Stewardship

Stewardship

September 16, 2014 at 7:51am

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Until recently, the term stewardship was not used much in the contemporary world outside of churches. More recently it has become a major theme of books about management in both business and nonprofit organizations.

“The term steward is misunderstood and even foreign in our society. We do not have any terms in our modern vocabulary that carry the richness of this term. Caretaker fails to capture the responsibility laid on the steward. Manager seems inadequate to describe the relationship between the owner and the steward. Custodian is too passive a term. Agent is too self-serving in our day. Ambassador is too political, and it lacks the servant aspect.Warden is too administrative and loses the sense of the personal. Guardian is too closely tied solely to parental responsibilities.” (Rodin, p. 27)

In order to truly understand what Jesus’ hearers understood Him to mean, we need to put all of the above together: a steward is responsible for managing the owner’s resources, has a close relationship with the owner so that she knows what He wants her to do with them, is active, not passive in her role, is not self-serving, serves humbly and personally, and does guard her Master’s assets, but not in a parental way, that is to say, makes the decisions the Master wishes, not the ones her own wisdom would suggest, like a parent would.

For a better understanding of the Bible’s concept of steward, reread the story of Joseph. He embodied all the concepts above.

There are three other Bible stories: the parable of the talents, the story of the sheep and the goats, and the story of the ten bridesmaids, which will give us some insight. It is strange that only one of these is normally associated with stewardship, when you consider they are all together in the same passage.