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Unparalleled needs and opportunities are confronting local churches today. The ability of the local congregation to respond constructively is in direct proportion to its available resources. The resources, both individual and financial, depend upon the effectiveness of its stewardship program.
Few congregations have effective year-round programs stewardship education, tithing and planned giving. Most need help. SALT will help supply that need. SALT, through information provided by "Church Stewardship & Growth Center" will meet the needs of your church by bringing you articles of what others are doing in the stewardship field, suggestions on new programs, displays, literature, electronic medias, and training materials. It will give you and your congregation the satisfaction of more effectively meeting the needs of the work of Jesus Christ.
You can help! Share with others the ideas you have found effective.
Send you ideas to Editor SALT@Neibauer.com. Comments also appreciated.
SALT addresses itself to a long-felt practical need: to help the pastor or chairperson as a stewardship leader in the local church. It can spare them that desperate, once-a-year plunge which they have often found to be ineffective. It will help them to project goals with checkpoints for progress in stewardship training. People of considerable stewardship experience and creativity from many denominations will share the benefit of their knowledge. Contributions from your stewardship experience should also be shared. Thus, there will be a stewardship of tried and tested ideas that will enrich all of us.
The difference between the success and failure of bringing families to full stewardship stature is vested in local leadership. As the chief steward under God, you hold the key of leadership. Use it or lose it!
Walter J. Waddell, III
Church Publishing Manager
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Stewardship is to the Christian life and the Christian church what a mainspring is to a watch. A watch cannot run without a mainspring. A church cannot "go" without a dynamic motive. The Christian meaning of stewardship itself must be clear.
In a discussion of stewardship, we usually go back to the Old Testament and its emphasis upon God's creation of the world and everything in it. God is owner of all things and man has been made the steward or responsible caretaker of that which belongs to another. Man himself is created and owned and sustained by God; his position of stewardship carries with it heavy penalties for unfaithful conduct of business and care of property.
The idea of stewardship began. In the Old Testament. Abraham had been called to start toward the West with a conviction in his soul. He was to pioneer a new way of faith and life and become the center of a community with a peculiar mission and destiny. To him had been given a promise. It was a secret and a power. And as a recipient of what he and his successors regarded as a call from God, he became the steward of a higher creation. All through the Old Testament story one confronts this sense of stewardship. Israel is not only the steward of God's created earth, but in a peculiar sense the receiver and the keeper of the Holy Land and the Holy Word of redemption. Stewardship takes on larger dimensions. It is a specific sense of responsibility for a revelation, which is aimed at a new life.
In the New Testament this sense of stewardship for the revelation of God reaches a high point. The Gospels are witnesses to the coming of the Messiah, the fulfillment of the promise. The birth, ministry, teaching, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, and the inauguration of the Church have completed the mighty acts of God which now form the foundations upon which the redemptive action of God will be built. The New Covenant has been established. The new age has begun. The Kingdom is open to all believers.
Stewardship takes on a still larger meaning. It goes beyond the care of God's created world; it goes beyond even the protective concern and careful cultivation of the Old Covenant promise. It now includes the Gospel and the power of redemption. In fact, there is no true stewardship without the stewardship of the Gospel on the part of those who know it through repentance and faith. Christian stewardship is set within the context of redemption.
It is the apostle Paul who best interprets the meaning of Christian stewardship. The driving power of his life was to be well?pleasing to Christ (II Cor. 5:9). All men will stand before the judgment seat of Christ to receive the judgment. The love of Christ "constrained" him.
Paul speaks of "one dying for all." In this statement he reveals his sense of stewardship. God has reconciled us to Himself through Christ. He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us. It is this God?initiated reconciliation that made Paul sense this debtorship to God and to all men. To him had been given the status of a new man in Christ. To him had been entrusted the unspeakable gift of the Gospel. To him had been given the unmerited justification by God in Christ. He exclaims to the Corinthians, "Ye are Christ's; and Christ is God's. . ." (I Cor. 3:23).
In a real sense there is no true stewardship without this sense of repentance and faith, this conviction of sin, and this reception of the justifying grace of God in Christ. This sense of the Evangel is always prior to our stewardship.
The Christian is one who knows the high value of the Gospel of redemption. He is a steward of God's most precious gift of grace. He knows he is Christ's and that his life is made new by being in Christ. With Paul he can say, "Let a man so account of us, as of ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God. Here, moreover, it is required of stewards that a man be found faithful." (I Cor. 4:1?2). The Christian is Christ's servant. He gladly shoulders with other Christians the responsibility of sharing the Gospel with others, whether inside or outside the Church. He is found faithful. And he thinks through very carefully all of the ramifications of stewardship, in his own life, in his vocation, in his relationship to others, in his actions in the world of our time.
Stewardship is the practice of living in the light of the divine redemption made real through Jesus Christ. It is as deep as life itself and as extensive as all our human relationships with God and nature.
For stewardship is more than a way of earning, spending, giving, and saving money. It is a way of life and action. It is the whole philosophy of living from the Christian point of view. And it has to do not only with individuals, but also with Churches and families and groups that regard themselves as Christian.
This larger stewardship has to do with the life, the inner life, of the believer and with all the outer expressions of that life. One never becomes the true steward of his possessions until he experiences the richer wealth of which he has become the recipient.
Stewardship has more to do with what one is and does than with what one has and gives. It deals with the essential springs from which flow the beneficent streams of life and service which not only bless the Church and the world, but which change the nature of life and the world. For what the world needs is not mere philanthropy; it needs new life; it needs a new orientation, it needs that kind of life that is re-centered in God-in-Christ.
Excerpts from Christian Stewardship and Christian Education by Dr. Elmer Homrighausen.
Think about using year-round stewardship tracts, posters and sermons to educate during the summer without asking for a commitment. Use as a thought process months before your usual stewardship tithing program starts.
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