Greystone’s Decreasing Strategy
Dear Friend of Greystone,
A friend of mine recently referred to Frederick Dale Bruner’s comment on John the Baptist’s famous statement, “Jesus must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). Bruner’s remarks on these words are as sobering as they are refreshing. He describes the counterintuitive perspective of faithful Christian ministry that is required and provoked by John’s reaction to Christ:
“Is there a more concise description of the psychology of Christian ministry? The great desire of authentic Christian ministry is the increase of Christ in the hearts of one’s parishioners, neighbors, and oneself. But the decrease of our own ministry? Generally and understandably we think that if our ministries increase, Jesus’ ministry will increase as well. John the Baptist knows better. He apparently believes that it is possible to be so consumed with Christ’s increase that one can actually be content to be less significant oneself. This is the mystery of authentic ministry. Who of us can say we have attained this poised self-diminution? It is a goal greatly to be desired.”
Indeed.
In the spirit of Bruner’s insight, I suggest that we should admit we are often tempted to confuse the spread and visibility of our ministries with the spread of the Lord’s work, to assume that His ministry is at least roughly coextensive with our own. As a result, we suffer what we regard as a holy anxiety over the scope of our various ministries because we want—rightly—to see the Lord’s work and glory reach the ends of the earth. If we are global, we think, his ministry reaches globally. If we grow, the Lord’s work grows. If we reach and do more, Jesus reaches and does more.
It’s a simple and easily defensible way of thinking. But, No! However apparently logical and “missional” this way of thinking may seem, and regardless of how widespread this assumption undoubtedly is, such a perspective represents a confusion of the world’s business strategies and principles with the forms of faithful service to Christ. This approach makes good sense on business terms but not ministry ones.
What a timely reminder this is for those of us who are deeply invested, personally and otherwise, in particular ministries that we are convinced render important, unique, and timely service to Christ and the Church in our day. It is in fact a potentially lifesaving reminder: the Lord does not need us, any of us, and he does not need our institutions. His ministry is not coextensive with ours. To take this a step further in John’s direction, in the always surprising and mysterious logic of the Gospel, our smallness is in fact an ordinary way his greatness is enlarged. We decrease and thus he increases.
John understood this. We need to as well, especially when we are trying to raise financial support for our endeavors. Fundraising is a difficult, trying, and sometimes tortuous task, and I am frankly terrible at it. I am much more at home in the classroom, talking and praying with students and ministers, preaching and reading and writing, leading and serving. Not fundraising. But raising funds is necessary too. The good and important work that is being done by the Lord’s servants cannot be done without costs and sacrifice, costs and sacrifices that should be borne by the Body and not by any one individual. This too we learn from the Gospel.
What is neither necessary nor fitting is to relate that fundraising to what the Lord is pleased to do. We must never suggest, however unintentionally, that our growth in reach or in resources corresponds to the reach of the Lord.
At Greystone, our approach to ministerial and theological formation may be seen as a commitment to the strange but sound theo-logic of John’s famous remark. Our model of making old ways new breathes the air of this very atmosphere. This may help to explain Greystone’s oddness in the current landscape of ministerial and theological training. Bringing the Church back into such formation; insisting on a required (not optional) overall culture for that formation that includes daily prayers, labor, feasting, and conversation; investment in ministers and church leaders in their own contexts with a respect for the acquired wisdom that is regional and local; the focus on slow reading and slow thinking, on listening and questioning, on the long view rather than immediate effect; privileging the ordinary contexts of faithfulness such as marriage, children, friendship, and congregational common life; and the renewal of Reformed worship as “epiphanic” of the Church, putting the reality of the Church on display (for better or worse)—these all seem to us much more coherent with John’s perspective than with some of the prevailing thinking among Christian institutions today. They won’t ever make Greystone a household name, but they help make for stronger households—family households and church ones.
For this reason and others, since its official launch in 2015 Greystone has been relatively quiet about itself. We have been a “gap filler” in service to other institutions and organizations. Our hands are coarse from the long, hard labor of important small things in many small contexts. Our muscles are sore from the heavy lifting that has been done behind the scenes year after year, and which has been carried out by very few. There is dirt underneath our fingernails from countless private meetings with pastors and sessions to help them navigate cases of abuse and domestic violence, advise ministers and other church leaders about the uses and abuses of church power, mentor and encourage otherwise aimless young men unsure about the prospects of Reformed ministry in a Reformed church world not always eager to welcome classical Reformed convictions. And so on.
But you won’t notice that coarse skin or see much of that dirt because we don’t talk much about it. Because our personnel and our activities have been global from the start, we have been (say some) the “little engine that could.” But we believe our effectiveness, whatever that may be, is reducible to our stubbornness regarding the wisdom of older and self-effacing ways. We pray that it is an expression of our confidence that Christ is increased even when—and precisely because—we decrease. Even though we have dozens of volunteers and staff working steadily and fruitfully in many places, we have wanted you to know more of Christ than of Greystone. And so we have gone down a different path than other institutions, making much of volunteerism, prioritizing quality and experience while eschewing celebrity-like possibilities for our choice of instructors and leadership, resisting the relentless expectation that we will be successful and viable to the extent that “GreystoneTM” is a major brand. May it never be.
Instead, as we are now poised, in the Lord’s kind providence, to turn the corner from a gap filler for other institutions to becoming a full-orbed training and formation institution ourselves, we continue to embrace the God of small things, whose small things are great things. We will now press onward—unashamed of our coarse hands and dirty fingernails—into providing full degree programs of our own. We are doing so because the Church and our friends are helping us to see that this is what is needed—not by Christ, but for him. But we will of course continue to happily work with others, to fill gaps large and small, and to make the good work of others known far and wide for Christ’s sake. We remain committed to the goal that no Greystone collaborator will have a better friend and partner in all the world than Greystone. But this will be for Christ’s sake, not theirs, and not ours.
We will announce more about this new mode of our work in the days to come. For now, though, I am obliged to do what I am so truly bad at doing, namely, make the case to you that your support, especially financial, is certainly needed as we turn this corner. And it is needed at this very moment today, and at unprecedented levels.
But the Lord knows this, and he knows how he will provide for this through his people.
If you want to support such a vision, if you want to see a generation or more of ministers and other Church leaders who themselves happily, joyfully, and faithfully embrace small things—including smaller churches, towns, and people—as contexts for the increase of the Lord’s glory, I invite you to join the little people of Greystone in a big way.
But not for Greystone as such. Invest in this work for the Lord who, through Greystone but also far beyond Greystone, is pleased to make much of those who rejoice to be made small for His sake.
May He increase!
Yours in Christ’s service,
Mark
The Rev. Dr. Mark A. Garcia
President and Fellow in Scripture & Theology
Greystone Theological Institute