Herb Van Denend at DawnTreader Christian School mid 70s

It is more blessed to give than to receive

What if the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) is approaching its structural questions all wrong from a motivational perspective? What if instead of trying to employ our board assets to rejuvenate the organism below (or if you like the tree metaphor to use the branches to feed the roots) it decided that the path to its own rejuvenation was giving itself away in a more radical way.

While the CRC sometimes struggles with some of the individualistic methods common among evangelicals our strength seems to be in institution building and development.

Listening to Harry Truman

Harry Truman once said “It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

This really isn’t far from Jesus’ admonition “don’t let you left hand know what your right hand is doing.”

Some of the CRC’s most significant accomplishments for the greater good and for kingdom development often happen outside of formal CRC circles.

• Do you know the role the CRC played in working on the “blood diamond” issue?
• Do you know how the CRC is helping move the US Immigration debate forward?
• Do you know how the CRC is helping move the creation/science discussion forward?

These are just a few examples off the top of my head. The closer you look the more you will see.

You’ll also see the influence of CRC scholars on educational institutions beyond the CRC:

• Geerhardus Vos
• Cornelius Van Til
• Nick Woltersdorff
• Alvin Plantinga
• Rich Mouw
• Lew Smedes

What World Renew Really Does

I grew up like most CRC folks assuming then CRWRC helped people when natural disasters hit and then “taught a man to fish…” They do do these things, but when I became a missionary with World Missions and worked with CRWRC missionaries I saw what they often mostly did was institutional development.

To extrapolate, if you give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish he’ll eat for a lifetime. If you teach a man to develop a competent and responsible fishing industry he’ll feed the world.

It isn’t just World Renew that does this though, you’ll find CRC people all over the place quietly working to make their institutions better. We are an institutional tribe.

Littering the World With Competent Organizations.

The CRC got started in this early through its Christian Schools movement. The CRC didn’t develop schools it owned, but through the ideas of sphere sovereignty empowered its people to develop schools and institutions outside the bounds of the formal church. This is vitally important because the last people you really need running all sorts of things are a group of pastors. We talk too much and often don’t have any idea how to run an organization.

The CRC didn’t just stop with schools. You can find lots of organizations in traditional CRC colony areas like retirement communities, health care organizations, diaconal groups, etc.

Being Nimble Means Starting New Things

When I was growing up in North Jersey my parents together with a group of other concerned CRC folk began ECUMP, a group working to help make it possible for inner city kids to go to the CRC schools in the area. As a child I’d go to bed with the ECUMP meeting going on a floor below me in our living room.

When the ECSA closed the Passaic school the group decided to start their own inner city Christian School named Dawn Treader in an old mill in the Great Falls district of Paterson. As a boy I remember spending a summer helping in the push to get that old mill ready for school.

My experience isn’t unique in the CRC. It wasn’t just true of preacher’s kids. CRC folks, clergy and lay, work together to do things often around institutions and organizations not owned or controlled by the church institution.

Not Too Big To Fail, Not Always Under Control

This approach to serving the world has its risks. Organizations open and close. Sometimes organizations can start and then can go astray. There can be factional takeovers. A lot can happen, but that is how the world is.

What this approach does to do is help Christian people address the needs of their times.

Casting Our Bread Upon the Waters

I wrote a bit ago about the CRC considering spinning off some of its agencies. What if this wasn’t just a strategy for institutional survival but a strategy for blessing the world beyond us and developing partnerships?

If there is anything that elicits anxiety in our individualistic culture it is the idea of a controlling institution. Americans (especially Western Americans) fear institutional control (especially if it’s not them controlling the institution). What tends to inspire people is institutional generosity.

What if it were part of the CRC’s vision for its agencies that we birth competent institutions in order to share them with the world? We already do this quietly? What if we did it more intentionally and more overtly?

How would the CRC change if this became a denominational priority? What if we were known not for a fearful controlling spirit but for a generous spirit? What if our influence grew by developing partnerships beyond ourselves with people who might not share our confessional convictions at the moment but in these non-ecclesiastical institutions and spaces we would serve the world together? What if this became what we were known for in the world?

I think in the long run this in fact could bless our church not in a direct way under institutional control but in a gifting way which is in fact foundationally aligned with the strategy of our catechism.

• We experience the misery of the world.
• We receive the truth of Christ’s generosity poured out for us. This comes to us as total and free gift.
• We in turn give freely to an undeserving world trusting that in giving we will receive.