Wealth and Poverty in Christianity

This is a section of a larger chapter on the parable of the unjust steward. The full text is the third chapter of the following text .  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 understands stewardship and raises monies for congregations, the (condescending) theory being that most Latinx Episcopalians were coming from the Roman Catholic tradition and hadn’t been exposed to mainline Protestant congregational fundraising practices such as annual pledge...

A radical transformation in Christianity’s attitude toward wealth and its public role in caring for the poor occurred around 312 CE with Constantine, the Roman empire’s first Christian emperor. Constantine has been described as a paradoxical figure, “an autocrat who never ruled alone; a firm legislator for the Roman family, yet who slew his wife and eldest son and was perhaps, himself, illegitimate; a dynastic puppet-master, who left no clear successor; a soldier whose legacy was far more spiritual than temporal.”[1] Constantine’s conversion and military victories under the banner of the ‘new god’ of the Christians, would result in the development of an imperial Christianity that appears at times to have had little to do with the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. And yet, as I’ll discuss below, one of the through lines was Christianity’s care for the poor, a charism that had until then been primarily practiced within and among Christians but which now became a public responsibil...