Stewardship is the principle of managing resources so that they most effectively fulfill the purpose for which they were given, both now, and for the future.  Conservation might be one part of good stewardship.  Careful use could be another.

“We are dancing Sarah’s circle,” we sang.  “Every round a generation.”  “On and on the circle’s moving.”

A church community is like.

The founders of this church are far behind us.  No one who gathered the last Sunday in April, 1913 to hear the first sermon given to the congregation that would become this church, is here with us today, one hundred and nearly six years later.

Yet in another sense, that congregation is here today.  It’s you.  That congregation is this congregation, sitting here this morning.  That church is this church.

We sang, “Here we seek and find our history.”  It’s our history.  It’s the story of our beginning, though we weren’t there personally.  Though individuals come and go, the congregation lasts.  The church lasts.  The story gets carried on and continued from generation to generation.

This one, same, church was founded one hundred and nearly six years ago.  Here it is today, thriving, active, working, challenged, engaged, anxious, working it out and moving it forward.  Hopefully, and with our care and good stewardship, this church will still be here one hundred and six, or six hundred and six years from today.

This morning is the kick-off of our annual Stewardship Campaign.

And this sermon is the annual “Sermon on the Amount” as they say.

But honestly, it isn’t.

I’m not going to talk about the budget.  I’m not going to ask you for money.  I’m not really going to talk about the Pledge drive at all.

I’m going to talk about Stewardship.  Stewardship is about taking care of the people, communities, objects and organizations that are valuable in our lives and nurturing them into the future.

In a church, stewardship is partly about giving.  It’s also about managing what we already have.  And it’s about developing present capacity to receive more in the future.  All while doing the work of the church that makes the church valuable in the first place:  worth giving to, worth caring for, worth growing into the future.

Making and recording and paying pledges, is a portion of stewardship.  A small “amount” if you will – so there, this is a sermon on the amount.

Stewardship is the work of those who are currently responsible for an organization’s resources using those resources in such a manner that the resources maximize their effectiveness toward achieving the organization’s goals.

Often, we think of stewardship solely in the mode of conservation of resources.  Stewardship of the earth, for instance, probably does mean conservation of threatened environments more than anything else.  Stewardship of a fine old house listed on the historic register does mean conservation, more than anything else.

Stewardship as conservation means preserving what is valuable in the present, so that it holds its value into the future.  Stewardship is about bringing the worth of the present into the future.  We strive to be stewards of the earth so that future generations have the benefit of the environment that we have, conserving what we have and restoring what we’ve lost.  We are stewards of a fine old house, so that future generations can connect to history the way we can.  Stewardship is caring for the present, and then offering to the future what we have made in the present.

But churches are a little different from the earth, or fine old houses.  So something a little more than conservation is required in stewardship of a church.

What we value in the church is what we do:  our fellowship, our worship, our mission.  Preserving the value of a church means spending money so that our fellowship, our worship, and our mission, are inspiring, exciting, effective and meaningful.  If stewardship were only about conserving resources, then you might think being a good steward of our church would require that we stop all the doing that we do now, which use up our resources, so that we can give those resources to the future. But what the future needs from us is not a healthy bank account they can start from, but a healthy church they can grow from.

Stewardship in a church is using our resources in a manner that maximizes their effectiveness toward achieving our church’s goals.

So good stewardship, first of all, requires good understanding of an organization’s goals.  If you don’t know the goal, then how can you steward resources toward that goal?  You’re either spending money with no sense of what you’re spending it for, which is foolishness and profligacy.  Or you’re saving money with no sense of what you’re saving it for, which is foolishness and hoarding.

Church’s have resources because churches are for something.  Church’s have resources because churches do something.  We have a purpose.  We have a mission.  Stewardship is using our resources in a manner that maximizes their effectiveness toward fulfilling our church’s mission.

Now some organizations have goals that can be accomplished in some clear and finite way.  If an organization’s mission is to abolish small pox worldwide, at some point you could say “mission accomplished” and close the organization.  There’s no need to steward the organization into the future once the goal is met.

But churches have missions that can mostly never be accomplished.  There will always be something for us to do.  Always someone who needs us.  We won’t ever come to the final Sunday worship and wipe our hands and say, “OK, now that’s done.”  Stewardship of a church means both doing what we need to do now, and stewarding the organization into a future that will continue to need what the church is here to do.

Stewardship in a church means using resources responsibly now, and conserving resources responsibly, for the future.

But notice that stewardship is always about using our resources, either now or in the future.  Conserving resources, for a time, if we intend to use them later.  But no church’s mission is ever merely having resources, sitting somewhere, tied up in property or on a ledger sheet, impotent to actually accomplish the work that the church is gathered to do.

We are not a bank.  We are not a foundation.  Our stewardship responsibility is not to conserve our resources so that the next generation can use them.  Our responsibility is to use our resources to fulfill our mission, now, and, mindful that our church’s mission extends into the future, to conserve our resources so that the church can continue to fulfill its mission in the future – but that’s the key, continue to fulfill our mission, because we’re also carefully using our resources now to fulfill that same mission now.

Stewardship is thus a balance between current needs and future needs.  With the guideline always being how do we maximize the power of what we have to fulfill our mission?

One further difference between stewardship of a church’s resources and stewardship of a fine old house, or stewardship of the earth, is that in a church new resources are always arriving.  New people join.  New pledges are added.  New money comes in.  New ideas and passions and gifts and skills arrive.  A new family moves into town.  A current family adds a child and grows our community.

If you’re stewards of a fine old house, the stewardship job is to take care of the house.  There is no “new house” that could replenish this one.  The same with the earth.  The earth has the ability to restore itself if we give it time, but there is no new earth that can replace what we destroy.

But churches always have new resources flowing in.  If the church is alive and active.  If the church has any value as a church, then it has church members who are able to support it and visitors eager to check us out and maybe join.  Sure, any future congregation would always appreciate a little help from the past.  But as long as there are present church members, the church will have present resources.

Not understanding the difference between a finite resource, like a fine old house, and a renewable resource like a congregation, can lead our stewardship astray.  A church that conserves resources out of a sense that not spending now is some kind of a gift to the future, can sometimes so impoverish the present church that it ends up not having a future church at all.  

Who wants to join a church that isn’t doing something important and exciting?  You might be conserving the church’s money – but not the church’s value.  No one joins the church of the big bank account, or Our Lady of the Endowment.  You join the church that is alive and active and moving and doing.  Stewardship is using resources that fulfill the present purpose and create an attractive community that will generate new resources in the future.

So, you see, good stewardship is entirely dependent on a good understanding of mission.

What is the church for?

As I asked a couple of weeks ago, when I introduced these several weeks of thinking about the church’s mission, “What should we do?”

That’s the fourth of five developmental tasks for a church in an interim period, as we are.  Look at the history of the church, to lift up any patterns of behavior that might be causing chronic problems.  Attend to the health of the leadership in the church, which we’re addressing with the Harvest the Power curriculum.  Explore the identity of the church.  Review the mission of the church.  And strengthen connections between the church and the larger UU faith, which we will turn to next month, including hosting the District Assembly here at the end of April.

Mission, or purpose, is also one of the three core spiritual issues for all of us:  Identity, Purpose and Meaning.  Who am I?  What should I do?  And Why does it matter?

What should I do?  Given the world the way it is, how should I respond?  What work is going to fulfill my own passion and personality?  Where should I spend my resources of time and money?  Or should I save my money now so that I can prepare myself to do what I really should do later in life?

What should we do?  As a church?  How can we steward our resources so that we fulfill our mission now:  effectively, with excitement, inspiration, passion, and in ways that attract others to join us, so that we can continue to do what we really should do later in the life of the church?

We will look a little more specifically at the mission of a church next week.

But for today, one final thought about stewardship in a church.

One of the aspects of belonging to a church that I love, is this feeling of belonging to something larger than myself.  A UU faith that I share with thousands of others.  A local church that was here before I joined, and will be here after I leave.

I’ve talked about stewardship being about finding the balance between doing what we are called to do now, as a church, and supporting the church to come so that the church is well positioned to do what it will still need to be doing in the future.  The way that we look backward and are grateful for the founders, and the people who built this building, and the folks who were here doing what they were doing that inspired each of you to join, whenever it was that you joined, is mirrored by our hope that future generations in the church will look back with gratitude at what we did with the church at this, our, time.

What do we owe them?

The stewardship of money, yes, that’s a part.  To give, generously, to spend, wisely, and to save, carefully.  Stewardship of the building and the grounds.  Stewardship of the faith itself. Stewardship of our church’s reputation in the community.  All of that.

But perhaps, the most important gift we can give is the simplest one:

Love.

Let us love the future of this church.  Let us love the future congregation specifically.  Let us see the church members sitting in this hall.  Listening to their minister.  Hearing their choir – or robot/android band, or whatever they have.  Let us love them:  their hopes and fears.  Their desire to make a difference in the life of Long Beach.  Their struggles and sorrows.  Their laughter and joy.

“Love, like a carefully loaded ship, crosses the gulf between the generations.” Writes Antoine de St. Exupery.

“In a house which becomes a home, one hands down and another takes up the heritage of mind and heart, laughter and tears, musings and deeds.”

They will appreciate our work.  The modest endowment we leave to them.  The well-written and carefully organized policies we crafted.  The playground.  The parking lot.  The gorgeous new office we opened in April 2019.

But perhaps, more than anything else, as members of one community, one generation to another, they will appreciate our love.

We sang,  “Then, when life is done for me, let love be my legacy.”

When our time in the life of this church is done, for each of us, for all of us, let love be our legacy.