"How many Sunday-school members?"
"I don't know; my children go."
"How many go to prayer-meetings?"
"I don't know; I have never been there."
"How many go to communion?"
"I don't know, I never go; my wife goes."
Then the stranger said: "Will you please tell me why you said it was the most powerful and influential church in the community?"
"Yes, sir; it is the only church in the town that has three millionaires in the church." That was why he thought it was a great church. The Church in America would die of dry rot and sink forty-nine fathoms in hell if all members were multi-millionaires and college graduates. That ought not to be a barrier to spiritual power. By power I do not mean influence.
I'd hate to have to walk back nineteen hundred years to Pentecost. There were 120 at Pentecost who saved 3,000 souls.
Some of the most powerful churches I have ever worked with were not the churches that had the largest number or the richest members. Out in a town in Iowa there were three women who used to pray all night every Thursday night, one of them a colored woman. People used to come under her windows at night and listen to her pray. She murdered the king's English five times in every sentence, but oh, she knew God. They had 500 names on their list for prayer and when the meetings closed they had checked off 397 of them. Every Friday I would be called over the telephone or receive a letter or meet those women and they would tell me what assurances God gave them as to who would be saved. I have never met three women that were stronger in faith than those three. That town was Fairfield, Iowa, one of the brightest, cleanest, snappiest little towns I ever went into.