the Lord saying, “You’re right, Gene. This is exactly the way.” Now look at there. It was in front of me. They had not only maintained, but I am telling you, they had spiritually flourished out of their own spiritual experience and sharing it in those meetings.

Now, I’m going to illustrate to you what I saw in Japan, because it was the last time it was ever seen on this earth, and it’s not been seen since. They gathered 20 or 30 or 40, let’s call it about 35 of them. They gathered and they asked me to speak, after having a meeting of two hours that was dripping and overflowing, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea what to say. There wasn’t a leader there. Everything they did was community and corporate, and they’d done it for seven years, and they all sat down just like this on their haunches or whatever, and when I spoke to them, I watched a Japanese meeting, receiving the gospel. And when I began to speak, if they agreed with me, they went like this, and as I spoke longer and they listened more through an interpreter, you could see somebody go like this. And all over the room, there was just this, that was their amen. That wasn’t a Western amen. That was a Japanese amen. And down toward about three-fourths of the way, I was getting amens like this. And all over that room, they were just bobbing like that.

And as I came to my conclusion, they were doing this. I got the forehead all the way to the floor. You understand what I mean? That was a real arousing hallelujah for them. I lived with them for about one week. Somebody sent them money to build a church building. That Chinese who spoke Japanese started ministering to them, and he never stopped, and he never stopped, and he never stopped, and he never stopped, and he never stopped, and he never stopped. Never stopped. And with the preaching of the word of God, he killed the body of Christ. And I’m going to repeat that. With the preaching of the word of God, he killed one of the most pure, perfect expressions of the body of Christ that’s come along in a millennium. He pastored them to death.

And today in Toyama, Japan, they worship in a building, and they sit on pews, and they sing Western songs, and they have a pastor who’s still preaching to them. For shame! And I am here tonight with a burden to say to you, as the Lord moves on your heart in the name of God and all that’s pure, don’t do that to the body of Christ. Never. Don’t kill her with your pulpiteering. You face that crisis, and if you face this matter, you’ll face other crises in your life because you will face basically the disintegration of the pastoral concept in your own mind, your heart, and your life, and if you do that, you’ll be in big trouble.

Well, do you want me to finish this story? I came back from the Far East, having traveled to many other places, but I said to myself, ‘When I saw that I’m not going to see anything remotely similar to that.’ I came back home very, very disenchanted with what I saw everywhere else. Everything was like two-faced to me. And I came home, and I collapsed, and I was back in bed again. In fact, I collapsed in the Far East. One of the things I discovered about that time is my thermostat was broken. I cannot live in hot weather. I told Jack the other day, this is the first time I have been in hot weather, I think, since 1966. You asked me why I live in Portland, Maine, and now you know. I can come south in the winter, and that’s all I can do.