Second Visit to Taiwan (1957)
T. Austin-Sparks visited Taiwan a second time in February 1957. His first message, released on February 11, was on “Sonship.” The evening message was “The Name above All Names.” Starting March 6, there were morning training sessions. The messages were on “The Visions and Message of Ezekiel.” Later in March he went to Hong Kong for a conference on “Prayer, Wisdom, and the Cross.” Brother Sparks was very impressed after hearing the testimonies from every locality in Taiwan. In the May-June 1957 issue of A Witness and a Testimony (Vol. 35, No. 3, p. 50), he recalled the time he had spent there:
We have just returned from a further three months in the Far East, and there, once more, we have beheld “the wonderful works of God.” Day after day in continuous sessions we have been privileged to minister to some five hundred and more…workers; and night after night to about 2,000 to 2,500 believers and workers.
We have spent a whole week in visiting assemblies in many places, sometimes three or four in a day, where the believers, radiant in Christ, awaited our arrival and eagerly devoured the ministry. |
We have, in addition, spent a whole week in visiting assemblies in many places, sometimes three or four in a day, where the believers, radiant in Christ, awaited our arrival and eagerly devoured the ministry. All this work and these assemblies—ranging in numbers from one to sixteen hundred—have ’spontaneously’ arisen and are spontaneously growing. A principle and maxim of the servant of God who was His instrument in the beginning of this work—even when it was growing very greatly—was ’Try to keep things small. Never try to make the work big. If it is of God it will grow in spite of everything. We must fill the trenches with water. If it is not of God we do not want it.’ That principle is held to and enunciated today.
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When Brother Sparks analyzed what were the secrets of what he had experienced, he said “unhesitatingly and with deep knowledge that [there were] four” secrets:
- The cross. This has produced a deep inward work “in the life of the believers, individually and collectively.”
- The Holy Spirit. In every direction and government there is the “sovereignty and government” of the Spirit.
- The church. There is “a true and clear conception and expression of the Church as the Body of Christ, a spiritual organism on heavenly ground.”
- “The fellowship of His sufferings.” These believers know what it means to count “all things as loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, a life of sacrifice and abandon to His interests and glory.”
As a further comment on this last item, Brother Sparks made this observation:
No work or believers could have had greater opposition, or have been made to suffer more than those related to this work. Politically, spiritually, and—grievous to say—from Christian bodies, it has suffered almost unbelievably, but on it goes by the momentum of inherent spiritual life, by the power of the Spirit of Life.
In the same issue of A Witness and a Testimony, Brother Sparks asked the question as to what he had seen, “Is there no organization in such a great work?” He himself answered the question this way:
We say at once, Yes, there is, and it is as near perfect as anything we have known. But, there is a difference. The ’organization’ (if you must use that word) never produced or preceded the work or the life. It is just the order into which life must be directed to prevent confusion. A garden full and overflowing with living organisms requires direction and control to make it beautiful, but you do not begin with your controls and then try—by means of them—to get life. When someone referred to the order in their work and used the word “organization,” a leading responsible brother just quietly said, ’But we are not conscious of the “organization,” we are only conscious of that which makes it necessary.’
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