11

What About
Your Relatives?
When my parents came to the Lord, in no time at all we
started to fellowship with those in the church which we had
begun attending. They became our whole interest.
Do you know what our relatives said? "Since they got into
that religion, we lost them."
It was the truth. We were so busy with the church that we
lost all contact with our friends, relatives and former ac-
quaintances. We saw our relatives only at funerals. The very
ones we were meant to bring to the Lord were suddenly no
longer a part of our lives.
Who are the ones who bring new people to the Lord?
Those who have themselves just been converted, because
they still have friends in the world. But after a few months
they won't bring any more new people because they will cut
themselves off from all their friends. They will burn their
bridges with the world and, instead, will come to prayer
meetings and Bible studies, becoming totally absorbed in the
church system.
I recall the time when our family belonged to an Italian
church. We had meetings every evening except Friday. Six
evenings out of the week we were away from our home!
Each evening at 6:30 we left home with our Bibles under
our arms. We had no car at that time, so we had to walk
seven blocks to take the train. We didn't return until around
104 LIVING WITH JESUS TODAY

10:30 p.m.
Imagine what our neighbors thought! Every day at 6:30
they watched us leave. They were sorry for us. "Poor people.
What a religion they have!"
Of course, we had no time to make friends with them—we
were so busy with the church. Even when there was a holiday,
the church held a special meeting. We were always in church,
so there was no room for our relatives or our neighbors in our
lives. We thought that spirituality was to be in church con-
tinually.

God saved each of us to spread His kingdom in the place in

which He put us, in the structure of life in which we find
ourselves. We are responsible for the people who are around
us. He wants us to reach them, to show them His love. He
desires to love them through us. This is how the kingdom of
God grows.
But the church has too often extracted us from the normal
structures of the world. We have cut all connections with the
people we were meant to spread light to. The result is that we
are useless for evangelism.
We need to look afresh at the purpose for the church. It
was never meant to be an institution separate from life. To
become a Christian was meant to be the normal way to live.
When God called Abraham, do you know what He had in
mind? "In you shall all the families of the earth be blessed,"
He told him. But what did the Jews do? They thought God's
blessing was just for them; they wanted the privilege, but not
the responsibility.
God has not put us in His church to be lazy. He expects a
great deal of us.
We are the true seed of Abraham through Christ. God in-
tends that through us all nations come into the blessing of
Abraham. We are here to extend the kingdom of God into
the whole world.
God spreads us out all over the place so that we can salt the
WHAT ABOUT YOUR RELATIVES? 105

earth and light the world. Everyone is meant to shine in the

place that God has placed him. This is how the kingdom of
God invades the structures of society, like leaven spreading
through the whole loaf of bread.
Jesus said, "Seek first the kingdom." So the first thing in
our lives is the kingdom. Every single one of us is in the place
that God means him to be for the extension of the kingdom.

This means that it is very important when we move that we

ask God where He wants us. We should not just move for
ourselves, but because God wants us as one of His representa-
tives in a new location.
"Well, I changed my job because...," we say.
But that is wrong. We change jobs because God is taking
us from one job to another, because He needs a missionary in
our new work situation.
If you are studying at a university, you aren't there primar-
ily to get a degree. You are there first and foremost for the
kingdom. Obtaining the degree is part of your work in the
kingdom, not simply so that you can fatten your intellect.
A boy came from Peru to study at the university in our
country. After a while, he got saved. He came to our Assem-
bly church. A few weeks later he told the pastor, "I don't
want to study any more."
"Why?" asked the pastor.
"Because now I'm saved," he replied.
"What do you mean?" the pastor inquired. "You can't
leave your studies because you are saved!"
"No, I was not really studying there."
"But we saw you studying there."
"Yes, I had to study; but I was not there for that purpose.
The Communist party of Peru sent me to the Argentine uni-
versity to spread Communism in the university. In order to
do that, I had to become a regular student. My studies were a
cover-up. When I had finished this degree, I would study for
another, and another, staying as long as I could to spread
106 LIVING WITH JESUS TODAY

Communism."
If you are in a university, you are there first to spread
God's kingdom. If you can't preach, you can shine as a light.
You can love people, so that they see that Christ is alive today.
Suppose you work at Ford Motor Company. "Well, I'm
there because they pay better, and because they have so many
benefits," you tell me.
No, you are at Ford Motor Company because God needed
a missionary there.
He simply uses Mr. Ford to support you in the mission
field.
If you have two lives—a private life, and a religious life—
you can work in a place for many personal reasons. But when
you live only one life, God is in everything you do. And wher-
ever you find yourself, you are responsible to those who are
a part of the structure of your life.
First, we are responsible to our own family. The pastor
isn't responsible; he is just a helper, a counselor. We are the
responsible ones. Husbands are responsible to their wives
and children.
"But I am a widow." Then you are responsible. If there is
no husband, you are the priest.
"We are orphans, and I am the only one who is saved."
Then you are responsible to your brothers and sisters.
Whatever household you live in, you are responsible. God
appointed you to that household to be the head.
By "head," I do not mean the person giving orders. I am
talking about being the spiritual light in the household, the
priest. If you live in a students' residence and you are the only
saved person, you are responsible to those students who live
with you in that household, whether you like it or not.
In every household where there is someone who knows the
Lord, he is responsible. He is the light to that house, the
priest. And God will ask each of us, "What did you do in the
place in which I put you?"
Second, after our immediate family we are responsible to
WHAT ABOUT YOUR RELATIVES? 107

our relatives—our uncles, aunts and cousins.

"But it is 20 years since I last saw them!" Yes, and that is
very wrong; because you are responsible to them.
Third, you are responsible to your friends. Not just your
close friends, but also your lawyer and your dentist. If God
has saved you, it is because He wants to reach through you all
of these people who are a part of the structure of your life. If
not through you, then through whom?
Fourth, you are responsible to your neighbors. You are
the priest in your neighborhood.
"Me?"
Yes, you are the pastor of that neighborhood. The church
divides the world into provinces, the provinces into dioceses,
the dioceses into parishes, and the parishes into homes. Every
Christian has a parish.
Your block is your parish. You are responsible to that
block. Do you imagine God is going to send an angel from
heaven to evangelize your block so that you can go to meetings?
You are the pastor of your little parish, and the minister is
your counselor. He is there to help give you confidence and
to assist you in fulfilling your responsibility by providing
guidance. But you are the responsible one.
You are also responsible to your fellow workers. You are
a priest to those who work around you each day. They are a
part of the structure which God wants His light to permeate
through you.
So this means that you have something to do. Perhaps you
should start by making a list of all the people you are respon-
sible to.

But before you begin, I want to draw a very clear distinc-

tion between the concept and life.
If you have just the concept of being responsible as a priest
in your parish, you will either find it a tremendous burden, or
you will rush out and try to convert everyone by preaching to
him. The letter kills. If your responsibility is just a concept
108 LIVING WITH JESUS TODAY

to you, it will either kill you—or you will kill those to whom
you witness because you will turn them off!
I am not speaking about trying to do some great work for
Jesus. I am talking about a life which so manifests love that it
attracts people to the light. In other words, our life lived 24
hours a day in Him is itself doing the work of the kingdom of
God.
When I am invited to speak in churches, I am afraid of one
thing. Most of the invitations are to speak on discipleship,
which is a subject I really like to speak about. But the danger
is that we become more attached to the method than to the
living Jesus Christ.
Humans find the mechanical part of discipleship very
tempting. It is attractive to us. We get hold of the concept,
but not the life; and it ends up becoming another system, an-
other form of bondage.
In the situation in which discipleship arose, in the church
fellowship which I pastored in Argentina, it did not come to
us in a mechanical way at all. It came as life.
We did not know anything about discipleship. We were
simply living as a fellowship and discovering things without
knowing what we were really doing. Only after I came to the
United States and started to teach was it labeled discipleship.
People said to me, "You are teaching the doctrine of sub-
mission."
For the first time we discovered that we were practicing dis-
cipleship! Until that time it had just been a flow of life, not a
doctrine. When we discovered the doctrine of submission, we
spoiled the life! So I am afraid of the label.
When I am invited to speak on discipleship, I now prefer not
to speak on that subject the first visit. Rather, on the first visit, I
prepare people for what is to come. Through my first visit they
understand that I am not legalistic in any sense at all. Only when
they understand this will I speak on discipleship.
You remember that when Paul visited Athens, he found that
the Athenians liked to spend their time hearing new doctrines.
WHAT ABOUT YOUR RELATIVES? 109

Sometimes I think that we are like that in our churches. We all

like to hear what Brother Cho did in Korea, or what God did
in our church in Argentina.
Those things are interesting. And they can be helpful. But
we really don't need to copy them because we all have the
same Spirit living within us to lead us in our particular church
situations. The danger is that we take these things and create a
new system out of them. They become a formula.
In this book, I am not trying to present you with a new
system. I am simply seeking to present to you the living Jesus
Christ who can tell you what to do in your local situation. This
is not a new recipe on how the church should be. It is to point
you to the Holy Spirit who can lead you 24 hours a day.
My purpose in talking about how we made disciples and
how the kingdom grew in our situation is to make you think. I
want to cause you to look again at the preconceived concepts
you have of how the church should be and how to win
disciples. You need to be free to hear what the Holy Spirit is
saying.

I would like to be a disturbing element. Before we can be

open to hear what the Spirit is saying to our churches, we need
to be brainwashed from our lifeless forms. We need to aban-
don our fixed concepts of the church so that we can experi-
ence the ever-fresh life of Jesus on a continual basis.
When I speak of being a light in our communities, and of
being priests to those who are a part of the structure of our
lives, you have a picture of what I mean. But I don't mean
what you picture. Those concepts are not part of the life of
Christ. They are part of our church system.
I am not talking about trying to get your relatives, work-
mates, friends and neighbors to come to church. Nor am I
speaking of giving them tracts with Bible verses to convince
them that they need Christ. That is all part of our system.
Most of them are not interested in those things, because they
are religion and not life.
110 LIVING WITH JESUS TODAY

I don't know how to say this... I don't think there is an easy

way to say it. I think I just have to say it, even if it seems hard.
I believe there is coming a time of great shaking of all of
our systems, and only that which is unshakeable because it is
the life of Christ will not be torn down.
Times are coming when we are not going to have pipe
organs, and when we may not have hymn books and Sunday
School materials.
We even may be without Bibles! But the primitive church
didn't have any of these things. The New Testament hadn't
been written yet. And most believers didn't have access to the
Old Testament. All they had was the Holy Spirit. But because
they had Him 24 hours a day, they had the kind of faith that
cannot be shaken.
As a result, they turned the world upside down!
You see, a church system may become a hindrance. It ought
to be something that helps us bring people to Christ, but in-
stead it ends up being a problem. We have added so many
things that we are caught up in, and we don't know how to
get rid of them. We even think that they are essential.

Let me illustrate what I mean by a hindrance. Our church

in Argentina is charismatic. We raise our hands when we
sing. (Well, sometimes we do and sometimes we don't.)
Now that doesn't appeal to everybody, so the system has
become a hindrance for many people. Once we invited a cer-
tain family to our church.
"No, I don't think we want to come. We don't fit into
your atmosphere," they said.
Some people feel better in a Baptist atmosphere, or in a
Catholic atmosphere, or in an Episcopal atmosphere. I'm not
justifying the attitude, but I do wonder if sometimes the
things we do in our churches aren't a major reason why the
world doesn't want to come to them. Most of these things are
just not normal: they are religious.
You know, most of the people you are responsible to will
WHAT ABOUT YOUR RELATIVES? Ill

not come if you invite them to church. But did you ever think
of inviting them to your house? They will come there.
If you bring a person to a Pentecostal church, or a Baptist
or Episcopal church, he has to overcome many things in
order to get to Christ.
Perhaps he is anti-catholic, anti-charismatic, or anti-
liturgy... But he is not anti-ice cream!
So you bring him to your house. Your home, not the
church building, now becomes the center of your Christian
activities. When the church is centered in a home, it is more
likely to be centered in people than in a building.
The key is that every home starts to function fully as a
center. Every home, and every individual.
I am not talking about taking your car out of the garage and
driving to someone else's home for a church meeting. No, that
is just like going to a church building. I am speaking of bring-
ing to your home all who are a part of your structure of
life—your relatives, friends, neighbors and fellow workers.
Now I don't mean holding meetings in your home with
gospel songs and Bible study. Some churches do that. They
have a hundred members, so they divide them into four
homes. But that is just another church of the kind that we have
in buildings.
I am talking about staying in your house to fulfill your
duties of priesthood. You begin with your wife. I was the
pastor of the First Assembly of God, but my wife was neglec-
ted. Start by evangelizing your wife.
What do I mean by evangelizing?
To evangelize is to have complete love. It is to have fellow-
ship, communion, full understanding between each other.
So evangelize your wife. Love her and meet her needs as
the Holy Spirit prompts you. Then check your relationship
with your children. How are you getting along with them?
What about your relatives?
How are you doing with your cousins and aunts? How long
is it since you last saw them? Start to rebuild those burned
112 LIVING WITH JESUS TODAY

bridges. I did it, and it is amazing how many we won to the

Lord without speaking a word.
I wrote them, making friends with them again. I didn't
preach. I shared love with them. I repented of neglecting them,
rejecting them, because I had let the church system take all of
my time. I won them just by loving them.

Those women whose husbands don't know the Lord—how

many of them go to all the church meetings? No wonder their
husbands don't come to the Lord. The church is their rival!
They need to evangelize at home by showing the love of Christ
as the Holy Spirit leads. He will tell you how to love if you
listen to Him and do what He tells you to do.
An incident occurred in our church in Argentina which
touched me deeply.
We brought a very nice family to the Lord. They were a
wealthy family. He had been an atheist. But because of the
healing of their daughter, the whole family was saved, and
they became fully committed to the Lord.
This man started bringing people to his home. Eventually he
had 30 of his friends and relatives meeting there. It took about
a year and a half for this group to grow to that size, but when
it reached that number the multiplication stopped.
After they had finished witnessing to all their friends, they
couldn't win anyone else to the Lord. It's like when you start
to sell encyclopedias in your spare time. After you sell them to
your friends, you don't sell any more.
The same thing was happening with many other families.
My wife said, "Johnny, those who are going to come to the
Lord have already come; and those who haven't won't come."
There seemed to be a limit to growth, and we couldn't break
through this limit. We decided to ask the Lord how we could
keep on multiplying.
We asked this former atheist and his family, "Wouldn't
many more of your friends and relatives come to the Lord if it
didn't involve being linked with a church system?"
WHAT ABOUT YOUR RELATIVES? 113

He thought about this, and the next day he told me,

"Pastor, I am sure that many more would come, but our
church system is the problem. It is a hindrance."
This started us studying.
If the church system is essential for salvation, let's push
people into that system. But if the pipe organ, the hymns, the
choir, the church calendar, the board, the deacons and Sunday
School materials are not essential, then maybe we should ask
the Lord if there is another way.
So we began to pray. And as the Lord directed us, we made
radical changes. I am not suggesting that everybody should do
this today, but it came as life to us. It was not a concept or a
doctrine; we weren't trying to create a new kind of system.
This brother and his family had a large apartment. Instead
of trying to bring more people to church, we encouraged him
to make his own disciples at home. So he invited them to his
apartment, not to a church service.
Six months later I visited him. He now had a church in his
home of over 200 people! Some 250 of his relatives had been
saved, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and fully
committed to the Lord. But not one of them was coming to the
church services.
Before we can win people to the Lord, we have to build rela-
tionships. Often they have been broken, so they must be re-
paired. Where there is a birthday, I give a little gift. Or perhaps
I give a plant to my neighbor and start to build a friendship. I
take every opportunity to win people as friends. Then the
gospel will be passed on quite spontaneously through relation-
ships.

Perhaps by now you imagine that I am against church

buildings and all that goes with them. No, I am not against
them. I believe that if we were to change the center of our ac-
tivities from buildings to people in their homes, we would
find a new use for the buildings.
If I could, I would add a few things to the buildings, ac-
114 LIVING WITH JESUS TODAY

tually.
I would add a swimming pool, a racquet ball court, and
perhaps a sauna. Not everyone in the community can have a
swimming pool or sauna at home, so there is a place for these
in the community center of the church. The existing church
buildings could be used for conferences when needed, as well
as for special times of praise.
If we would get rid of the bondage of the building, we would
begin to increase numerically. For the sake of the people,
perhaps we need to close the building some Sundays. We don't
need to hear a new message every Sunday. Once a month is
quite adequate; then we have a month to put it into practice.
So the other Sundays, we can do the Lord's work. Instead
of having a service next Sunday, everyone could invite some
friend or relative to his home. Not to a religious meeting, but
to build a relationship.
Take a church body which consists of 800 members, repre-
senting 200 or 300 homes. That means all of those families are
evangelizing. When we use the church building, only the wife
comes in many cases. But when we use the home, the husband,
wife and children can all be together. So each Sunday 200 or
300 people are evangelized.
We would not be closing the church building down for three
weeks out of four so that the people could stay home watching
television, but so they could be involved in furthering the
kingdom of God. They would open their homes—not to have
advertized meetings—but to love their cousins, their aunts,
their neighbors, their friends and those they work with.
After a month, when we returned to the building, it would
not be large enough because of all the additional people who
would have been won to the Lord through the month of evan-
gelism. So the pastor would have to say, "The north side of
the city will come in the morning, and the south side will come
in the evening."
The following three weeks would be spent in the same kind
of activity, so that after the second month the pastor would
WHAT ABOUT YOUR RELATIVES? 115

have to say, "The north side will come in the morning, the
south side in the evening, and the southwest on Saturday
evening."
Eventually, the building would be packed every day with
different people from different areas of the city.
This was the way the primitive church functioned. You can
see it in the New Testament. Every day, both in public places
and in every home, they didn't cease the work of the Lord. We
are forever talking about starting work for the Lord, but they
never ceased.
We are a royal priesthood, to show forth the love of God to
the world. We are ambassadors for Christ, sent to bring good
news to all nations. It is time we make our church buildings
serve us, instead of us serving them. When the church is
centered in the person of Jesus Christ instead of in a religious
system, the kingdom of God will spread throughout the whole
earth as Jesus commanded.