Welcome to the "Consecrated Stewards" Blog

This blog is intended to provide resources for those interested in grace-based Christian stewardship. It will especially serve as a forum for those using the "Consecrated Stewards" stewardship emphasis of the Lutheran Church Extension Fund and be a place for finding answers to frequently asked questions.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

CHRISTIAN STEWARDSHIP OR PIOUS MATERIALISM?

A few years back, a study was done for Princeton University on Religion and Economic Values. (Click Here for more on that study.) That study showed that while Americans gave lip service to their religious values regarding wealth and money, those values seldom were the motivating factors behind basic economic decisions such as job choice, major purchases and attitudes towards wealth.

What religious faith does more clearly than anything else is to add a dollop of piety to the materialistic amalgam in which most of us live. We do not feel compelled to give up any of our material desires, only to put them "in perspective." When finances worry us we pray, and that gives us strength to keep on working. In short, a kind of therapeutic motif is at work. Our faith helps us feel better about ourselves whether we are worried about our finances, whether we have money in abundance, or whether we fall into both of these categories.

The study lists the following reasons why churches fail to make an impact on our attitudes towards money:

1. Money is considered too personal to be discussed openly. The darkest taboo in our culture is not sex or death, but money. We still believe that our personal finances are too ticklish to be discussed with even our most trusted friends. Ironically, while most of us worry about our money, we do so alone. We do not place ourselves in a position to benefit from the counsel of others. Nor do we try to gain the kind of perspective that might come from articulating and testing our own views more openly.

2. Money and morality are kept in separate compartments. Our culture encourages us to think this way. Money is allegedly value-free. We make decisions as consumers, on the basis of advertising rather than as Christians on the basis of our values.

3. People seldom think about connections between faith and money. Fifty-one percent agree that "the Bible contains valuable teachings about the use of money" But agreement is one thing; making use of these teachings is another. Only 29 percent said they had thought more than a little in the past year about "what the Bible teaches about money," and only a few more (31 percent) had thought this much about the broader issue of "the connection between religious values and your personal finances."

4. Clergy may be fearful of seeming too interested in money. Most of the pastors surveyed admitted they found it difficult to preach about money. In many cases, they, together with their parishioners, could not see the connection between faith and money.

5. Stewardship has lost much of its meaning. Stewardship is perceived by the public to mean either something as narrow as charitable giving or something so broad that it has virtually no specific implications. When people were asked what they thought was the best definition of stewardship, 10 percent said it meant "giving a certain percentage of your money to the church," 12 percent thought it was "taking good care of our planet," 16 percent said it meant "remembering that God makes everything," 40 percent said it was "using your individual talents in a responsible way," and 20 percent were unsure. Moreover, only 22 percent said the idea was very meaningful to them; 40 percent said it was fairly meaningful; 20 percent said it was not very or not at all meaningful; and 18 percent were unsure.