It can be easy to think that the focus of any discussion of stewardship in our church life is about money. It is true that money is a reality that we need to deal with. Yet money is but an outward sign of true stewardship. Stewardship is ultimately about trust. What is it that I put my trust in? How do I build up that trust? In the Large Catechism, Martin Luther writes in explaining the First Commandment, “to have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe in that one with your whole heart. … Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, is really your God.” He then goes on to point out the many things that in practice we trust in more than we trust in God.
Money is one of those things. It is so easy to assume that whatever happens will work out because we have enough in our bank accounts to get by. One part of giving to the church, then, is to act out our faith commitment that we will make it through difficult times not because of our bank statement but because God will be with us. Beyond that, we do not actually give money to the church; we give money to God’s mission. That mission takes many forms. It takes the form of a building where we can gather and praise God. It takes the form of supporting those who are hungry by providing food. The mission is actualized by having a staff that can help the congregation members put their faith into action. It is this mission of God at work in our lives and in the world that we give to through the church.
Perhaps even more valuable than money, though, is our time. I remember stories in international communities of how to relate to Americans, emphasizing how focused on time Americans are. While people from other countries will tell the distance to another place using miles or kilometers, Americans tell how long it will take to get there. We value time that highly. A key part of stewardship, then, is asking us how we determine what to entrust with something as valuable as our time. What does it look like to use the time given us by God for God’s purposes? While God is God of our whole life, if we use the tradition 10% model as a gauge of what to dedicate to God in return, it comes out to a little less than 10 hours per week or 1.4 hours per day (you can ask me about how I came up with that). That works out to weekly worship, a daily devotion time, and serving with one ministry for each member of the congregation. Imagine what our ministries would be like if all of our members followed that pattern! Even more, when ministries are focused on God at work in our lives, those hours add to the joy of our lives rather than exhaust us the way so many other things we do with our time do.
Stewardship, then, asks us to think about how we use what is valuable to us. Do those uses show our trust in God and lead us to trust God more? If not, can we stretch ourselves to deeper our trust?