“Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.” — 1 Corinthians 4:1
“Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.” — 1 Peter 4:10
In these early years of the 21st-century, the time seems right to probe more deeply into the terms “steward” and “stewardship.” The role of the steward in the Christian faith is not often expressed in explicit terms that use the word “steward.” Yet, as Old Testament scholar, Bruce C. Birch wrote:
The concept of the steward is amazingly comprehensive … Consider the concept of covenant community… The various elements of covenant responsibility (economic, political, social, religious) are all related to a trust from and accountability to God as the sovereign covenant partner. And this covenant responsibility can only be discharged as a corporate community, responsible to God and neighbour.
Birch goes on to note that the narrow restriction of stewardship to budget and fundraising still afflicts many in the church.
Making the point from the secular side, a study of members of the Forbes 500 wealthiest people in the world revealed they were only a tiny bit happier than the public as a whole. Why? The study’s author concluded that “the wealthy often continue to feel jealousy about the possessions or prestige of other wealthy people, even large sums of money may fail to confer well-being.” It’s called keeping up with the Joneses.
Referring primarily to the 20th century, Loren Mead, founder of the Alban Institute, pointed to a partial success of stewardship methodologies in these words:
Techniques of stewardship have helped us fund the church and its ministry for a century. These techniques have made possible miracles of mission. These techniques have undergirded strong and vibrant institutional forms of enlarging ministry. In the coming generations, as financial resources continue to diminish, more and more pressure will be put on stewardship to respond to financial crises.
While there is much truth in Mead’s words — techniques of stewardship did help fund the church and many of its ministries for a century — it is also true that the success was never as complete or as long-lasting as his words might suggest. The more common story of stewardship has been of disappointments and frustrations experienced by denominational and other stewardship officials who were charged with funding the ministries of the church. When Mead wrote of “more and more pressure [being] put on stewardship to respond to financial crises,” one might think the primary role of stewardship is to fund the ministries of the church. If stewardship leaders accept this assumption, overall results will continue to be as unsatisfactory as they have been for the past several centuries. I am not ready to accept this assumption.
However, elsewhere, Mead corrects this when he contends that “the issue is not really money or budgets, but the deep anxieties and fears we have about our relationship with God … The real work of stewardship is to help us grow spiritually.”
But the question lingers: What does it mean to grow spiritually? This leads to an even more basic question: Is there a deeper understanding of stewardship that is not based on some combination of external rules or obligations, that does not rest on funding the institutional church, that is not necessarily an expression of thanksgiving, and that underlies an understanding of covenant based on obedience and promise? My conclusion is that the answer to each part of this question is a resounding “yes.”
Mead’s words also described a critical spiritual anxiety. He wrote that “‘wealth’ and ‘money’ are key words to the critical spiritual anxiety of almost everybody in every congregation in the country.” He continued, “our tools of stewardship (all of them that I know of) fail to take into account the deeply spiritual dilemmas we each hear in how we relate to what we have and whose we are.” In these words, I think that Mead is squarely on target.
This view about critical spiritual anxiety resonates with the words of Walter Brueggemann. In an important address given at Trinity Presbyterian, Atlanta, Georgia, in 1996, Brueggemann described the experience of being pulled in two directions, or being haunted by two different versions of one’s life. His address described two stories that operate in his life:
“One story that competes for our loyalty is the money story. But we also know about and take seriously a different account of our lives, the story of the gospel.”
The money story, he said, is “the story of self-sufficiency and merit and being safe on our own terms.” The sign of this story is more. It insists that no matter how much one gathers together, it is not yet enough for happiness and safety. “The outcomes of this story are anxiety and worry.” At this point, both Mead and Brueggemann have similar analyses of the human condition: a symptom of the quest for money is a critical spiritual anxiety.
But Brueggemann then described in detail the second story, the story of the gospel: “It is an account of God’s generosity that we are able to see in the mystery of God’s creation, that we know crucially in God’s love in Jesus of Nazareth, and that we trust because we have experienced it in intimate, concrete ways in our own lives.”
He continued, indicating that the sign of this alternative story is baptism. “The outcome of the story is a life of communion with God shaped like gratitude, a capacity for deep generosity because all that we have is a gift, and a valuing of neighbour, whereby we live to transform our world into a viable neighbourhood where justice and mercy for all brothers and sisters is assured.”
The first story of anxiety and greed — the money story — has great power and is the dominant story of our culture.
The question then is how do we move our lives toward the second story? Brueggemann said: “The move from the story of anxiety to the story of generosity does not happen by accident or by osmosis. It happens by intentional resolve and by incremental discipline. It happens not only with our money but with every aspect of our lives.”
How does it happen? Brueggemann proposed a way, one with which I resonate and that, in my view, has major implications for what it means to be a steward of the gospel. He listed three dimensions of what it means to be imbedded in the gospel story:
- The God with whom we want to live is a God of deep love, but also of great demand.
- What God cares for is the world. God cares for every creature in creation, and intends that every creature must have the safety and dignity of a full life.
This is also a point that Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall has made consistently, both in writing and in conversations of which I was a part, declaring that God’s passion is for this world and that we are called to live in this world. In his seminal 1982 publication, The Steward, Hall wrote:
This world, for all its pain and anguish of spirit, in spite of its injustice and cruelty, the deadly competition of the species and their never-wholly-successful struggle to survive — this world is the world for which God offered up “His only begotten Son.” It was precisely the belief in a God crucified that gave Bonhoeffer the courage to go to his own death affirming the life of the world.
- Communion with God and generosity for the neighbour are linked to our baptismal sense of self. “The community of the baptized believes that God, in the very mystery of creation, has created us to be giving, caring, sharing, generous creatures. That is who we really are! Stewardship, thus, is a practice of our true selves.
Drawing from his observations of commercials during the time of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and also from his trip to Kruger National Park in South Africa, Brueggemann talked first about commercials that had the theme “Follow Your Thirst.” His point was that the underlying motif of the commercial was to urge more — “more thirst, more drink, more self-indulgence, more satisfaction.”
Psalm 42 begins with the metaphor of a deer thirsting for water. The psalmist links this deep thirsting with the believer yearning for communion with God the way that a deer yearns for water.
As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
— Psalm 42:1-2
The story of the gospel, of which baptism is the sign, is that our true thirst is for God. In Brueggemann’s words, “That is who we truly are, and only that will quench.” But there is danger and risk in coming to the waterhole, as Brueggemann observed in a visit to Kruger National Park. When an animal leans down to drink, it is vulnerable, off-guard and easy prey. But because the thirst is so great, the animal must come despite the danger.
For those who are baptized, there are also dangers and risks that must be taken. Because it is the waterhole of the gospel, when we drink there “God will draw us into new purposes that will be costly and demanding. Drinking there will change our lives.”
A Proposed Definition of Stewardship
Brueggemann defined stewardship as “a resolve to move beyond the tale of anxiety.” His definition is more a verb than it is a noun! He noted that stewardship is not about cunning budgets. It is about our true selves. Where does this leave us? Here are my conclusions:
Though stewardship relates strongly to one’s attitudes about money and possessions, it is not about funding institutions or ministries, even those of the church. The words of Douglas John Hall are instructive in this regard:
What if the mission itself requires something like the biblical metaphor of the steward if it is to be grasped imaginatively and engaged in faithfully? What if at least part of what is intended by the overall theme of these issues — “North America as Mission Field” — demands of us that we take up this metaphor and incorporate it into our theology of mission as such? What if stewardship, instead of just being the means of our mission, were a vital dimension of its end — that is an indispensable aspect of what Christian mission actually is.
Stewardship relates to a theological imperative; it is not based on legal or mandatory obligations. It originates inside a person and compels him or her to act.
Though stewardship can relate to a feeling of gratitude to God, it is not based on pressures, such as guilt or pressures of feeling obligated to express thanksgiving.
Stewardship is not based on motivations such as responding to promises of prosperity or favouritism.
Stewardship is based on the human being’s need for God, which can be described as an all-consuming thirst. It is a move from thirst based on anxiety and the felt need for “more,” to a thirst for the gospel of God. In the words of the prayer of St. Augustine, “You have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Stewardship then may be defined as drinking deeply from the waters of the living God by moving from the stagnating waterholes of “more” to the living water of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and inviting others to do the same.
