Generous Giving

In a recent presentation I said, “I’m pleading that our congregations not burn through their assets in a last-gasp attempt to keep their church alive for just a few more years.  What an exercise in lousy stewardship that would be.”

Upon reflection, I acknowledge that the issue is much more complex than that.  What is our theology of wealth?  Can we develop an understanding of what God would have a congregation do with the assets it has accumulated?

There are several dichotomies that come into play.  In each case, there seems to be a moral and scriptural argument for either choice.

1. Is wealth inherently good or inherently evil?  Is prosperity a blessing bestowed by God or evidence of past unjust behaviour?
2. Are we called to a life of stewardship or generosity?  Should we preserve assets or give them away?
3. Are declining membership numbers a sign of an unviable ministry, or do we carry on as long as two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name?  When is it time to call it a day?
4. Is it our mission to serve this generation or future generations?
5. Is our ministry purely local, or does it have regional, national or global dimensions as well?  When we stop supporting the wider church, are we still the church?
6. When dealing with wealth, should we be as wise as serpents or as trusting as the lilies of the field?

How we answer these questions, and probably many others, will inform our view of what it means to use congregational assets faithfully.

The questions are often most acute when a congregation finds itself in financial difficulty, with trouble balancing the annual budget.  There are other options:  cutting back the pastor’s compensation; reducing or eliminating benevolence offerings to the synod; exploring alternative ministry arrangements with other congregations, and so on.  But some congregations will find themselves with a budget deficit and invested assets at the same time.

Is it OK to balance the budget by drawing down the investments?  Is it irresponsible to spend accumulated wealth in order to avoid less palatable choices?  Is it our obligation, as stewards of the assets entrusted to use by previous generations, to preserve them in order to pass them on to the next generation?

It’s important to keep in mind that assets can be physical as well as financial.  What is the right thing to do if a congregation finds itself with no option but to disband, while it still owns physical assets such as a church building?  Should it give its building to a local secular charity that needs the space for programs that benefit the community?  Or should the congregation transfer title of its property to the Synod  or the Evangelical Lutheran Foundation of Eastern Canada (ELFEC) so that it can be sold and the proceeds used to support some other ministry?  [Note: as executive director of ELFEC I have a conflict of interest on this question.]

In which direction does your moral and scriptural compass point on these questions?  What should a faithful congregation do when confronted with these tough issues?  What is your role as a leader?

Please add your comments.

Some readers may ask: does it really matter what we call it as long as people give generously?  Anyone who has read the entire series of posts will know that I believe language matters immensely.  While it’s possible to invent new names for new things, the rules of language do not allow us to change the meaning of words willy-nilly.  Words have a history and carry a baggage that includes semantic, cultural and psychological elements.

Carol Johnston is Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis.   Several years ago she conducted research into what produces a culture of generosity in a congregation by studying five generous congregations in different parts of the U.S.  One of the things she learned is that many church members, even those who are very affluent, live in fear of not having enough.    In a recent conference presentation she said “Stewards in the Bible are usually slaves, or at best hired hands.  When they don’t measure up, they are punished.  So when Christians are told that their primary identity is that they are “stewards”,  and their anxiety about money is already high, it does not help.  There are many ways in which Christians do properly engage in “stewarding” work, but Christians are not primarily stewards.  We are first and foremost children of God, heirs of the promise, and as such ultimately secure in life and in death.”

How we say something matters a great deal.  Surely we don’t want to increase people’s anxiety about a subject that is already fraught with negative emotion.  Changing the way we talk about something may produce vastly different results.

For a dramatic illustration of this point, have a look at this brief (less than 2 minutes) video.

Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, says “As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice – there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community.”  So the question is put to you:  which way will you choose to view the world — through the familiar lens of stewardship or through a new lens of inheritance?

I have presented these ideas to several audiences over the past few years.  An objection that has frequently been raised is this:  if people got what they have through inheritance, with no obligation to do what God would have them do with their possessions, doesn’t that give them licence to ignore God and other people and become totally self-serving?

Or in the words of Joni Mitchell, “Who you gonna get to do the dirty work when all the slaves are free?”

It strikes me that, if this idea that might be true really were true, those of us in the business of asking people to give money to the church would have to behave very differently.  Instead of treating each other as servants or slaves labouring under contract to a stern and unforgiving master (see the Parable of the Talents), we would have to treat everyone with the respect due to a child of a generous and loving parent.  Servants can be commanded and their obedience enforced, but free women and men do not respond well to orders and threats.

Where might we find places to apply this revolutionary transformation in outlook and behaviour?

My first suggestion would be to develop a habit of thanking people.  In my opinion, the doctrine of stewardship has promoted a twisted culture in our churches where the words “thank you” are far too rarely heard.  I hesitate to make this personal, but in my job people often email me asking for information.  I do my best to respond promptly, but I would estimate that 80% of the time my replies are never acknowledged — that is, if the original question came from someone in the church.  This lack of basic courtesy has driven me crazy for years, but now I have a hypothesis to comfort me.  Failure to thank people stems from a basic slave mentality.  If everyone labours under an obligation to obey, there’s no need for thanks — we’re all just doing our job.  Of course it goes far beyond the way we do or do not answer emails.  Compare how our churches thank members for their weekly offerings to the way other charities treat their donors.  The contrast is stark and appalling.  Giving thanks is one of the fundamental ways we show respect for people.

Secondly, if we can no longer rely on obedience as the motivation for putting money into the hands of the church, if human beings are children of God with freedom to choose how they will use that which really is theirs, then we in the church are squarely in competition with the rest of the world.  What would motivate me to give my money away as opposed to spending or saving it?  What would prompt me to give it to a charity instead of my children?  And why would I choose a church, over the other 85,000 Canadian charities that want my gift, as the beneficiary of my generosity?

The answers, it seems clear to me, will rest largely on the question of mission.  Does my church have a mission or reason for existing?  Or is it here because it’s here because it’s here because it’s here?  Can my church articulate that mission in clear, understandable terms?  Does it communicate that mission to internal and external audiences as a reason for supporting the church with time, talent and treasure?  Does it tell me how my donation will make a difference in someone’s life?  Does it tell me that my last donation helped to change the world for the better, even by a little bit?  Does it tell me what my next donation will help to accomplish?

In this frightening new paradigm, characterized by an an existential state of freedom, we will have to learn to nurture a culture of gratitude, compassion, and generosity in our congregations and among our people.  We will have to appeal to their sense of justice and their zeal for mission instead of fear and guilt.  How we might do that is a topic for another day.

In the New Testament, Romans 8: 14-17 offers the most direct support for the notion that our primary identity and relationship to God is as a child to a parent, not as a steward to a master.

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

As Paul makes clear not only in the passage from Romans, but also in a similar verse in Galatians (4:7), the implication of being a child of God is that we are also heirs.  And both draw a strong contrast between childhood and slavery.  Many writers have pointed out that stewards could technically be in a state of slavery; some have gone on to proclaim quite proudly that as stewards of God we are slaves to the divine will.  Why, if we are children of God by adoption, would we insist on thinking of ourselves as slaves?

Here is a list of passages from the epistles that make direct reference to our identity as children and heirs of God:

Rom 4:14 – heirs to the promise

Gal 3:29 – heirs according to the promise

Gal 4:1 – child and heir though God

Eph 3:6 – fellow heirs in the promise

Tit 3:7 – heirs according to the hope

Heb 6:17 – heirs of the promise

Heb 11:17 – heir to the righteousness

If we are the beloved children and heirs of God, then the blessings we enjoy are received not by way of trust, but through inheritance.  Inheritance is a form of gift that takes place between generations.  As gift, an inheritance comes without obligations of the sort that are implicit in the idea of a trust.  (This is not to deny that wills can put conditions on bequests.  Nor does it deny that some forms of inheritance — the family farm, treasured heirlooms, etc. — can be received with a heavy feeling of responsibility to preserve the inheritance and pass it on to the next generation.  But these are not the same as the terms of a trust.)

The challenge I offer to all supporters of the traditional stewardship paradigm is this:  if mainstream theology tells us that we are children of a loving, generous God in all other respects, why is it that we are servants of a master when it comes to money and wealth?

What will we call this paradigm that rests on the idea that we are children and that what we have comes from God in the form of an inheritance?  Heirship contrasts nicely with stewardship, and it might work in print, but when spoken aloud it is too likely to be confused with either the Hindenburg disaster or the Snoopy blimp that patrols the skies at golf tournaments.

Perhaps it is less important to have a snappy name than to recognize that a new paradigm has profound implications on how we think about money and giving in the church.  And that is the topic to which I will turn next.

As a way of defining our relationship with God and wealth, stewardship is not the only, or even the best, concept to be found in the Bible.

The stewardship paradigm is rooted in a few New Testament verses which use the Greek word which we translate as “steward”.  The reference is grounded in the reality of life in that place and time, when wealthy land-owners could employ a chief servant (or slave) to whom was given the authority to manage the master’s estate.  This created the now-familiar relationship between the master and the steward which was described in the first part of this series (“Confronting Stewardship”).

My Bible software’s search function found 17 instances of the word “steward(s)” in the NRSV translation.  All but three of them are factual in nature (e.g. “go to this steward, to Shebna, who is master of the household . . .”).  The three that use the word in an analogical way appear in:

1 Corinthians (“. . . servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries . . .”)

Titus (“For a bishop, as God’s steward, must be blameless . . .”)

1 Peter (“Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God . . .”)

This doesn’t seem like much of a framework on which to hang an entire theology.

My friend and colleague Rev. Dr. Allen Jorgenson, who teaches at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary,  has published an excellent study on stewardship entitled Awe and Expectation:  On Being Stewards of the Gospel.  A few years ago, when we team-taught a summer course, he pointed out that a description of a first-century CE Palestinian household was incomplete if it only mentioned the master and the steward.  The missing figure was the child of the master, probably the first-born son, who stood to inherit the estate some day.

The person called “Master” by the steward is called “Father” by the child and heir, so we would expect a different relationship between steward and master on the one hand, child and father on the other.  And the child’s standing with respect to the estate is very different than the steward’s also.  Where the steward lives in obligation, the child lives in expectation.  The differences are referred to in the Gospel of John (8:35): “The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever.”  Even allowing for the fact that the evangelist probably intended his meaning to be figurative, we still have to admit that there is a basis in reality — which is why allegories work.

Ownership of the estate will pass from father to child, at the father’s death, through inheritance.  Then the child becomes the new owner and master, and quite possibly parent to a child of his own.

So the first question is,  does Scripture give us any reason to believe that, in our relationship with God, we are more like children than stewards?

With apologies to Douglas John Hall, who called the steward “A biblical symbol come of age” in his book of that title, I believe that “child of God” is at least as promising a symbol in the Biblical record, and much better able to stand up to examination than the steward.

Does the phrase “our Father” ring a bell?  More on this in the next post.

Generous giving is psychologically incompatible with the idea of stewardship.

Speaking psychologically, and not politically, stewardship is a conservative concept.  In the first post of this series (“Confronting Stewardship”), we saw that conservatism is one of the strengths of the idea.  We need stewards to preserve scarce and valuable resources, the true meaning of conservation.  It should be no surprise that the ecology movement has adopted the concept of stewardship with enthusiasm.

Building on what was said in previous posts, I would suggest that the essential characteristics of stewardship include:

• a conservative ethos
• an emphasis on holding on
• an environment of scarcity
• strategies of saving and investing
• a motivation of duty or obligation

If we consider the qualities of an ideal steward, we list might include the following adjectives:

• Careful
• Deliberate
• Reckoning
• Scottish ethnicity (stereotypically)

And if we looked for a story from the New Testament to complete the picture, we might think of the Parable of the Talents.

On the other hand, a dictionary definition of generosity includes “liberality in giving or willingness to give”.   We apply the label “generous” to gifts, to people, and to the spirit some people exhibit.  We think of a generous gift as exceeding the minimum requirement; “the more the better”.  A generous person responds to need, and is neither calculated nor grudging, but free and spontaneous.  Isn’t this what all fund-raisers, including those who work for the church, are trying to encourage in people?

So our list of the characteristics of generosity might include these attributes:

• a liberal ethos
• an emphasis on letting go
• an environment of plenty
• strategies of spending and giving
• a motivation of freedom

We might describe a generous person as:

• Joyful
• Spontaneous
• Slightly reckless
• Mediterranean ethnicity (Zorba the Greek comes to mind)

And the illustrative Bible story would be the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

It could be argued that my outlines are stereotypes and that the game was rigged from the get-go.  But that is precisely my point.  Invoking either concept stimulates, in the mind of the listener, exactly the kind of caricatures I have painted.   This may be one reason why stewardship is such a tough sell in our churches.  When we want generous giving but use the language of stewardship, we’re asking people to do the psychological equivalent of driving with one foot pressing the accelerator to the floor while the other is jammed on the brake pedal.   The expression “generous steward” is reminiscent of the old Canadian Tire commercial which encouraged us to “Give like Santa; save like Scrooge”.  The ad worked because it was telling us we could do the impossible (at one retail chain’s stores only).

If we’re asking for generous giving, we defeat ourselves by using the language of stewardship.  As Mr. Dunk, my elementary school principal used to admonish his students:  “Say what you mean and mean what you say.”  Language matters.

The logical problem with stewardship can be put succinctly:  if stewardship is true, God does not give and neither can we.

In making this claim, I want to draw a distinction that is similar to the difference in law between a trust and a gift.

According to the Canada Revenue Agency, “A gift is a voluntary transfer of property without valuable consideration to the donor.” For our purposes here, the two key features are the voluntary nature of the transaction and the fact that it is a transfer of ownership.  For a gift to exist, a donor must in fact own the property that is being transferred and she must do so without obligation.

Going through a form of giving without having ownership of the property in question is fraudulent, since the receiver is under the impression that she is the new owner when, in fact, the true owner has not given anything.   There is no transfer, and the true owner retains possession.

CRA insists on a gift being voluntary to distinguish it from a contractual transfer or sale (which involves the legal concept of consideration, which is something of value such as money).  Contracts are enforceable because there is a promise of money changing hands in return for the transfer of property.  If there is obligation, no gift exists.

A gift is different than a trust, which is another type of transfer.  In a trust a person (the settlor) settles certain property upon a trustee for the benefit of a beneficiary.  The settlor and the beneficiary can be the same person.  Trusts originated during the time of the Crusades, when a knight left his home for an indefinite period of time, facing an uncertain future fighting the infidel (the less said about that, the better).  The law of trusts evolved in response to the need to give someone control of the knight’s property while he was away from home, without surrendering any of his ownership rights.  The trustee had full authority to act, but the terms of the trust would spell out those for whose benefit he had to act (the knight’s family, but presumably his servants and vassals as well).

A trust agreement is enforceable at law.  Failure to live up to the obligations imposed by a trust is known as breach of trust, an offence that occasionally catches up to lawyers who help themselves to money they are holding on behalf of clients for real estate transactions.

From this brief and informal survey, it should be clear that a gift and a trust are two very different concepts.

The correspondence may be inexact, but stewardship is very much like trusteeship.  In both concepts there is a party who delegates authority over her property to a person who may act with all of the power of the owner, except the power to put her interests in place of the owner’s.  The person being delegated to (steward or trustee) always acts under obligation to the owner, and at the pleasure of the owner.  Authority delegated may be revoked.

If God is the owner of all things and we are merely stewards to whom God has entrusted certain goods, then God has not given us anything.   If we hold things as trustees or stewards, it is logically impossible for us to give them to anyone else, for they are not ours to give.

To illustrate this point, let me introduce Steve, who is both a long-time friend and my financial advisor, to whom I have entrusted the investment of the family fortune.  I have given him the authority to choose investments, within agreed-upon parameters — the main one being the purpose of making money for me and my family.  He is the closest thing to a genuine steward in my personal experience.

Now Steve, in discharging his responsibilities to me, can be many things: bold; imaginative; competent; prudent; honest; and so forth (and he is all of these).  But the one thing he cannot be is generous.  No matter how much money he is able to turn over to me,  not one cent of it is a gift.  Everything he does is merely discharging his responsibility as a steward, using money that is mine — not his.

A trust is not a gift.  If we wish to hold to the idea that God gives, indeed is generous beyond our imagining, then we have to abandon the idea that God is the owner of everything and we are merely stewards, not owners.  If we wish to encourage people to be generous in their giving to their friends, families or charities (including the church), then we have to abandon the fiction that stewardship describes the relationship between ourselves and God.  If we don’t own it, we can’t give it.

A sizeable number of Christians give no money, literally nothing.  Most of the rest of American Christians give little sums of money.  Only a small percent of American Christians give money generously, in proportion to what their churches tell them to give.

Christian Smith and Michael O. Emerson with Patricia Snell,   Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More Money.

In the last post I listed four types of reasons why we might want to say goodbye to the stewardship paradigm.  I’ll take up the last category of reasons — practical ones — first, perhaps because it’s the least controversial.  The simple truth is, as a set of principles for nurturing a cultures of generous giving in our congregations, stewardship does not work very well.  If it ever did work on any significant scale, it certainly stopped working decades ago.

This is in spite of the facts that the United States is one of the most “churched” of all developing countries, church members are among the most affluent Christians in the world, and virtually all American denominations have written policies that prescribe tithing as normative for believers.

I have no way of demonstrating this, but I am pretty certain that virtually all Christian denominations in the U.S. and Canada have operated within the stewardship paradigm for the past century or more.  Every church uses the concept of stewardship to explain why giving is an integral part of discipleship.

In the ELCIC, my own calculations have concluded that the average member household contributes somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5-2.5% of gross (before tax) income to its congregation.  The data also show us that in a typical congregation, 30-50% of the households contribute a negligible amount each year, the sum of those donations comprising less than 5% of the congregation’s total income.

A brief digression:  It is true that the other 50-70% of the households must be donating more than the average in order to bring it up to 2.5% of income.  It is also true that per capita giving in the ELCIC has been rising steadily throughout the 25 years of our church’s history.  Then why are we in such serious financial difficulties?  The biggest reason is the loss of membership — averaging about 1% per year across the denomination.  Those who are left are giving more each year, but their share of the load increases each year also.  It is our failure to retain and attract members that is our primary problem — and not just for the financial consequences — poor evangelism, not bad stewardship.

But the point remains, and is brought into clearer focus when we look at the proportion of congregational income contributed to church-wide ministries.  It has fallen, in the Eastern Synod, from an average of 10% in 1986 to barely more than 6% today.  Congregations are keeping more of what they get.  Does this indicate a culture of  generous giving?

Finally, I contend that if the concept of stewardship ever had much effect on the behaviour of a sizeable percentage of members, its heyday has long since passed.  Stewardship emphasizes duty or obligation.  As it is publicly proclaimed — by the clergy or, more frequently, by the accountant or banker who has the misfortune to be chair of the stewardship committee and who is pressed into service on Stewardship Sunday in November –  it often acquires overtones of guilt and shame.

Duty, responsibility and guilt are notions that might motivate some people born between the two World Wars, what many people call the Civic Generation, and one writer has dubbed “the Greatest Generation”.  But those values have little or no traction with Baby Boomers, their children or grandchildren.  They don’t give out of duty, and they don’t support institutions.  That helps to explain why, on most Stewardship Sundays, it’s one old guy in a blue suit up at the front of the church talking to a small group of white-haired people in the pews.

Stewardship doesn’t work.  We should get rid of it for practical reasons alone.  But there’s more.

In our cynical world, where suspicion is a necessity, insisting that something is true is not nearly as powerful as suggesting that something might be true.

Thomas King, The Truth About Stories

In the next few posts, I wish to pose an idea that might be true.  The idea is this: if we wish to nurture a culture of generous giving in our congregations, we need to abandon the stewardship paradigm for reasons that are . . .

• logical
• psychological
• theological, not to mention
• practical.

I call it the stewardship paradigm, following the usage of Thomas Kuhn in his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.   Kuhn defines a paradigm as “a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.”   He observed that a paradigm is so all-encompassing that members of a community are often literally unable to see observations that conflict with the prevailing wisdom.  Experimental results that run contrary to the paradigm are explained away as anomalies.  Dissenters are branded as incompetent kooks, radicals or, in some communities, heretics.  Do our notions of stewardship constitute a paradigm?

Consider this quote from Clarence Staughton:  “Stewardship is everything you do after you say yes to Jesus Christ.”  Or the slogan adopted by the Synod of Alberta and the Territories of the ELCIC:  “Stewardship is a way of life.”  Finally, no less an authority than Douglas John Hall, in  The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come of Age, wrote: “The steward metaphor . . . is an inclusive concept, a kind of presentation of the gospel in a nutshell.”

Over the past several years I have looked, in vain, for any writing that critiques — or even critically examines — the Christian view of stewardship.  There are hundreds of works that seek to justify it, explain it or improve the way it is put into practice, but none I could find that have ever questioned stewardship.  That is what I intend to do here, at the risk of being branded a heretic (or more accurately, an apostate, since I used to believe all this stuff rather fervently myself).

What are the stewardship assumptions that define the way the Christian community views reality?  We could construct a classical syllogism to explain the train of thought:

Since . . .

God created, and also owns, everything in the universe; and

God entrusted to us everything we enjoy, the way a master entrusts his property to the care of a steward.

Therefore . . .

We have an obligation to use everything we have (“our selves, our time and our possessions”) in ways that serve and please God.

We sometimes sneak in a second conclusion, often implicit but still potent:

Since God’s mission is carried out by the church, we are good stewards when we give to the church.

As Luther would say, this is most certainly true.  Or is it?

Stewardship has been part of the accepted wisdom of church life for more than a century.  A skeptical observer would note that it has probably been written and preached about with far more fervour than it has been practised.  It constitutes part of the label under which this blog appears.  For these reasons, it seems appropriate now to take a careful, thorough and unsentimental look at the concept.

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines a steward as “one called to exercise responsible care over possessions entrusted to him” (my version was published in 1966, which explains the non-inclusive male pronoun).    Stewardship, then, is “the administration of the office of a steward and of goods or duties entrusted to one’s care”.  Another source defines it as “a responsibility to take care of something one does not own”.

My Webster’s goes on to provide a second, more churchy definition of stewardship:

The aspect of the religious life and church administration dealing with the individual’s responsibility for sharing systematically and proportionately his time, talent, and material possessions in the service of God and and for the benefit of all mankind. [sic]

Our inherited theology of stewardship tells us that we are stewards of our time, talent and treasure because God the Creator has entrusted those gifts to us, although they continue to belong to God.  God calls us to exercise responsible care over the three Ts, and since we have a duty of responsibility without the status of owners, that makes us stewards.

We are told that the Greek word (“oikonomos”) in the epistles which is translated as steward means “household manager”.  Our words “economy”, “economics” and “economist” are obviously derived from the Greek source.  That clears up a mystery for me which originated in high school — I always wondered why a course in cooking and sewing (which only girls could take in those ancient times) was called “Home Economics”.

So if stewards are really household managers, tasked with the responsibility to look after property they do not own, that explains why our teaching of stewardship in the church places such emphasis on careful management.  It also explains why that teaching is almost indistinguishable from the cultural values of the petit bourgeoisie, imbued as we are in the Protestant work ethic, raised to be cautious, prudent and thrifty.

It seems to me that the concept of stewardship has its strongest and best application when three conditions are satisfied:

• scarce or finite goods;
• absentee ownership; and
• a clear delegation of authority.

Scarcity is an important condition, for if resources were practically unlimited, it would be a mockery to imagine anyone carefully managing them.  What would be the point?

Absentee ownership and clear delegation are pretty much self-evident.  I am not a steward over things that are mine;  I can only be a steward over possessions, goods or duties that belong to someone else.  And I must be appointed to my role by the rightful owner of those things, not self-appointed or nominated by a third party, otherwise I would have no genuine authority to act.

It makes sense to me that we talk about environmental stewardship, one of the more common uses of the term today (4.3 million hits on Google).  It makes sense to me that we talk about a congregational council exercising stewardship over the congregation’s assets.

In both of these cases, we want the people acting as stewards to be careful, conservative and responsible because they stand in a different relationship to the goods being looked after than the owner does.  We understand, intuitively, that I can do what I want with what is mine (within moral limits, of course).  But I cannot do what I want with something that I am caring for on behalf of another.  I have an obligation to act in their interests, not my own.

That, it seems to me, is the strength of the concept of stewardship.  It is important for me to state this clearly now, for in posts to follow I will say much that is critical of our usual ideas about stewardship.