From the Rector

As we’re in our stewardship season, it makes sense to think a bit about what it means to be a steward.

Being a steward means taking care of something, a trust, for someone else. One definition is to “manage or look after another's property.” Another definition is “a person responsible for supplies of food.” 

This was the title often given to someone in a castle, for example, who ensured adequate food was available to make it through winter or a siege. A more general definition is simply “a person whose responsibility it is to take care of something.”

I suppose there’s the very simple reading of the word stewardship that means we’re charged with taking care of the church. So our stewardship is exercising that very basic responsibility.

I’d contend that it’s deeper. The question of stewardship has to do with what we do with something that we borrow, that is a gift—and that something is our lives.

God creates, sustains, and redeems us—lends us all that we need for this life and the next. We’re stewards of this gift of life, a thing that ultimately belongs to God and to God alone. The way we use this life, our time, talent, and treasure, reflects on what kind of stewards we are being of that gift.

Our stewardship campaign this year consists of two parts. One part is how we will serve and the other part is how we will give. The Book of Common Prayer says the duty of all Christians is, “to follow Christ; to come together week by week for corporate worship; and to work, pray, and give for the spread of the kingdom of God.”

So our campaign this year focuses on two of those last three: to work and to give. It is the third of those though which will bring the other two into focus.

If we pray deeply about how God is calling us to use the time, the gifts, and the resources He has given us we will find ourselves drawn, almost directly, into a deeper conversation with God about the kind of Christian we are and will be—and the kind of Christian God is calling us to be.

That is what we are stewards of—our call. The words “commitment,” “duty,” “obligation,” and the like are unfashionable these days. We live in a time in which commitment or duty seems quaint. Even more quaint, perhaps, is purpose. In a time of distraction and fleeting affections there are few things that endure—and fewer who want to invest in their future. This, though, is precisely that antiquated, unfashionable, musty language with which God speaks to us.

In a fast food world we’re called to an enduring feast. In a time when truth seems to matter so little we are called to live in the light of eternal truths. In a day when so much seems to be changing so fast, we are called to take and eat just as those first disciples were. God is calling us to embrace that which has been rejected by so much of our culture so that we might become stewards of His truth in a time when that truth is so desperately needed.

We are stewards of mystery. We are stewards of truth. We are stewards of that call to love and serve—a high calling we pass on to the next generation. We are stewards of creation and of our buildings. We are stewards of the vision, history, and future entrusted to us. 

All of that has been handed to us with the simple understanding that we will live into the call we all have to be stewards. In different ways we will take and hold and then pass on that duty. Those ideas of fidelity and honor and duty might have fallen by the wayside—but it is so often by the wayside, at the margins, in forgotten places that God finds us wandering.

So we will continue to be stewards, ensuring adequate food for our neighbors. We will continue to be stewards, holding this property for the sake of the next generation, on behalf of God. We will continue to exercise that responsibility passed to us at the very beginning—to be faithful stewards of the bounty that is our life, our faith, our joy, and our hope.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert