A man of rare wisdom

Although Richard Greenham of Dry Drayton, whom we met last month, was well known and appreciated as a gospel preacher, it was as a pastoral counsellor that Greenham excelled.

His 20th-century biographer John Primus has argued persuasively that in this area Greenham was ‘an ecclesiastical titan who used his extraordinary gifts to make enormous contributions to God’s church and kingdom’.

For Greenham to fulfill his ministry as a preacher meant pastoral visitation.

Due to the fact that numerous demands on his time gave him little free time during the day, Greenham would rise at four every morning to study and prepare his sermons. He preached twice on Sundays, and during the week he also preached on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday just after dawn so that his parishioners might attend before they went to work in the fields. After preaching on a weekday, he went back to study in the morning, and in the afternoon he visited the sick or went out into the fields, trudging through the clay, to speak with his parishioners as they were working.

This time with his people he called ‘Christian conferring’, which he rightly considered a very helpful means of grace alongside listening to the preached word and reading the Bible for oneself. According to his first biographer Henry Holland, Greenham ‘having great experience and an excellent faculty to relieve and comfort distressed consciences, he was sought, far and near, by such as groaned under spiritual afflictions and temptations … the fame of this spiritual physician so spread abroad that he was sent for to very many, and the Lord was pleased so far to bless his labours that by his knowledge and experience many were restored to joy and comfort’.

Greenham’s friends hoped that he would write a book on the art of counselling, but he never did. He did pass on a great deal of his wisdom to others by word of mouth, sayings that were written down after his death. They reveal Greenham to be a man of rare wisdom.

Here are four of his pithy sayings:

‘Many are barren in grace because they are barren in prayer’.

‘Where the Scripture hath not a mouth, we ought not to have ears’.

‘This is the gift of gifts, the Spirit of God… This is the top, this is the head, this is the height, this is the depth of all good things, even the Spirit’.

‘True it is, the Sun is bright, but what is that to a blind man? True it is, the word is glorious, but what is that to a man without the Spirit of God?’

Alongside this ministry of counselling was that of catechising, which Greenham regarded as an essential if the preaching of the word was to bear fruit. He catechised Sunday afternoons and also on mid-Thursday afternoons.

The typical catechism of that era included four elements: questions and answers on the Ten Commandments, on the Apostles’ Creed, on the Lord’s Prayer, and on the sacraments. Greenham drew up his own catechism. It contains questions on the Commandments and the Creed, but not on the other two. It could very well be the case that the copies we have of this catechism are incomplete. But what we do have is over 300 questions along with short answers. This would have been more than adequate to establish a person solidly in the faith.