Faithful Stewardship

Stewardship is one of those old words that has largely fallen out of common use in our culture. The reasons for this aren’t hard to imagine. Even as I write, I glance out the window and see a generic strip mall. Would anyone speak of stewarding such a place? Maybe a landlord would claim some responsibility for its maintenance, but the language of stewardship feels too weighty, too earnest. It suggests more than mere oversight; it conveys a sense of responsibility not only to preserve but to pursue something higher—something good and beautiful, not just profitable. And that, I suspect, is part of why the word has faded. Few of us view our lives, our work, or our world through the lens of stewardship. We’re more often governed by metrics of utility, efficiency, and personal gain. To serve a person, a place, or even a task for its own sake—because it’s good in itself and worthy of care—often feels foreign to our thinking.

There’s another reason, I think, that stewardship sounds strange to modern ears: real stewardship assumes what we care for isn’t ultimately ours. A steward is entrusted with something on behalf of someone else. That’s a biblical concept: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (Ps. 24:1). Stewardship is connected, in other words, to a deeply Christian way of seeing the world. We’ve been given gifts—time, resources, relationships—and we’re called to steward them for the glory of the One who gave them (Rom. 12:6–8; 1 Peter 4:10–11). That kind of vision feels foreign to a culture shaped more by materialism and vague spirituality than reverence for God. In a secular age, cut off from a sense of divine ownership and human accountability, stewardship doesn’t mean much. What’s left is bare selfishness—self-directed, self-justifying, and self-consuming. But Christians are called to something older and deeper. Our vocation reaches back to the garden, where Adam and Eve were charged to tend and keep what God had made. We now live as exiles in a land that’s not our home, and that makes stewardship harder. Even so, the calling remains. And God hasn’t left us on our own. He sent His Son, who stewarded His mission perfectly, and now renews us in His image so that we might live lives of faithful stewardship by His Spirit. We start by asking, “What has God given me?” The answer, of course, is everything. And if that’s the case, then whatever we have—our talents, resources, callings, circumstances, and relationships—we’re called to be faithful stewards of it all.