Passionate Steward - 10th Anniversary Edition

14 THE PASSIONATE STEWARD
The recovery of good stewardship from secular fundraising will
not be the immediate panacea to the ills of Church and society, but it
will be crucial if we are to liberate the resources at our disposal for
the work the Church has been instituted and called to do. It is not
enough for the Church simply to “keep on keeping on.” We need to
permit ourselves to dream, to surpass the status quo, and to ask what
we could and should be doing. To realize our deepest vocation we
will surely need to develop ourselves as stewards. Indeed, while the
gifts we give will never save us, our acts of stewardship, in so far as
they are in keeping with God’s plan for humanity, do offer us the
dignity of participating in God’s plan of redemption.
Stewardship is not the by-product of a committee meeting or
a fundraising campaign, nor even of the Sunday sermon.
Stewardship is a relationship with God that both receives and gives,
making all things possible. Christian stewards recognize their gifts,
contemplate all that is in their lives, and devote themselves daily to
the conviction that they, as Christians, are invited into a state of
duality: as a child of God, the Christian is gift, and as steward, giver.
Life as a steward, contained in the covenant of our baptismal
promises, and embodied in the daily journey of our lives, is intrinsic
to our Christian discipleship.
The Church needs to understand that the recovery of Christian
stewardship from secular fundraising is vital to the life of our
Christian communities. It seems a paradox that we must reach into
our antiquity, to the teachings and practices of the apostolic
communities, and even back to Judaic wisdom and tradition, if we
are to return stewardship to its proper place in our contemporary
life. But only thus—by faith, God’s grace, and good stewardship—
can we hope to reach out to where God always calls us, and society
expects us to serve.
God not only calls us to quit what is wrong, but to do what is
right. In this sense, stewardship is not passive, but is by definition
inherently active. To become “the passionate steward” requires