What is an article on stewardship doing in an April newsletter? Isn’t that about money? Shouldn’t that be in the Fall? Didn’t we just do that?
In fact, stewardship is less about money, and more about custodianship, at least from a scriptural perspective. It is about taking care of stuff. It’s about how we use our time. It’s about what we accomplish with our abilities. It is about how we nurture the earth and safeguard its resources. I suppose then, there is a financial part in all those things too, but it is really about so much more than financial or budget concerns. It is living out what it means to be a Christian.
A group of folks is meeting at Grace to talk about these larger questions of stewardship. You might say they are working on an ecology of stewardship or at this point more of a collage of stewardship questions. The questions they are asking have to do with authenticity, relationships, interrelatedness, lifestyles, commitments, wholeness, prayer, discipleship, process, finding ways to let people do what they really yearn to be doing, like pounding nails, working for others, putting something together, following their dreams: and those things are just the beginnings. We want to borrow from the best understandings and practices of what has gone on before and integrate that into the freshness of what might become of us, if we really commit ourselves take care of the things, abilities, resources and time God gives us to work with. Who knows? We might even experience a conversion to deeper faith or end up with lives filled with expanded meaning.
We’re not sure where all this will lead us from this point, but we want to let you know that we are talking about these things from this multi-faceted perspective, and to let you know that stewardship is not just a once a year thing that has to do with money, but a life-long quest of how we can be faithful disciples of God’s instruction and caring stewards of the world God provides for us. In Genesis, God created the world we live in and told us to take care of it; at the other end of the Bible, in the book of Revelation, God promises a day of transformation to a new heaven and earth. Stewardship is all that the faithful do with everything in between. That’s a broad expanse, a lifelong quest, an intergenerational challenge, a cultural mindset a legacy to pass along. In fact, that’s a whole lot of stuff to even begin to consider.
We’re quite excited about the possibilities of where God’s Holying Sprit might be leading us all in this arena. We hope you’ll be excited by all this too and contribute to the process along the way. Keep us in your prayers. Join us if your curiosity is piqued. Pastor Wendell is the contact, and all are welcome.
Pastor Wendell Hendershott