“I’ve had very good burritos,” I say with an honest grin, “but I’ve never had one that caused ‘awe’ to rise up from within me.”
After some snickering, I usually get offers to introduce me to burrito joints that may change that reality (which is how I find new places to eat on my speaking engagements), but even though the comment is laced with humor, there’s a good bit of truth here. I generally use this illustration when talking to groups about the “stewardship of praise,” one of the types of stewardship I’ve identified as a faith leader.
How do we steward our praise, not only for the Divine, but for everything? How do you?
We may think it’s just a matter of semantics, but being honest about what is literally “awesome”—causing awe in us—can help us be honest about what we worship in this world.
When most disciples engage me to talk about stewardship, what they really mean is that they want to talk about finances. And this is for good reason, of course; finances and economics are an important piece of discipleship. After all, Jesus mentions finances and economics 288 times in the Gospels, roughly one out of every ten verses. It is certainly an important part of living a cruciform life.
But financial stewardship, as important as it is, holds just a slice of the stewardship puzzle.
Stewardship, at least in my view, is everything.
And I know, folks hear that and say, “Well, if it’s everything, then it’s really nothing at all!” Specificity is the friend of those trying to find out how to live, by God, in this world. This is most certainly true.
But when I say that “stewardship is everything,” but I more precisely mean is that, at least for the disciple, a stewardship lens is placed on every prismatic piece of life.
For my own work, I’ve identified a dozen stewardship facets that I try to highlight as I engage in conversations across the church and beyond. But it’s a growing list and has morphed and changed even since my work began.
A few are familiar ground but should be re-trod continually because their impact is evergreen. These familiar slices are stewardship of finances, land, creation, and mission wellspring (or some in the church might call this “stewardship of building”). When I bring up these pieces of the stewardship puzzle, I usually seen knowing nods in the community.
But there are other pieces, too, that aren’t often associated with the world of stewardship.
Stewardship of voice, or advocacy, is certainly a prescient part of stewardship in these days. How are we called to refrain from speaking when other voices need to take center stage? And, conversely, how is God calling us to speak up, as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded the world from his cell in Birmingham, when voices are being silenced?
Or what about the stewardship of relationship? How do we make and keep friends?
How do we steward our bodies, whatever body God has given us? Have we thought about that honestly past the latest diet fad?
The stewardship of collective body, or how we create an equitable and livable society, is part of the stewardship puzzle often neglected by the church, mostly because the church has shied away from speaking about civic life in some corners. But we are, indeed, called to steward our communal life, both within and outside the church.
How do we do that well?
And as odd as it may sound, how do we steward our online body in this day and age? The stewardship of social media is a growing concern of mine as a director asked to think deeply about these things. The relative anonymity of our online selves can bring out the worst impulses in humanity. That, or the mere post of moral outrage can lead us to believe that we’ve actually done something in the world (and all we’ve done is let our thoughts be known…with no follow-up action). As the right Reverend William Sloan Coffin, former pastor of Riverside Church in New York City reminds us, “Moral outrage is not a strategy.”
But past the physical, past the collective, how do we steward those most ethereal of elements, most notably our calendars and call? Stewarding our time well, and stewarding our sense of what God is calling out of us, literally takes our whole lives. So many in this world allow their calendars to run them, instead of they running their calendars. So many are so busy, they never ask the good but difficult question: is this what I’m being called by God to do, now?
Now before you imagine that stewardship occupies my mind every second of every day, I want to disabuse you of the notion. Thinking too hard or too long about any issue can cause analysis paralysis, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that disciples need to be fretting about every decision in every moment.
But an honest question entertained regularly about any or all of these categories can, I think, provoke us to living more intentional and cruciform lives. After all, if we just relegate stewardship to one piece of our existence, we may be missing the fullness of life that God in Christ calls us toward.
And fullness of life, or “abundant life” as Christ regularly calls it in the Gospels, is certainly the promise we receive from a God who loves us, the whole us, enough to dwell with us in everything that we are and go through in this life.
God stewards everything. So, yes, in light of that I truly think stewardship is everything.
