Confession of Faith: Stewardship

Mennonites confess that all things belong to God - including stuff we legally own.  Stewardship is about how we take care of, handle, and use all that God has placed around us while we are journeying in this life.  This includes everything the church, our talents/gifts/abilities, our time, our money, our possessions, our bodies, our minds, our hearts Jesus' has given us, our world, our friends, our families and all else is under our stewardship - given to us for a time to use for God and to take care of, but not to keep.

Stewardship can sometimes be a difficult practice to implement.  How are we good stewards of our money?  It's often difficult to navigate the waters of how much we give, to whom, how much we save for later or emergencies, and how much we need to live on  It's difficult to partition our time.  How much do we work, play, rest, spend time with God, and serve?  It's difficult to care for our bodies - portion our food, eat healthy, eat small amounts at a sitting.  It's difficult to serve and care for our world - we have so much else to do.

In the United States it is difficult to be stewards because we have so much - in fact we have too much.  Everyday moves faster than the last with more to do and more places to go, more things to buy that are half as useful as what we have, more information we absorb with half as much truth, doing twice the work half as well as we could.  We work more for less, we pay more for things that ultimately don't matter, we are caught in the cycle of consumerism and can't break out.  In this situation, stewardship takes hard work in order to break out of the cycle of our culture to submit all we have into God's hands and use all that we have for God.

Want to learn more?  Here is Article 21 of the Mennonite Confession of faith:   http://www.mennoniteusa.org/about/confession-of-faith-in-a-mennonite-perspective-1995/article-21-stewardship/