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  • Church and the Work (3 Volume Set)

    Church and the Work (3 Volume Set)

    $17.00

    Brief Description

    (Three volumes, sold as a set only)
    Volume 1 - Assembly Life
    This first of three volumes is a collection of teachings on practical matters of "body" life within the Church believing that the Body of Christ is both spiritual and practical. Various topics include authority, fellowship, ministry, meetings and boundaries of the local assembly.
    Volume 2 - Rethinking the Work
    A first time edition of Nee's original Chinese publication by the same name. Topics include apostles, false apostles, and ministry based on Acts chapters 13 through the end of the book.
    Volume 3 - Church Affairs
    This volume is an expansion of Rethinking the Work which came ten years later. Not a correction to, but a more detailed teaching given to young workers as to how to conduct themselves when being set out to establish churches everywhere. The teachings are basic but important and come from the first twelve chapters of Acts rather than the latter part of the book as in Volume 1.

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      The Church and the Work (Three volumes, sold as a set only)

      Volume 1 - Assembly Life

      The purpose of God is to establish Christ - and not just the personal Christ but also the corporate Christ, which is the Church: "as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is the Christ" (1 Cor 12:12 Darby). The work of the Holy Spirit in these past two thousand years has been centered on building this body of Christ. We will fail God in seeing His purpose and fail the Holy Spirit in cooperating with his work if we are not "holding fast the Head, from whom all the body, being supplied and knit together through the joints and bands, increaseth with the increase of God" (Col. 2:19). The body of Christ is not only most spiritual but also most practical. It is an earthly testimony as well as a heavenly body. All its spiritual principles must be and can be practiced in a local assembly. Here in these pages, therefore, we shall find that Watchman Nee shares with us the practical aspects of the assembly life. He touches on such practical matters as authority in the church, ministry in the church, church fellowship, church meetings, and the boundary of a local assembly.

      It is important for the reader to remember that this volume emphasizes only the practical side of the Church, and hence concentrates on the life of the local assembly. There is another side of the Church - that of the spiritual principles inherent in the Church universal - which is not the subject of this book. To maintain the right balance and to obtain the whole concept of the Church, both the principle and the practice, both the universal and the local, must be received and kept. For it must never be forgotten that a new wineskin is for containing the new wine; and therefore the first without the second is meaningless.

      May the Head of the Church find himself expressed corporately among His people.

      Volume 2 - Rethinking the Work

      This second of three volumes on the Church and the Work had originally been published in Chinese as Rethinking the Work. When the first English-language translation of the book was subsequently published in London under the title Concerning Our Missions, the original book's entire first chapter as a chapter entity (entitled "The Ministry and the Ministers") was deleted, although some of its text was incorporated into the English translation's first chapter ("The Apostles"), which chapter was actually the original Chinese edition's second chapter. Moreover, a subtopic (dealing with false apostles) to be found in the original Chinese version of the chapter entitled "The Apostles" was also deleted when Concerning Our Missions was published.

      Now in order that there might be available to English-language readers the entire text of Rethinking the Work, all deleted materials cited above have in this present edition of the book been restored to the work and have been placed in their proper order in the text just as it had appeared in the earlier Chinese version. In addition, so as to avoid any repetition, that part of the original first chapter which has been incorporated into the first chapter of Concerning Our Missions has been deleted and reinserted at its proper place in the opening chapter of this new edition now in the reader's hands.

      With these various corrections made, therefore, this revised and enlarged edition of the London translation of the original Chinese work provides the reader for the first time with the complete text in English of Watchman Nee's Rethinking the Work.

      Volume 3 - Church Affairs

      Ten years after the original publication in Chinese of Rethinking the Work, (1938), there arose in China a need for a further reconsideration of the Work. Yet is was not because the principles or practices of the church laid down in that book proved to be wrong or impracticable, but because light on the parallel subject of the Work was found by that time to be insufficient. Thus in 1948 further instructions concerning the principles and practices of the Work were given during training sessions held at Mount Kuling to the workers who gathered there.

      Rethinking the Work had in its day dealt especially with the understanding that the church is local, based as that book mainly was on Acts chapter 13 onwards; but later, by means of the Kuling talks which now comprise this Church Affairs volume, the fact that the Work was found to be regional was presented in 1948 on the basis of Acts chapters 1-12. And this latter book thus makes more complete the author's treatment of the overall subject of the church and the Work.

      The opening chapter of this final volume of the trilogy serves as an introduction, for it sets forth the complementary concept of the Work as being regional. Following this, twelve different aspects of church affairs are then discussed. Since these talks were originally spoken to younger fellow workers, a special approach to the subject will be evident to the reader. They were never meant to be a general treatise on behavior in the house of God; instead, they were presented in a form for helping younger workers to know how they were to conduct themselves as they were sent forth by the Lord to establish churches everywhere. It was not unlike the apostle Paul in his giving instructions to the young Timothy so that the latter might "know how men ought to behave themselves in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim. 3:15).

      These talks are now being offered to the reader as guidelines and not as rules and regulations. The aim in the publication of such a volume today is not towards uniformity of outward appearance, but is only meant to illustrate that these principles can in fact be put into practice. Spiritual principles must be applied spiritually. They will become letters if only applied technically; and we know from the Scriptures, "the letter kills" (2 Cor 3:6). May those who read this volume keep this in mind continually so as not to be tempted to treat this study as a technical manual or some kind of fixed procedure which they must follow, but instead be truly benefited by receiving whatever divine light (or principles) may be found in its pages.

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