Stewardship

I got asked to talk about stewardship at church again this year. Here's what I said.

“Usnavy. That’s a pretty name. I’ve never heard it before.”

She gave a wry smile and with a slight eye roll explained, “You’ve heard it, it was printed on the blanket I was wrapped in at the naval hospital.”

As some of you know, I’m a bit of a story teller. As such, I don’t generally put much stock in the details in the stories told by others. One should never let the facts get in the way of a good yarn. However, when this story was told to me by a fellow missionary, I accepted it straight up. I did that because, while my stint in full-time service to the Lord was brief, it was long enough for me to learn two things:

1. You don’t need to make up crazy stories about your missionary work; they come to you.
2. The people missionaries minister to believe that they have no power whatsoever.

You see, the reason that story is funny is also the reason it is tragic. As affluent Americans, we can’t imagine letting someone or something else tell us what to name our children. Or where we should live. Or what we should eat. What career to pursue, what school to attend, what car to drive, what color raincoat we’ll buy. We decide for ourselves. We are empowered.

If the only raincoat you can afford is the plastic bag out of a park trash can, you don’t get to pick the color.

What’s this got to do with Stewardship? Well, I’m getting’ to that.

We have a very engaged congregation. And that’s a great thing. Everybody who can help out around here really should, if for no other reason than to realize just how much work goes into making a group of believers a functioning church.

But, there is a pattern of Stewardship in affluent churches such as ours. We tend to lend our efforts to inward ministries. For outward ministries, we are much more likely to write a check.

Frankly, as a college student with no means, that pattern was very useful to me when trying to raise funds for my missionary work. And make no mistake, outward ministries like Trinity Food Pantry and Episcopal City Mission have real expenses and they appreciate your donations very much. But by giving actual service to these ministries, something much more profound can happen.

It is often stated that these programs we put in place to help the underprivileged would work a whole lot better if the people they were aimed at would show a bit more gumption. This is true. But just how confidently does a person work towards their future when they’ve been so beaten down by a system of inequality that they don’t even think they can name their own kid?

They are children of god. They are worth more than they are getting. They need to hear that. They need to hear it from us, not our delegates. They will only believe it if we, the beneficiaries of the most imbalanced economic system in the history of the world give them the one thing we can’t buy more of. We need to give them our time.