Stewardship
Stewardship - Living in God's Extravagant Grace
This webpage is designed to allow clergy and laity to access easily a variety of information regarding stewardship. The purpose of this site is simple. We hope to provide basic information to help leaders in congregations and dioceses develop stewardship programs that help carry out the work God is calling them to do.
We are big believers in not reinventing the wheel. Rather, we prefer to highlight excellent wheels being invented around the church. If you have ideas, programs, newsletter articles, bulletin inserts, sermon summary or outline, quotes, or comments you would like to share, please send them to vwalkup@nashaumf.org.
You will notice that some items have copyright or attribution notices attached. We expect internet users to download, copy, and share good material. We do ask, however, that you copy items in their entirety, including these notes regarding authorship. We hope this will encourage people to allow us to share their work through this medium. Who knows? You might be one of our future writers who come to appreciate this bit of courtesy from your readers and admirers.
We look forward to hearing from you!
The information shared here comes from lay and clergy who are passionate about helping people to be good stewards of God’s blessings and resources. We believe that we are recipients of God’s extravagant grace and that some of our questions need to be re-formulated. For example, we have often asked, “Can you and I give a tithe of my/our income to God through the church?” Out of a theology that all that we have is God’s, a more proper question will be, “How much of God’s blessings on my/our life do I/we need to keep for ourselves?” We have often understood stewardship to be about money, and that is an important aspect, but not the only aspect of it.
Blessed by God’s grace, what and how will we use God’s resources to leave legacies for our children and our children’s children? Stewardship is about caring for the creation because we love the Creator. Stewardship is about who we are and not what we have. Stewardship is relational – established on the grace of Jesus Christ. Stewardship is not a means of seeking God’s favor, it is our response to God’s grace and God’s redemptive power in life.
By definition, stewardship is the personal responsibility for taking care of another person's property or affairs or in religious orders taking care of all that is entrusted to the individual or the order. Historically, stewardship was the responsibility given to household servants to bring food and drinks to a big castle dining hall. The term was then expanded to indicate a household employee's responsibility for managing household or domestic affairs. Stewardship later became the responsibility for taking care of passengers' domestic needs on a ship, train and airplane, or managing the service provided to diners in a restaurant. The term continues to be used in these specific ways, but it is also used in a more general way to refer to a responsibility to take care of something one does not own.