Stewardship ISN’T Easy

Editor’s note: Monthly articles from LCMS Stewardship Ministry are hosted here on The Lutheran Witness site. Visit the “Ministry Features” page each month for additional stewardship content.

For decades, the LCMS has boldly proclaimed that stewardship is the free and joyous activity where the child of God and God’s family, the church, manage all of life and life’s resources for God’s purposes.

This definition has stood the test of time and has enabled us to embrace a faithful and full understanding of the baptized child of God’s identity as a steward, as well as the activity of stewardship itself.

But it could be posited that in making the definition and practice of stewardship clear and concise, we have also been guilty of making it too easy. “Easy” stewardship takes a few forms.

First, steward leaders have often oversimplified stewardship into a programmatic approach. This is when stewardship is reduced to the once-a-year commitment process that involves a sermon series, charts based on percentage giving, and commitment cards that are filled out, handed in, and then tucked away neatly for another year.

On the other hand, stewardship is made too easy when it is ignored. Pastors and steward leaders treat stewardship as the congregational “third rail.”

These leaders see any mention of stewardship formation and accountability as something that will anger the people entrusted to their care. This ire makes the task of ministry even harder than it already is, so it must be avoided at all costs, unless it is necessary to keep the wolf away from the door.

The labor of stewardship originated in Eden

But stewardship is not easy. From the very beginning, stewardship was designed to be work. Genesis 2:15 reminds us of the twofold task that falls to the newly created steward: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”

Adam was created for the task of stewardship. Work was an essential part of that stewardship. So was keeping or defending what was entrusted to them. Labor and accountability have been essential elements of stewardship from the beginning.

What makes stewardship such a challenge for us is what happened after the perfect creation was entrusted to Adam and Eve.

At the end of Genesis 2, we find the stewards naked and unashamed. But then as the page turns, up slithers the ancient serpent and all hell breaks loose. The stewards, who were entrusted with working and keeping the garden, are guilty of failing in that task in reverse order.

While Eve was the one engaging with the serpent, Adam was there. Both failed to defend the garden from the alien word of the serpent. Once the serpent’s word was allowed to stand, the rest of the events in Genesis 3 fall like dominoes.

Listening to the alien word leads to thinking covetous thoughts, which gives way to thieving claims of ownership, which demonstrates idolatry and cuts the failed stewards off from the Creator that they were called to reflect within creation.

From our perspective, Genesis 3 reads like a slow-motion, unavoidable disaster.

The consequences of failed stewardship

Both Scripture and our lived experience make us aware of the consequences of failed stewardship. Pain in childbearing. Confused roles in the family. Tiresome toil that leads only to death and returns everyone to the dust they came from.

All human beings in all times feels this in their bodies. What is recorded in Genesis 3 is part of why stewardship is so hard.

Another reason why stewardship is so hard isn’t actually recorded in Genesis 3. Read this chapter again — there is one thing that a student of the text will never find. At no point is the steward fired from the task. Human beings are never relieved from their created task of being stewards.

Hence, we live this stewardship out in a world broken by sin, with flesh that has been stained by sin and a will that has been corrupted by sin. The world works against us. Our flesh works against us. Yet, in spite of all this, we are still stewards!

Hope for every steward

The Lord does not leave us in this hopeless place. While not alleviating this burden, He provides the one thing needed: hope.

Genesis 3 contains the hope for the seed that will crush the head of the ancient serpent. That hope lived its way through the ages all the way until Jesus came to be the Messiah  and went to the cross to save us from our sins, work that we could never do!

Reconciled to God through Jesus, we are baptized into His completed stewardship. We are then restored as stewards of His Word. Paul in 2 Corinthians 5 points out that we have had committed to us the ministry of reconciliation. We are now stewards of the Gospel.

Reconciled to God in Christ, we steward the Gospel for the sake of our neighbor so that they too can be added by the work of the Holy Spirit to the ranks of redeemed stewards. This task isn’t easy either. Read Romans 7. We need that stewardship of the Gospel done for us so that we can be restored for the sake of the Gospel too.

Stewardship is never easy. It cannot be ignored. Nor can it be reduced to a few formulaic steps, the filling out of a card and going back to our lives. It is a daily and weekly call to repentance. The Lord opens His Word to us daily. The Lord opens His Table to us weekly. He does this to sustain us in the task of stewardship.

This is not an easy task. But it is the very one for which He has made us and to which He has called us. The One who has called us is faithful. He will work His work in us! It isn’t an easy task. But it is a completed task in Christ.

LCMS Stewardship ministry features may be reprinted with acknowledgment given to The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.