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      Stewardship

      God’s Way of Recreating the World

      by

      Steve Kindle

      Energion Publications

      Gonzalez, FL

      2015

      Copyright © 2015, Steven F. Kindle

      Unless otherwise indicated, scripture quotations are taken are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, Copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U. S. A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      Kindle Edition

      1-63199-`74-4

      978-1-63199-174-5

      Print Edition

      ISBN10: 1-63199-173-6

      ISBN13: 978-1-63199-173-8

      Energion Publications

      P. O. Box 841

      Gonzalez, FL 32560

      energion.com

      [email protected]

      To First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

       of Redding, California

      Partners with God in recreating the world

      With thanks and appreciation to Larry Haight, Director of Library Services, and Eric Wheeler, Reader and Digital Services Librarian for Simpson University, and Keegan Osinski, Public Services Assistant, Vanderbilt Divinity Library, for their assistance in providing many of the resources for this book.

      Introduction

      There is little disagreement that our world is as close to self-destruction as it has ever been, humanity included. It is unnecessary to list the wars, political conflicts, diseases, ecological disasters, and the like; we are all too familiar with a daily rehearsal of our plight. What there is little or no agreement on is the way out. How will we, as the human race, (homo sapiens, or “the wise humans”) find our way out of our mutually shared predicament and into a world of wholeness and abundance that the Hebrews named shalom? Is there any wisdom available to us that can lead the way?

Jews and Christians have at their disposal a wisdom that is comprehensive enough to meet the challenges of our time. We understand this wisdom to be a gift from God as we have received it through the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The only problem is that we have abandoned it long ago. At least we in the West have, who traded in our bountiful inheritance for a mess of meager pottage known as the consumerist society,1 and the promotion of the individual over the greater good for all.

      This book is a challenge and an appeal. Its challenge is to reconnect with the ancient wisdom that first conceived of a world after God’s own heart. Its appeal is to take up the mission we pray so often, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” God’s will for God’s creation is not hidden or kept solely for the initiate. It is not beyond the ability of the lowliest disciple or too inconsequential for the highest. To rediscover and then implement our sapiential heritage is not only vital, it is our highest calling as humans, and the way out of our current and continuing crisis.

Joseph Blenkinsopp, in his Creation, Un-creation, Re-creation: A discursive commentary on Genesis 1-11, outlines the progression of God’s activity from the perspective of primordial time to the call of Abraham.2 With the desire of Adam and Eve “to be like God,” humanity was set on a course of self-destruction that ended with God being so sorry (“for it repenteth me that I had made them.” KJV) that God wiped out all but the necessary ingredients with which to start over, or re-create. From that first moment Noah emerged from the ark, God has been working to return creation, and certainly humanity, to God’s original purpose.

      Primordial time has become our time: humanity is un-creating our world even as God is hard at work re-creating it. Until humans restore God’s original intention for partnership in maintaining the Earth, we will continue on our road to destruction.

      The farther we get away from Modernism’s tendency to break down everything into its constituent parts, keeping them separate, and move toward seeing the entire universe as one integrated whole, the closer we get to understanding stewardship. The New Physics teaches us that everything is connected and has a relationship to everything else, however remote. Science is hard at work to find the organizing principle to explain how the universe works. Stewardship functions in that regard for Christianity. It is the organizing principle that shows how every other aspect of our faith fits together.

      Separating out religion as a discrete part of life is a modern construct and is not the way the early church saw its place in the scheme of things. To ask if a person was religious, even up to the 16th century, was nonsensical. All of life was seen as invested with value and to be taken as a gift of God and used accordingly. Modern life is seen as a series of compartments that we enter one at a time: work, play, spirituality, exercise, family, and so on. So too in congregational life. Sundays (and perhaps Wednesday evenings) are for worship, Monday through Friday are for work, weekends are for family and hobbies. The problem is that when one enters one sphere, one leaves another behind. This complicates churches’ efforts to make stewardship a way of life that encompasses every aspect of our lives.

      Today our churches struggle with meeting budgets, membership decline, ministry obligations, spiritual transformation, effective evangelism, competing commitments, rapid change, youth exodus, diminishing effectiveness, and the seeming irrelevance of its message. Individual Christians long for deeper connections to God and each other, significant ministry, solutions for our ecological and humanitarian crises, and relevant support through life’s vicissitudes.

      It is my contention, and the thesis of this book, that stewardship, comprehensively understood and applied, will lead a congregation and individual Christians out of these problems and into mature and effective relationships and significant ministry. And, most importantly of all, it will restore the Earth, and its people, to peace and prosperity.

      This is not a “quick fix” book on stewardship; it is much more than that. It is more of a permanent fix when properly understood.

Every pilot flies according to The Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, that is, every pilot who wants to fly safely and most enjoyably. SCUBA divers dive with the knowledge they gained from NAUI or PADI certification instruction; not to do so puts their lives in peril. No explorer ventures forth without first gaining as much knowledge of the territory presently available; not doing so increases the risk of not returning. It behooves us as Christians who desire to walk closely with God to discover just where it is God is walking, or we may find ourselves pursuing irrelevant goals. Karl Barth famously advised young theologians “to take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.”3 That’s another way of saying that how we look at the world should be as close to how God sees it as possible. For Christians (and Jews) this means paying close attention to our Bible.

This is not as easy as it seems on first blush. In a previous book.4 I discussed how difficult it is to agree on biblical teaching. I suggested a method of interpreting the Bible called a canon within the Canon. This is an effort to approximate or summarize the essence of biblical teaching and compare portions of the Bible to it. Fortunately, for this study, promoting a specific interpretive model is not necessary. I suspect most parties to this discussion will agree with the larger points made, as most models arrive at the same conclusions. So why this book? Because, although most will agree with its understanding of stewardship, few actually incorporate these findings in the day-to-day operation of congregations or in their own lives. Stewardship is seen as a mere tool, not a way of life. This book is a challenge to make stewardship the controlling idea of congregational and individual life.

      Those involved with other religions and their adherents soon discover that they all are concerned with the same thing: discovering and promoting the purpose of life. The differences are many and profound in how they go about this, but in the final analysis, they are pursuing their

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