Meeting Place for the Church in Los Angeles 2303 W. 23rd Street
It was a Saturday morning in November right after morning watch that Brother Chang received a call from Witness Lee, who was in Seattle, Washington, shown in the picture above. We thought that Witness lee had returned to the Far East. He told us that he felt it was of the Lord to come to Los Angeles. We, of course, were happy that our brother could come and be with us and minister the Word. But then Brother Chang asked him how long he would be able to stay. We were ecstatic when he told us that the Lord had not allowed him to go back to the Far East but was directing him to move to Los Angeles. We couldn’t believe what we had heard. He was leaving a fruitful ministry of 20,000 in Taipei to meet with about twenty of us in Los Angeles.
By the end of November he had moved. Initially he stayed with the Changs.
Meetings with Witness Lee Speaking
November 30 - December 12, 1962
We met every morning at 6:30, as we had before, for prayer, and frequently in the evenings.
- Message one: Consecration and God's Plan
- Message Two: Principle of the Overcomers from Esra 1:1-6 and Revelation 12
- Message Three: Classes of People from Matthew 11:7-11; 22:41-45
- Message Four: A Corporate Universal Man based on 1Corinthians 11:23-25; 10:16-17
- Messsge Five: Exercise of the Spirit in Prayer and Reading from John 6:35, 53-58, 60, 63; 4:24
- Message Six: Commanding Prayer from Isaiah 62:6; 45:11; and Exekiel 36:37
Witness Lee's First Converence in America: The All-inclusive Christ
December 21 - December 31, 1962
The picture below, taken in front of the Changs’ house, shows 51 adults and 12 children, with some missing. Imagine how crowded it was in this house, with some sitting on the stairway, in the dining room, in the kitchen, and in the front hall, as well as in the living room.
In this conference Brother Lee presented to us the land of Canaan as the highest type of “the all-inclusive Christ out of which and upon which the fullness of Christ, the Church is built.”
Three hymns came out of this conference:
Oh, what a prize! Oh, what a gain!
Christ is the goal toward which I press.
Nothing I treasure, nor ought desire,
But Christ of all-inclusiveness.
My hope, my glory, and my crown
Is Christ, the One of peerlessness.
Hymns, #499, stanza 4.
Oh, what a breadth! Oh, what a length!
The height, the depth unsearchable!
Christ the Lord is unlimited,
So vast, immense, immeas’rable,
All that He is and all He has
Is now our life unspeakable.
Hymns, #500, stanza 3.
The other hymn was “We praise Thee, Lord for Thy great plan, that we Thy dwelling place may be” (Hymns, #837). The messages released through the speaking of Witness Lee are printed in the book The All-Inclusive Christ.
"The Lord's Move in America"
This conference with Brother Lee has been described as the beginning of a new move of the Lord in this country and, to those of us who attended, it was certainly a milestone in our Christian life. Never before had the light of revelation in the Old Testament been so intense and the Bible opened up in such a way that was so living, fresh, and nourishing. Brother Nee spoke of the time in the early 1800s when John Nelson Darby joined with the brothers in Dublin, Ireland, as a release of a torrent of light (Nee, The Orthodoxy of the Church, 70). This aptly describes our experience as Witness Lee spoke those messages.
In the memorial meeting held for Brother Lee on July 9, 1997, mention was made of his decision to move to Los Angeles in 1962:
In the early 1960s the Lord burdened Brother Lee to move to America and to bring the recovery to this country. He felt that America was a leading country of the whole earth and that for the recovery to spread further, the ministry had to be brought into the English-speaking world. For a man in his late fifties who had lived all his life in the Chinese-speaking world, he was undeterred by the language barrier and he began in 1962 to minister in America in the English language(A Memorial Biography of Brother Witness Lee, 1998, p. 58).
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