A Layman's View of Stewardship

Gary Grubb, our 9-year Stewardship Committee member and recent Chairman, resigned as of the first of the year to move on to other challenges and ministries. I will be filling in until the Convention. During this relatively short time, we hope to maintain a focus on the small church initiative Connect to Grow and continued stewardship awareness. Accordingly, I am beginning by sharing my layman's understanding of Christian stewardship. Which is basically the self-created record of our lifetime use of all God's gifts, including where we live and our freedom to worship as we please. I see this record of our Christian life delineated by four milestones we encounter alone. First, our mothers were certainly present when we were born, and while we may have had a sibling along for some of the experience, as well as attending personnel and maybe an expectant, hopefully joyous family, we enter this life only by ourselves. The next milestone marking our record of Christian stewardship is coming to understand that God's purpose for providing gifts is to equip us to respond to the faith making work of the Holy Spirit. Gifts are to be used to fulfil His tasking to care for the members of His church here on earth, be they those we see on Sunday or those who have not yet received the work of the Holy Spirit through His word. Though we may come to the realization as a participating member of a group, we come to it by ourselves. Along the way we also come to understand that while we are saved by faith alone, God pleasing work stems from that faith and becomes our record of stewardship. The next major milestone in life is death, again something experienced alone, even if others die at the same time and at the same place. Hopefully at this milestone we will again be surrounded by a loving family and friends who will remember us as having exhibited a well lived steward's life. It is the cumulative effort of our daily life at its end that becomes our record as a steward of God's gifts, not the yearend financial receipt or a recitation of the number of committees served on. The final milestone of a steward's life is the receipt of Christ's judgement, again something encountered alone. Requirements for this accounting are well and completely identified in the parable of the faithful steward-those who receive much are expected to return much, those who receive less are expected to return a more modest amount, but woe to those who bury His gifts to only return them unused. They will truly experience God's wrath. As in all our LCMS theology, the requirement for stewardship comes straight from the Bible, with no need for scholarly or "official" interpretation to complicate, or trivialize, the subject.

Don Panzenhagen, Interim Chairperson of the Stewardship Committee