Homily on Stewards and Stewardship at Union Theological Seminary

This homily was preached at Union Theological Seminary´s James Chapel on November 30th, 2022. Dean Sandra Montes asked me to offer a reflection based on my book, The Unjust Steward: Wealth, Poverty, and the Church Today. 

What is money? What is its purpose? And how are we, the leaders and future leaders of religious institutions, supposed to think about and use it? 

This book - and many of these questions - began rumbling around in my mind back in 2010 when I was working for the Episcopal Church Foundation. 

Part of my job at ECF involved traveling around the country and presenting workshops to small churches and other faith-led institutions on annual fundraising campaigns, oftentimes called stewardship campaigns. And so on one very hot day in June 2010 I found myself in Hendersonville, North Carolina presenting at Nuevo Amanecer, a conference for Latino Episcopalians conducted almost entirely in Spanish. 

I was there to present on how most mainline congregations practice financial stewardship. The word for stewardship in Spanish is mayordomía. The key idea here is that all Christians are called upon to be faithful stewards – mayordomos – of all that God has given us. Just a few slides in, however, I noticed that several participants appeared both skeptical and perplexed.

Eventually one of the attendees explained to me that the Spanish word I was using for steward, mayordomo, had extremely negative associations where he was from, that he would never want to be considered a mayordomo. 

For him and his family, and across many parts of Latin America, mayordomos were the overseers on plantations, the property/business manager-in-charge who used violence and coercion to squeeze every cent they could from the blood and sweat of workers. 

There were nods around the room that day as people recognized that ‘stewardship’ was a peculiar term for someone to be praising, as it is so closely associated with exploitation and injustice.

“Faithful stewardship” and being “good stewards” of all that God has given us is a beloved way the Church uses to think about wealth and it’s purpose, particularly within mainline Christian traditions. 

But experiences like the one that I just described – as well as further explorations into who stewards are in the Gospels – have led me to question the “doctrine of stewardship” as a sound way of describing how we are supposed to think and use God’s resources. 

Are churches really supposed to be in the wealth building business? Are church institutions supposed to be just as extractive and exploitative as the gig economy? Or do we have a different calling? Do the Gospels require us to find another way? 

This is a question I’ve been mulling over for fifteen years as I’ve watched one church organization after another wrestle with issues of financial survival. For me, these questions of wealth and poverty came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic, and so I used my early morning hours to write and reflect on how Christianity thought about these issues in the first five centuries. It’s a sprawling exploration that covers 24 different writers and texts, yet I kept coming back to the parable that Linda just read - the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16:1-13).

The parable of the unjust steward takes place on a vast agricultural estate, one in which a landowner and his steward exploited workers through forms of debt bondage. Biblical scholars have noted that the steward here was likely a “first slave,” or a man who had been freed from slavery for the purpose of serving as manager and overseer of the other slaves, day laborers and tenant farmers who worked the land.

One day, the rich landowner suspects the steward of squandering his wealth. When the landowner fires the steward, the steward panics and comes up with a plan for survival for after he has been dismissed from the plantation. 

The steward’s plan for survival is a curious one. Whereas previously the steward had exploited and extracted wealth from those he had overseen, he now begins to send his master’s wealth flowing in reverse. He uses the wealth to which he’s been entrusted to remit the debts of the slaves, day laborers and tenant farmers who were indebted to the master. Biblical scholars have noted that these debts were so large that the figures mentioned were likely the debts of entire villages.

Jesus concludes this parable strangely - that is, by appearing to praise fiscal immorality in a line that has perplexed Christian theologians for millennia: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into their homes” (Luke 16.9).

Jesus then states that like the steward, all of us must choose who our master is in life: “No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Luke 16.13).

So who then are stewards, and what is stewardship?

At the outset of this parable, the steward’s actions are exploitative and unjust. The “faithful steward” extracts wealth from the land and exploits workers so as to maximize returns and profit. The point of Jesus’s parable is that the steward only gains safety and salvation when he begins to send the money flowing in reverse, toward the alleviation of debts, in acts of economic jubilee. 

In essence, the unjust steward finds his salvation in acts of anti-stewardship.

All of this may seem like quibbles over vocabulary, yet how leaders (all of us) think about money consciously and unconsciously guides our institutions. And I am hardly alone in questioning stewardship as a good framework for doing so.

Writing in the 1930s, Reinhold Niebuhr - good Union theologian - criticized mainline Christianity’s love of stewards and stewardship. In “Is Stewardship Ethical?”, a short article he wrote for the Christian Century in 1930, Niebuhr traced the origins of stewardship to the influence of business leaders and wealth managers in mainline Protestantism during the industrial buildup between the two World Wars. He describes stewardship as a naïve framework that allows Christian institutions to avoid asking the harder questions about its sources of wealth, including the unjust means by which such wealth was made.

Niebuhr gives the example of “the pious business man” who is both honest and generous, two virtues which “give him the satisfaction of being a Christian.” Yet this pious businessman “regards his power in his factory much as kings of old regarded their prerogatives.” “Any attempt on the part of the workers to gain a share in the determining of policy, particularly the policy which affects their own livelihood, hours and wages, is regarded by him as an attempt to destroy the divine order of things.” 

The doctrine of stewardship does not help this businessman see his broader moral obligations but only serves to “sanctify power and privilege as it exists in the modern world by certain concessions to the ethical principal.”

Niebuhr’s critique resonates with what I’ve observed in the last fifteen years of working for a variety of church organizations. ‘Stewardship’ is oftentimes used to justify exploitation. I’ve now personally observed multiple instances in which ‘sound stewardship’ was the rationale for not divesting endowments from fossil fuels, for instance. In these conversations, being faithful stewards of an organization’s assets meant first and foremost maximizing returns, never mind the exploitation of the earth and the poor.

And yet frankly, I don’t see much in Jesus’s life or in the Gospels inviting us to be wealth managers. Instead, I see a remarkable message about how individuals and institutions are supposed to relate to wealth embedded into the parable of the unjust steward. 

In the end, the message of the Gospel must prevail. The steward gains new and vibrant life by releasing his master’s ill-begotten wealth for the remittance of debts; he finally finds safety and refuge by serving those he’d formerly exploited. In other words, this ‘first slave’ chooses which master to serve -- and I believe the Church must do the same. On stewardship, Jesus concludes: “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Luke 16.13). Serving God must come first.