Fellowship

The following is taken from the booklet The Four Pillars of WEC by Norman Grubb, which describes the four basic principles of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade and applies equally to our own lives. This is the fourth principle:

"Our Fourth and Final pillar shares in the support of all departments of the work, and it is called FELLOWSHIP.

"Starting from the top, it has been a conviction among us for thirty years that the healthiest and most Scriptural form of leadership in a work of God should be a spontaneous product from within rather than something imposed from without or above. W.E.C. started fifty years ago with an Executive Committee at the home base consisting of good friends of the infant mission, and with Mother Studd as its first Honorary Secretary. C.T. the founder, being on the field, was naturally in charge of the growing band of young missionaries with him, and of the Executive in London. This from 1913 to 1931, might be called the era of paternalism in the Mission. C.T. sought to run the Mission affairs in the Congo as a family, freely consulting his younger workers; but his was ultimately the final word, and being strong-minded and firm in his convictions, trouble did arise both with workers who differed from him on the fields and with the executive Committee at home. As we look back now, we see that leadership of this nature was God's pattern of necessity for those early years. It firmly fixed the Mission in its first three supporting principles and nothing can be more important than that, for we can now look back to a founder who lived what he preached and the record of whose life means more to us today than his words.

"When God took him in 1931, with what we might call the second generation of the work begun, there was a change of governmental principle, though no change in any of the other three. It was then that this fourth principle of fellowship took its place with the other three. Not that there had not been living fellowship before; indeed there had been, as those who were on the field with C.T. can testify. But it was now to be officially in the warp and woof of the Crusade leadership as well, on all levels. Those who were appointed to be Studd's successors refused the titles offered them, of president and vice president, preferring just to use the name of secretary. The important principle was then established that in a work of God the mind of Christ is expressed through the workers themselves; the commissioned are the ones best fitted to interpret as well as carry out the commission.

"Gradually this became the working principle at all home bases as they were brought into existence (now ten of them), and on each field. The workers themselves, the home or field staff, were the final executive voice, choosing their leader on a three year basis. Where the wide diffusion of workers on a field or home base made it advisable, a small committee was chosen, who act with the leader in the intervals between the meetings of the whole Staff, usually annually on a field, and two or three times a year at the home bases.

"Though that is now a common practice on the fields of many missions today, it was unusual and almost unique for the home bases to have the same system of government, and for the home bases to have no control over the fields. Each field is autonomous after the first two years of its inception.

"To start building home base staffs who would be executive in their home base affairs in such important matters as the opening of new fields, the testing and acceptance of new recruits, handling of finances and publicity, was possible for one reason only. It was because the entire staffs consist of wholetime workers, whether office, domestic, or itinerant, husbands and wives alike, with as distinct a call to the work as those on the fields. They have been tested and welcomed into the Crusade in the same way as those who go to the fields. Their one special privilege is that, in order in some small way to be identified with the sacrificial living of those on the fields, they take no salary or allowance from Mission funds, but rely on God direct for the supply of needs, including their daily bread. And in their staff meetings they are reinforced by the presence of the missionaries on furlough, who during their stay in the homelands are automatically recognised as members of the home staff.

"By this means, in the staff meetings, fellowship in the Spirit takes precedence over the actual matters to be discussed and decided. A three day period of Quarterly Staff meetings is much more like a family gathering than an official 'board meeting'. Our spirits are continually refreshed by the singing and praying and ministry of the Word, by the sharing with each other of the Lord's dealings, and by hearing the testimonies from the fields. Discussion on all points is perfectly free. The chairman's job is to give each their turn and often to encourage the more silent ones to express their views. The numbers present at the staff meetings of a large headquarters may be fifty or more. Votes are not taken, but unity of mind is sought. It is the chairman's responsibility to extract from the discussion what seems to be the mind of Christ most fully expressed, and to present it for general acceptance. Unity of mind, as well as oneness of heart, has been a wonderfully common experience through the years. Joy, laughter, and seriousness are mingled together, as opposing points of view are dissolved into oneness of mind with God's light coming through. It may have the appearance of weakness and inefficiency, with a lack of the experienced, responsible members of which a normal 'Board' is supposed to consist. But we have not found it so. God does give wisdom to the humanly foolish whose hearts are set on finding and doing His will. One other important effect is that by this means every member of the Crusade comes to realise that they are the Crusade, taking their proper share of responsibility for finding God's ways for us, exercising the faith for their implementation, being bound together in the family fellowship and sharing the family secrets, sorrows and joys--sons in the family, not servants or employees.

"Does business get done this way? A missionary secretary said to me in our early days, with an air of finality, 'Impossible'. But not so impossible. Weaknesses, yes: room for improvement in business organisation, plenty, and taking place too: but at least the work has expanded from the thirty-seven workers to over 1,000, from one field to over forty, with another 100 recruits in training or under testing, and the expectation of another 500 for the needs of both W.E.C. [Worldwide Evangelization Crusade] and C.L.C. [Christian Literature Crusade]. And as we have said, the reward has been that indefinable sense of family unity, of belonging to each other, of common ownership which binds together as no mere formal relationship between leaders and led, board and workers, can do.

"When differences arise, as they surely do, tensions are resolved on a family level, whereas official handling of them tends to be more rigid. Delicate situations, such as personal failures in the life of a worker or infringement of Mission rules (which are anyhow kept at a minimum), can be investigated, sometimes more privately, and often with more flexibility and hope of restoration. The hold that a fellowship has on its members, when the leadership is part of the fellowship, is most clearly seen in the nostalgia of those who leave, sometimes thinking that the grass is greener in some other field. It is almost once a WECer always a WECer! And certainly since the start of this leadership-in-fellowship right through the Crusade, the numbers of those who have left, compared to the high rate usually given of missionary casualties who do not return to their fields, is startlingly small. Thirty years of growing experience in this form of fellowship government has made us so satisfied with it and convinced of it as God's pattern for the Crusade that I believe none would wish to change it.

"Nor has such a fellowship-leadership produced indecision or compromise. Rather the opposite. Clear-cut decisions have been made, sometimes bold in their outreach, when an established Board might have been more hesitant: the birth in war days of the Christian Literature Crusade; the opening of so many new fields on a shoestring of finance; using raw recruits (in the absence of more experienced workers) as the first pioneers to a field; the present programme of yet another nineteen new fields; the establishing of Radio Worldwide; the start of Gospel Literature Worldwide (which began through Fred and Lois Chapman, and has had such success as the Bientôt free Gospel Broadsheet for French-speaking mission fields, and is now being produced as Soon for English readers on the mission fields, and Cedo in Portuguese, Un Quareeb in Arabic, Shoodov in Armenian, with further editions being prepared in Turkish, Spanish and other languages.)

"Apart from the Quarterly Staff meetings at the home bases, fellowship has been given the central place in our various headquarters by the morning meetings held in various forms on most of the days of the week. Fellowship has by this means been implanted in the consciousness of all newcomers to the Crusade as the necessary oil of the Spirit which keeps the engine running. The meetings are wholly informal, people sit anywhere, not in rows as in a church building, but around the room in a circle. The leader is not there to 'take the meeting', but to moderate a fellowship in action. Anyone chooses hymns or songs, the periods of worship are free for all to participate in, and they do: they are usually precious periods centering in worship and praise around the Lord Himself. For years, the major part of the meeting, perhaps one hour out of two, would be concentrated on some burning mission issue--what is God saying to us and what should be our stand of faith on the opening of some new field, a problem of the government and visas, the condition of the churches on a field, the need of a move of the Spirit, the start of a training school, finance and recruits, a problem of new workers, and so on, and so on. This would be varied at times by a talk on W.E.C. and Biblical principles of missionary work. All would be open to free discussion through the whole session, from the youngest to the oldest present. A Scripture portion would be read and talked on, relevant to the special subject of the morning.

"On the days when some new step of faith was being considered, we found great profit in examining the lives of the great men of faith in the Bible. How did Moses know the mind of God in carrying through his great exploits of faith, crossing the Red Sea, providing the manna, getting the water from the rock? How did he actually carry through his obedience of faith? And Abraham, Joshua, Gideon, David and Elijah. How did they handle their periods of doubt and the pressures of adverse conditions?

"We always maintain it as our objective not to go to prayer with a string of 'maybes' and 'hope sos' and 'if it be Thy will': but first to find (though sometimes it might take days or weeks) what we understand to be the will of God in a situation, conveyed to us through His mind enlightening our minds, through the weighing of the situation, through open discussion, through a word from the Scriptures, through general unanimity; then we go to prayer with the prayer of faith. We pray the prayer of affirmation and praise, and continue daily in this grade of prayer, not to descend again to the prayer of request once we believe we have God's mind and have expressed the faith that what He has said, not only will He do, but in His sight (where the future is the same as the past) He has already done it. There would also always be other matters about which we have not the same certainty, and for these we pray the prayer of supplication.

"But fellowship has a deeper side to it, which penetrates below the externals of our community life and down to our personal lives. Anybody who knows the condition of missionary societies or mission fields, (I speak as a missionary secretary, but does not this equally refer to all branches of God's work and all churches?) knows that loving one another as Christ commanded and for which He prayed in His final prayer, is the highest pinnacle and the least scaled in the whole range of the life in the Spirit. It just is so plain difficult with such precipices to scale and such rarefied air to breathe that we mostly prefer the lower levels of getting on with each other with as little outward friction as possible.

"As a missionary secretary, I would not like to guess what percentage of my correspondence centres on relationship complexes or situations that include them, and very often I am mixed up in them myself! Wounds are often a blessing in disguise, and the sad experience of division in early days has given us, I think, a divine determination not to let God's work go down the drain through divisions among brethren, the house which falls if divided against itself, the biting and devouring of one another. God has kept us together most wonderfully these thirty years: the progress and enlargement of the work without loss of loyalty to fundamental principles, is an evidence of this. The four weeks of the Leaders' Conference at Kilcreggan in 1961, with hardly a ripple even on the surface of our heart and mind unity was a mighty blessing to all of us. It was the leaders of this third generation of WECers taking hold of the reins, not only in the power and purpose of the Spirit, but in the unity of the Spirit.

"How are we to maintain this 'unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace?' Years of experience and experimentation have taught us some workable principles. The basic one is unchangeable and unconquerable, if maintained in the rubs of daily life, the impact of personality upon personality, as well as in the tensions of co-working and the clashes of opposite viewpoints. It is the fixed fact of Christ in us. If we believe that of ourselves, and thus of our brethren in grace, then the foundation of a preserved unity is unalterable--Christ is the real Person in me, and the real Person in him and her and them: and Christ in me and Christ in them is the One Christ. We are all part of the same Person, as the body is of the head. We are one. We do not become one or restore a broken oneness. It cannot be broken. But surface disagreements can be so real that we regard it as broken and act as if it were broken. We allow ourselves to be trapped into the illusion of unbelief. What is on the surface has a more real impact on us than the unchangeable foundation beneath. Being human, we are meant to start with our negative human reactions. That is not wrong; it is natural, so long as they are the spring-board for faith and not a cushion to sink back with into personal feelings.

"Take the matter of human relationships.  We quickly see and respond to what irks us.  We don’t like this and that about our co-workers.  Quirks of personality rub us the wrong way:  too talkative, too quiet; too positive, too negative; too jumpy, too placid; too mystical, too practical; too business-like, too irresponsible.  And so it goes.  It doesn’t take long for the minor dislikes to shadow out the major love of Christ in the one for Christ in the other, for depreciation of the human faults to blot out the appreciation of the gifts and fruits of the Spirit.

"Equally in major matters of policy, organisation, and viewpoint, differences may be real.  There are bound to be these, because truth is in an interaction of opposites, one viewpoint complementing the other.  But how then avoid the tendency to see flesh or devil in the one who take the opposite point of view, and the Holy Spirit and true guidance in our own opinion?

"What other way, whether in these personality clashes or in the concerns of the work, than seeing and constantly affirming the major as major through it all, and the minor as minor?  The major is Christ in my opposing brother giving him His light, much as I hope He is in me giving me what I see.  The minor, of course, is the magnification of our differences.  The mote, as Jesus said, is obviously the fiddling little thing in my brother which has taken on major proportions in my sight; the beam in my eye, the log of wood is this mounting, enlarging critical attitude towards him which blocks out my seeing him as I normally should, Christ in me seeing Christ in them.

"I know no way through, therefore, and have advocated and sought to keep my eye single on Christ in the other fellow or other party in a controversy, just as I have to do the same in an adverse situation, and keep seeing Him by faith in and through the appearance of the opposite.

"That does not change my convictions.  I may still feel that I wished so and so wasn’t like that or didn’t behave like that, or that this or that method of work or decision was changed.  I may still hold to this and say so on right occasions.  But I then speak the truth in love, and with the humility which esteems others better than myself, and maybe more right than I.  And anyhow I have plenty of wrongs in myself that others can see.  So I say, 'I disagree with you.  I oppose you in this thing.  I wish you were different in this or that respect.  But you are a container of Christ, as I trust I am.  I see Him in you more than I see you.  Therefore you and I are one, and I am honoured to be joined to you in Christ, and want to do my part in not letting lesser differences appear to break our unity in co-loving and co-working.  Love in this respect is greater than the lesser truth of whether you or I are right about this.' 

"This is a possible way of continuing together. Not only possible, but practical and actual.  We have proved it a thousand times in our ranks through the years. The Bible speaks of a unity of mind as well as of heart. That was Paul's plea to the Philippians, and the only spot he detected in that free-written love letter of his to them, 'Stand fast in one mind . . . be of one mind . . . be like minded . . . I beseech Euodias and beseech Syntyche that they be of the same mind in the Lord.' To the Corinthians he goes even farther and speaks of being in the same mind, the same judgement, and all speaking the same thing. Is this possible? Yes, when two conditions are fulfilled, I think: one is what Paul speaks of to the Philippians, having humbleness of mind which means appreciating the other's point of view as being as good or better than your own, and the other is giving plenty of time for God's mind to come through. That is why a vote seems to us out of place. It underlines division: so many vote this way, so many that, and the majority has it. But wait long enough, pray, discuss, seek to appreciate each other's points of view, and a time comes when something clicks into place and all see it to be God's mind.

"So the need is always to maintain the heart unity in Christ as the major decisive factor, unchangeable and more important even than mind unity, 'endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit', 'as much as lieth in you live peaceably with all men'. And make it the ideal to wait long enough for this to become a fact--same mind, same judgement, all speaking the same thing.

"There is one other way, the healthiest of all, to maintain fellowship in personal relationships, as well as the freshness of the walk in Jesus. We learned lessons which have much affected many of us over the past fifteen years through our friends from Ruanda, East Africa. From these, missionaries and Africans, we caught the reality of the walk in the light, not only with God but with one another. Such small books as The Calvary Road which has gone into hundreds of thousands of many languages, and Continuous Revival, share with us what God has been teaching them.

"Our first contact with them came through Edith Moules, the founder of the Leprosy and Medical department of the Crusade, who started this work among the leprosy patients in the Congo [Her story is told in the biography Mighty Through God: The Life of Edith Moules by Norman Grubb]. When on a vacation in war days with her husband, half-way between our Congo Field and Ruanda, he fell sick with typhoid, and the Ruanda station of Shyira being the nearest, she took him there. In four days he went to be with the Lord. But even in those days she had noted the quality of brotherly love and fellowship between missionaries and Africans, beyond anything she had see before, and a way of walking in the Spirit together which could be called brokenness, openness and challenge. That is to say, they were quick to repent when they slipped, calling sin sin, and to claim the cleansing blood of Jesus. This was the walk in the light according to 1 John 1, which they spoke of as brokenness.

"But they were also open and sharing with each other where the Spirit had convicted them and the blood of Jesus had cleansed them. They would do this, not only on the spot in their daily contacts, but in their open fellowship meetings at nights. These meetings were like a continual chorus of praise ascending, as one and another was telling how he had been tempted or tripped, but cleansed in the blood of Jesus in some item of his daily walk that day.

"This was down-to-earth reality. It touched Edith Moules because she and her husband had been longing to see that same quality of a living walk with Jesus among her leprosy patients. She was longing for revival, and here she was seeing revival in daily experience. That was the openness. But to this they added a readiness to challenge any fellow Christian who was not walking in the Spirit, not challenging in a spirit of superiority, but as fellow sinners who were themselves being constantly dealt with by God. Fellowship, they said, starts in our sinnerhood at the foot of the Cross, and in our honest sharing of the Lord's dealing with us.

"The answer to Edith's and Percy's [her husband] prayer came to her by the deathbed of her husband [precious seed sown down]. She was crying, and, mighty woman of faith as she was, maybe temporarily questioning God's dealings in so suddenly taking her husband. One of the Africans standing by the bedside discerned that her tears were more of questioning than of faith, sorrow of the world rather than godly sorrow as Paul said, and he boldly challenged her: 'Lady, if your husband is with Jesus, why are you crying like that?' She left the room filled with indignation at being spoken to like that, and by an African, one of those whom she was supposed to have come to teach. But there in her room, with the same sensitiveness to sin which she had seen around her, responding to God's light, God showed her own pride and anger, and took her back to the many times she had been hot-tempered herself while in the act of pointing out the faults of her leprosy patients. He reminded her of the saying of the Africans that when you point one finger at your neighbour, the other three fingers of your closed hand are pointing to yourself. Follow the three first! So she did, and as she began this same walk of brokenness and openness (telling the Shyira folks what God had said to her), and then returning to tell her leprosy patients the same thing, a move of the Spirit began among them also. Her fellow missionaries soon saw the change in Edith, not that she was less quick, forceful and dynamic--magnificent missionary that she was--but she now knew how to put it right quickly with God and us.

"By her invitation, two of the Ruanda missionaries paid a visit to our London Headquarters. About eighty of us gave two days to listen to their witness and their simple application of God's Word to their own lives. This was followed later by a visit of two of the African brethren, transported by air for the first time as the only Africans among a crowd of white people. The poise, humility, liberty and faithfulness of these two with their simple magnifying of Jesus in all they said and did, also reached our hearts.

"Results were immediate. Among them were two of our missionary leaders of today who were spoken to by God and openly told how God had touched hidden spots in their lives. Others of us ourselves visited Ruanda, and I was among those with whom God had a real dealing [told in the booklet Continous Revival by Norman Grubb]. In these ways there began among us a habit of more open sharing together of the Lord's dealings in our daily lives, which spread to many of our fields and other home bases. This has been maintained, not by any fixed or formal 'sharing' meetings, but with a freedom in openness and challenge which finds expression any time and many times.

"Fellowship, therefore, as the expression of brotherly love, is to us the fourth essential principle. Jesus left us two last commandments, not one: to preach the Gospel to every creature, and to love one another as He loved us. We are conscious of being weaker in fulfilling the latter than the former. We evangelicals have been rightly sensitive to right doctrine, to the preaching and maintenance of 'the faith which was once delivered unto the saints', as given us in the Scriptures. We quickly detect and beware of anything which dilutes 'the form of sound words'. Our critical faculty, therefore, tends to outrun the wide reach of love. We become too easily critical of externals and it cuts us off from identifying ourselves in love with people as they are, not as we would like them to be. Equally we are critical of each other, and it quickly tends to division through doctrine or method.

"There is brotherly love among us. We surely should never be as we are today by grace, if there were not: but we also surely need to watch that we maintain fervent love among us as carefully as we watch that we maintain faith and sound doctrine. Some have said that in the W.E.C. we have passed from the era of sacrifice in C.T. Studd's days, to an era of faith since 1931, and more nearly now into an era of love. May it be so, not leaving nor lessening the walk in the old paths, but 'adding to your faith . . . charity'.

"This is but a brief heart opening on the inside ways of God with us through the years. It may be used of God to help keep us in these old paths in our own ranks, as well as sharing with our many friends, some of the guide lines of the Spirit through the years. It is obvious what is our special cause for praise and thanksgiving through these fifty years--that in some measure the word of Paul to Archippus in Colossians has been true among us: 'Take heed to the ministry thou has received in the Lord, that thou fulfil it', and Paul's own, 'I have kept the faith', and Jesus to the churches, 'Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life'.

"For the future our hope is that the W.E.C. will go forward as in these past fifty years, true to the commission originally given its founder--the evangelization of the unevangelized parts of the world in the shortest possible time. We shall necessarily interpret this commission in the light of present day conditions. That includes, for instance, finding means by which those called of God from all nations may participate in this preaching of the Gospel to every creature.

"It is no longer a question of merely westerners taking the Gospel to Africans and easterners, but of the whole Church taking the Gospel to the whole world. We are looking to God to show us means by which Latin Americans, Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Africans and others may be our fellow-crusaders--all men to all men that by any means we may save some.

"There is the enlarging ministry of revival and spiritual life to the existing churches in many lands. There are the many channels for the Gospel by literature in these days of increasing world literacy, for which God has so wonderfully raised up the Christian Literature Crusade, and in which we ourselves in W.E.C. are participating in may ways.

"Let us be ready and flexible to be led of the Spirit into any new kind of missionary activity which will fulfil our commission; and this in addition to our primary calling for which there is still endless demand--direct pioneering where Christ has not been named, faced as we are at this moment by the call to nineteen new areas.

"But in all this, may one other fact be unalterable. Paul spoke of 'my ways which be in Christ'. We too have our 'ways'. We come well within that category 'not many mighty' etc. But God has, given us priceless treasure in some principles of the Spirit, which we have sought to underline in these pages. In these is enshrined the power of God. These are the armoury of the Spirit. Equipped with these we go to war with the shout of a king in our mouths, we laugh the laugh of faith, we rejoice with joy unspeakable at what we have already proved of the efficacy of these weapons, and with them we can cry, after fifty years of trial: 'with God all things are possible': 'all things are possible to him that believeth': 'I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me': 'this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith'. But without these we are as Samson shorn of his hair. May we never become those who 'wist not that the Lord was departed' from us. 'Faithful is He that calleth you, who also will do it.'."