On April 13th, President Yu, Mr. Lian and his
daughter, and the lady from the Finance Department of the
Haggai Institute came once again together to Ying Yang, He
Nan Province, to meet with the two Shens and Zhang, top leaders
of the Fellowship. President Yu said, “Having been praying
and waiting for one year, our Institute anticipated that religious
policy in China would be more lenient after China joined the
WTO, so that leaders from the Fellowship could have opportunity
to be trained in the Singapore Haggai Leadership Institute.
However, the present domestic situation shows that after China
joined the WTO, its religious policy would tend to be more
strict. It’s said that the Beijing Government has passed
a trial draft law of religion administration, and that house
churches everywhere across the country are now forced to register.
The ones that are not registered will be banned. For you to
go to Singapore now would take such a long time to process
all the passports. Therefore, in order to meet your need,
we have decided to make the best use of the opportunity to
hold a one-month training for you in April.” Shen and
the other coworkers said it was too short notice, for a lot
of ministries had been already arranged, and the established
work schedule couldn’t be disrupted. They suggested
the training be postponed to July if possible. President Yu,
however, insisted, “Now is the best time for the training.
Again, the domestic situation in July could have changed so
much as to allow no such training to be carried on.”
Seeing the eagerness and sincerity of the Haggai people, CGF
coworkers reluctantly agreed to accept this training, but
they shortened the training session to three weeks. Thus it
was decided.
President Yu said, “There will be thirty
coworkers from Watchman Nee’s group to study with you
this time. It’s not secure for so many people to stay
in one place, so we have decided to locate the training to
six different places, namely: Shanghai, Zhong Xiang City in
Hu Bei Province, Qing Dao City in Shan Dong Province, Ren
Qiu City in He Bei Province, Xi’an City, Shaan Xi Province
and Jin Zhou City in Liao Ning Province.” Their explanation
was that there were several families in the six places, who
had very good relationships with the Haggai Seminary, and
all of their relatives were in Singapore, and the families
were Christians secretly. They had gained certain status in
society, therefore they could guarantee security for the training.
Trainees should pay the round trip tickets for themselves,
while expenses during the training would be paid by the Institute.
There would be 12 trainees in each place: six CGF people,
another six from Watchman Nee’s Little Flock. The purpose
of this arrangement was for CGF coworkers to bring some good
influence to the Little Flock people who were quite conservative.
In each place, teachers from the Haggai Institute would be
paired up with Chinese coworkers trained in the Haggai Institute
to host the training. It was decided for all trainees to register
on April 16th, and the trainings would start on the 17th.
They also left contact phone numbers for the six places. Due
to the lack of background knowledge of the Institute, the
three CGF leaders had some discussion and decided to assign
at least one core coworker (the top leaders) of the Fellowship
to each of the six different places, in case doctrinal disagreement
occurred, these top leaders could keep the situation in control
and take good care of the rest of the coworkers. President
Yu specially requested that the two Mr. Shens go to Shanghai,
for they had decided to locate the temporary headquarters
of the training in Shanghai. President Yu would be directing
the whole training, while his two assistants would go on a
tour of inspection around the six different places.
At the time to say good-bye, President Yu emphasized
two issues: first, for the coworkers’ security, they
had decided that no participant of this training was to use
his own cell phone. One new cell phone in each place will
be arranged for everyone to share. Second, he hoped that CGF
leaders would not use their own cell phone to inform their
coworkers about the training, because cell phones were easily
bugged. He suggested the leaders use public IC phones to inform
others, in order to avoid any trouble and to secure the success
of the training.
