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200 EVANGELISMchapel with a membership of between twenty and thirty, andas many more adherents, all the outgrowth of this initialeffort on the part of the young preacher.This shows how the missionary must at times beginwith nothing and work out toward something; how when adirect frontal attack would fail, by a flank movement hemay perchance win out, or in other words how, in such astrategic place, where there are no Christians, the missionary makes for himself an opening. So much for the secondfeature of our threefold programme.The third feature of our programme was thefollowing up of the natural growth of the ChineseChurch. When five years ago, we took upresidence in this Held we found one hundred and fifty Christians, but they were isolated; too far away from any thenexisting chapel for anything like regular Sabbath attendance.They were the results of the work of our colporteurs, thepioneers or scouts. We adopted the slogan, every memberat worship somewhere every Sabbath. Borrowing the ideaof grouping by tens from the Bethany Sunday School ofPhiladelphia, we proceeded to group our Christians locally.Where there were not ten, two, three or more were organizedinto a group. The group at once proceeded to elect fromits own members one to be leader or deacon, later an elder.Such a group was encouraged to develop into a chapel, laterinto a full-fledged church. Soon we had some twenty ofsuch groups.Circuit-ridersConfronted by this number of chapels andhaving but a limited force of preachers, eachpreacher was made a circuit-rider with approximately fourchapels to care for. He spent not only his Sabbath in agiven chapel, but also the week following, during which hewas expected to visit an average of at least three neighbouring villages. On such visits he took with him the deacon ormember of the local group, thus encouraging personal workand introducing the preacher who was a comparativestranger. The preacher having four chapels to cover in amonth, could spend but one week at each. The remainingthree weeks of the month were cared for by the localwho had sole charge of the work.