Have a Home Meeting:

A new believer needs care and feeding at least once a week. This cannot be carried out in a big meeting which would have the nature of a classroom with one person teaching and others listening. In our experience, the best way is to have a home meeting with one or two new ones in their home. Caring for each one will be different. You cannot meet individual needs without providing individual care. The home meeting should be in the new believer's home. You can't expect a newborn baby to come looking for food. You have to take it to him.

Know what you want to bring the new believer into. This is the purpose of the lessons that follow. They can help you to know what to cover but good material cannot impart life. You must be prepared so that you know the material well and have a spiritual burden to impart it into the new one.

Never go to a home meeting without prayer. Don't depend on the burden you developed in your preparation. Learn to follow the Spirit. You are not there to display what you know but to meet the need of the new believer.

Bring one or two other believers to stand with you in your care for the new believer. This will connect him with others besides yourself and will give the others a chance to learn how to help someone else. But the ones you bring along must also be committed to being there for the new one. They cannot just come according to personal convenience. Secondly, they must be exercised to be in spirit praying inwardly for the meeting and not distract it with their own ideas.

Start off by asking the new believer to speak. You need to control the direction by asking a question or interjecting a comment but do not do all the speaking.

Pay attention to the remarks and questions of the new believer. You are there to meet his need, not to carry out your own program. Talk only at the right time to meet his need. The whole time you are speaking you must be calling on the Lord inwardly. Your spirit must be touching the Lord the whole time.

You know the need of the new believer by his talking, not yours. For instance, his speaking may reveal that he is too much in the mind so you know that he needs to be brought to the spirit. His speaking may reveal that he is in the realm of trying to be a good person so he needs to be brought out of his natural concept. You will only be able to know his need by paying attention to him.

Don't try to use one lesson each week. Rather, go at a pace that suits the new believer. Very often we try to help new ones at our own level. We get excited and talk a lot but they get nothing. They have to grasp what we are sharing with them. Very often this means that we have to go slower even to the point of using several weeks to make sure they have really got a lesson.

Be flexible and living according to the sense of the Spirit and the need of the new one. Sometimes you may not cover what you prepared at all but something else entirely. This will test the depth and breadth of your knowledge of the truth, of your sensitivity to the Spirit, and of your skill in caring for others. Always learn from the reactions of the ones you are caring for.

The Lord must work in their hearts. This means that we must not only teach them points, we must minister life to them. This means that we must be in life and speak out of our own enjoyment and experience of life.

Don't give too many points at one time. Give one point and then ask a question to see if he got it. Make sure he understands what you speak. If not then speak it again from another angle and then ask another question. Also, don't make the meeting too long. An hour and a half will be too long. If you make the meeting much over an hour he may soon feel unhappy with the length of time he is spending with you.

Never get into an argument. Use as many Bible verses as possible to answer questions. You must confirm your speaking with Bible verses so that it is not your speaking against his speaking. New ones need to learn to trust in the Word of God.