The Unjust Steward: Wealth, Poverty, and the Church Today

In 2010, I found myself presenting on Christian ‘wealth stewardship’ in Spanish. This was in Hendersonville, North Carolina as part of a regularly recurring conference of Latinx Episcopalians, an event conducted almost entirely in Spanish. I was there as a staff member of the Episcopal Church Foundation (ECF), an organization that produces resources to assist with congregational leadership and fundraising, and most of the attendees were clergy and lay leaders of Spanish-speaking congregations. The purpose of my presentation was to make the case for the way the Episcopal Church understood stewardship and raised monies for congregations, the theory being that as most Latinx Episcopalians were coming from the Roman Catholic tradition, they hadn’t been exposed to mainline Protestant congregational fundraising practices such as annual pledge cards and creating reserve funds for capital maintenance. In preparing my presentation, I remember realizing how things like annual pledge cards assume

By Meister des Codex Aureus  Epternacensis - The Yorck Project (2002) "Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony." - Luke 16:25 As I’ve written about in an earlier post , I began my exploration of Christianity around the age of fourteen. A great deal was taking place in my life at that time: my grandfather had just died; I had a new appreciation for my Mexican grandparents’ Roman Catholicism; and I was filled with the self-hatred of the closet. At school, I was surrounded on a day-to-day basis by a version of white Evangelical Christianity that was as ridiculous as it was terrifying.  Amidst all this, I had begun to ask a series of questions: What did the Bible really say? How could faith help give meaning to the lives of ‘the least of these’ on the one hand, and yet be so stifling and oppressive on the other? The unresolved nature of these questions led