A Biblical View of Stewardship

So hence now today many, many years later we're still in Waukesha Wisconsin. Now we're a family foundation. Their company is still going very strong in Waukesha, Wisconsin as well. It's a wonderful little far-flung suburb of Milwaukee.

So Greg why don't you tell us a little bit about the Kern Family Foundation and its mission and why we have partnered together in talking about this topic.

And then the other aspect of their experience that informs particularly the program I work in, Mr. Kern's father was a lifelong Baptist pastor. Mr. Kern grew up in the parsonage in Osage, Iowa. And he learned from an early age the critical importance of a pastor not only to the congregation but to the community at large, that pastors infuse into the life of the culture a moral and spiritual influence that cultures need to have. They help orient people toward the kinds of lives that they are supposed to have. The kind of life that's intended for human beings. And have that shaping affect on people's character.

So our program intends to bring these two worlds together, because most of what we do all day is work. If you add up work in the home, work in the workplace traditionally understood, and then work in neighborhoods and communities and civic associations, all the work that we do to keep our schools going and keep our neighborhoods going

You all have produced a document called Theology that Works. And it's kind of an overview in multiple parts of various themes. And our podcasts are gonna work through gradually, slowly, almost contemplatively this document. And it opens like this. This will help people understand kind of what we're talking about. It starts off by saying, "Today millions of church goers are Christians only for a few hours a week. Christianity is a leisure time activity for them rather than a complete way of life. The withering of discipleship is one of the gravest threats facing the church in our time.

"The main cause to the problem is that churches have disconnected discipleship from everyday life. Too often pastors talk about our walk with God and stewardship almost exclusively in terms of formally religious activities like worship, small group attendance, bible study, evangelism and giving. As crucial as these activities are for every Christian, they will never take up more than a tiny percentage of life for those who are not full-time religious professionals.

"We urgently need to recover the calling to whole life discipleship. The largest portion of our life, our work in the home and in our jobs, is excluded from our concept of discipleship and stewardship. Most churches have nothing spiritually powerful to offer for the activities that define our daily lives other than the other six days of the week. This leaves us preaching of faith that is not relevant to the totality of people's lives. And it also risks the rise of a legalism in which discipleship is equated with religious works."

I think that says it very, very nicely. That there's almost a secular sacred divide between the workplace and the way people think about it. And the way we think about a religious activity in our church attendance. And this schizophrenia -if I can say it that way- this schizophrenia is not healthy for discipleship.

Tell us what you have found interacting with pastors and with seminaries. You're connected to 16 evangelical seminaries that you currently support these days. And that number is growing. Tell us what you have found about seminary preparation of church leaders in terms of addressing this area and how you're trying to address that problem?

And so we're helping make those connections. We have everything from curricular integration initiatives where faculty will meet in colloquia or seminars or retreats to talk about what is the relevance of this to my New Testament class, my Old Testament class, my ethics class, my history class, my systematic theology class?

We had a fantastic experience this summer. There's a conference that we sponsor seminary professors to attend called Act in University. And we had over 100 seminary professors from seminaries evangelical seminaries across the country, twenty two evangelical seminaries and 100 professors. We gave them a workshop where we asked them to divide up by discipline. We had a table of New Testament people, a table of Old Testament people, two tables of ethicists, a table of systematic people and we covered every discipline in the seminary. And we invited them to just spend time brainstorming how can you connect the workplace and work in the home and the economy at large and everything else that is in this sphere or domain of life. How can you connect that to your classes?

And they were really engaged. They took fantastic notes. And just –there was no table in that room where people were not really, really engaged with this. And I sat there just watching the action. And I thought, "This group comes from every point on the evangelical spectrum from Presbyterians to Pentecostals, we had every type of evangelical in the room. And they represent a diversity of regions of the country, ages, races, and they were all engaged in thinking together about how every discipline in the seminary could make this connection to work.

And I just thought this is a fantastic, exciting thing. It's really demonstrating, I think, the crying need for this. That this is a missing piece that the training of pastors has not incorporated and needs to incorporate. And we also, in addition to the curriculum sponsor, extracurricular activities, lots of chapel talks, after a sort of evening lectures, lunch, lunch discussion groups, student reading groups and a wide variety of extracurriculars and then there are institutional partnerships where seminaries will work together with other types of institutions whether that's denominational bodies or business ministries or publishers or a lot of local churches.

So the big question we're wrestling with in our network now is what does it look like in a church when that church has really embraced a mission to integrate faith with work and the economy? What does that look like? There are a few churches you can point to where people have been on top of this. Tom Nelson is one of those but not a lot of them.

So seminaries are in many cases engaging with local churches, because they have alumni, have churches and working with pastors who share this sort of insight that this needs to be done to figure out, because largely we don't have a lot of models. So we don't know what it looks like when a church does this. It's really a voyage of discovery for us, kind of entrepreneurial the way our benefactors when entrepreneurial in creating their business. We're being entrepreneurial in that way.

And talk about some of the initiatives that are taking place in that direction and where you're going in terms of your use of media and that kind of thing.

But the focus of our seminary support has always been training pastors. And so we're now engaged in a number of activities that reach out to pastors who are already in churches as opposed to just working with training future seminarians.

We've also made a couple of grants to major evangelical media organizations like Christianity Today and Right Now Media. Those are brand new. We just made the grants. And the initiatives there are going to be developing some video products and other media written and visual media products to help tell the stories of Christians in their workplaces who are integrating their faith with their work. And to get to get those out into the ministry world where pastors can be equipped with that to kind of demonstrate here's what it looks like when people put their faith to work.

And again this is not always the greatest way to use video. I'm going to read, because it's just such a nice list. It says, "Work is the subject of tremendous theological and pastoral importance," and I think that's actually one of the important things to realize is that stewardship or oikonomia is actually woven through the scripture in a variety of places.

“It's a mode of participation in God's creative and redemptive activities. It was given to us to manifest the image of God exercising the stewardship and responsibility he made us for, this is Genesis 2:15. And imitating his attributes, John 5:17. It puts to use the talents God gives us. It has how we serve our neighbors in our everyday activities. It's one of the main ways we reflect the character of Christ, Mark 10:42 45. It carries out the cultural mandate developing the potential for creation.”

You know one of the foundations for this of course is Genesis 1 and 2. We're created to be regents alongside God who are responsible for managing and stewarding the creation and that takes work and labor. Of course since the fall it requires much more work and much more labor, but that's an important grounding.

“It manifests the restorative aspect of Jesus' work applied to us through the Spirit. It obeys God's direct commands, Exodus 29 and 2 Thessalonians 3:10. It's one of the core elements of discipleship and spiritual formation. And it certainly is the drive powering human civilization.”

You know one of the first podcasts we did was with Andy Crouch of Christianity Today. And we were talking about culture and how culture works. And he talked about sometimes we don't think about culture broadly enough. That we think of culture as primarily ideology. But really culture is it is the way it shapes us in terms of how we live and how we engage in life. And work certainly is a major component of that. And one of the points that you make in this piece that I think is so valuable that I'd like for you to elaborate on is that when most people think about work they say, "Work equals money."

Yeah, you're cringing.

So let's talk about that a little bit.

They are really kind of synonymous. The difference is when you say culture people think of art or ideology. When you say civilization people realize that it means everything that's going on including businesses and community activities. It's the whole package of social activity. That's all culture. His last book Culture Making really stresses that we make culture is something we make, human activity makes.

Now how does this apply to our work? Well, we have to understand work as a cultural activity. We have to understand that the economy is a cultural system. So when people think work is about getting money, it's a materialistic view of work. Essentially it focuses on the tangible at the expense of the intangible. And to have a Christian view of human activity we have to understand that the intangible, the spiritual is just as real as the material.

Now it's important not to start thinking that the material is unreal or evil. It's not. But we have to integrate the spiritual with the material. And we have to understand the spiritual reality of everything that we do. The spiritual reality of work is that it serves human needs and creates value for other people.

So if I'm if my job is to work in a factory where I pull a lever and that's my job to pull the lever on this machine at the right time, and that is actually not too far off from a lot of people's jobs.

Now let's say for a moment that the lever makes a widget that goes into the breaking system of a car, right? So we want people to think through, "Okay what I'm doing is making safer cars, and because the cars are safer, customers are willing to pay more for them and that's why I get paid to do this, because the car company can charge a slightly higher price for the car. That's why they give me the money to do this." But once we see that whole system we can see, “Oh the biggest significance of what I'm doing is making the world a better place by making cars safer.”

The paycheck is a byproduct as you said of making cars safer. Now we don't want to say paychecks are unimportant, because supporting your household is biblically a fairly important imperative.

And if we get people focused on that, “How do I support my household by doing good honest works that makes the world a better place?” all the pieces fit together very nicely and people can build a life that's meaningful and satisfies not only their material needs, but their spiritual needs, which are deeper and which the church is supposed to be especially concerned about.

And I do think it's fair to say, because I've sat in a lot of churches and you don't hear messages about this at all. In fact when we did the podcast with Andy Crouch on culture making, he made this point. That he actually tracked the messages that he was listening to over a couple of year’s period. And he said when work came up it came up as it wasn't the point.

Now as Christians we know how why we were made that way, because we have a hunger for God. And a hunger for living lives that are meaningful in God's world.

Now if people take satisfaction in serving others, then they can be finding that meaning and that satisfaction that they were made for all day long in their work. If we disconnect work from that search for meaning, that hunger for meaning, then in that little portion of life that's left when we're not working they're going to be seeking meaning in all kinds of things. The satisfaction of their desires and appetites, and it's all gonna be about finding meaning by consuming and satisfying myself, gratifying my desires.

I go to work, because I'm a steward of my work. I'm a steward of the world in my work. I'm making the world a better place. And when I come home, I'm a steward in that time as well. I have to use that time at home or in my leisure to be a good steward. It creates a holistic understanding of the purpose of human life to be a steward for God, creates a holistic understanding what have we're supposed to be as human beings that allows us to integrate these pieces instead of having that divide that becomes destructive in both worlds.