Stewardship

What is Stewardship?

Stewardship means this: all that we have, and own, and are – is a gift from God, and we have been entrusted by the owner Himself, our Creator and Redeemer, to be stewards of his gifts. The Bible calls us to be good stewards of the resources of time, talents and treasures that have been entrusted to us by our heavenly Father.

Jesus calls us to follow him. For the disciple of Jesus there is no “rule” regarding money! Rather, we are called into a relationship with a living person, our Lord Jesus Christ. The Christian life is not a “program” but allegiance to this Person who calls us to follow him. When you enter marriage you don’t ask the other person to sit down and write out “exactly what this marriage will cost.” How ridiculous! You know that it will cost you a lot, perhaps everything, and yet you enter into the marriage enthusiastically. In the same way, the Christian life is a like a marriage. You enter into it not knowing exactly where you are going; and like marriage you are never the same once you enter upon it. This is what it means to be a Christian: you enter into a relationship with Jesus that turns your whole life upside-down, and this includes the way you think about and use your money.

Jesus’ call to discipleship creates the church, the community of the followers-of-Christ. As the church we are to be an alternative community, a “city” within the city, the salt of the earth and a light on the hill. Part of learning to live as an alternative community is to be set free from our culture’s addiction to money. In a money-focused, materialistic-oriented, climb-the-ladder system, where “having is being” like ours, Jesus calls us to live out a whole new way of life. In short: as a church we are called to model an alternative way to relate to money.

At Redeemer, we seek to avoid two errors when talking about stewardship.

On the one hand, many Christians and churches treat money as an “untouchable”, something we can’t talk about or wrestle through together. In this approach, our money is treated as a “private” and not a “church” matter. But as Christians every aspect of our life falls under the Lordship of Christ. We need (together) to learn to think “Christianly” about all of our lives, not the least of all, about our money.

On the other hand, we won’t present a list of “rules-to-be-good-Christians.” We believe that the gospel of God’s grace, alone, should be what motivates us to be stewards of our resources for the glory of God.

Please download Redeemer’s Stewardship Guide to read more about what we see as the Biblical guidelines of stewardship. We trust the gospel of God’s grace to make this concrete and real in your lives.