By Maureen Wright

Stewardship has repeatedly come up in the course of my work recently. Not just the traditional fall stewardship campaigns of my childhood where children, youth, and adults promised or pledged to give an amount of money to the church. Many of you remember the numbered, weekly envelopes that were part of these campaigns; some of you reading this article use these envelopes each week. Not just the annual, three-point sermon with an illustration or two, on tithing from Leviticus 27:30 or 2 Chronicles 31:4-10. Stewardship is not just a campaign to raise money. Stewardship is the management and use of the resources provided by God for ministry and mission, the living out of and working for the kingdom of God. It is faithfulness, a guiding principle, a way of life for those who confess Christ as Lord and Savior.

One of the things that I learned early in my role as Stated Clerk was to not just read what the Book of Order says but to look behind the words as well. As an example, the Book of Order does not speak directly to how a church changes the number of members of its session. It is not listed among the “business proper to congregational meetings” in G-1.0504. Yet if you read G-1.0504a, the list includes “electing ruling elders, deacons, and trustees.” If I look behind these words, by electing the number of officers nominated, the church is approving the decrease or increase in the number of officers –savvy moderators will point this out before the vote. I think that stewardship is behind the discernment work of the Presbytery’s transition.

Conversations around scarcity and abundance are important stewardship conversations. The Season of Discernment in which the Leadership Team is now leading us with the support of Emily Swanson of Holy Cow! Consulting began as part of a previous Leadership Team’s Sustainability Task Force. This task force launched the Bluestone Working Group, the conversations that led to the sale of the Presbytery’s office building, and discernment to listen for who God is calling us to be and where God is calling us to go. Woven throughout all of this work, the decisions made, and the recommendations to come are reflections on whether we, as a Presbytery, use the value of scarcity or the value of abundance to support our work.

2014 Presbytery Moderator and retired Director of West Virginia Ministry of Advocacy and Workcamps (WVMAW) Joan Stewart is known for her Jesus math. Grounded in the story of the feeding of the five thousand in Matthew 14:13-21 (or the variations on the story in Mark, Luke, and John), Joan explains it this way: “Jesus math just doesn’t add up like we think. Five loaves of bread and two fish feed how many? One plus one plus one equals…one.  [God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit equals…God.] Jesus math!” Jesus math is abundance. It is not irresponsible planning or denial of the resources available, but the unshakable belief that we serve a God who provides for our needs, a God of abundance, a God who offers outrageous generosity to us through Jesus Christ, calling us to offer the same outrageous generosity to the world.

Those of you who know me know that I enjoy cooking. I picked up a book this week, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts by Crystal Wilkinson, former Poet Laureate of Kentucky and teacher of creative writing in the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program at the University of Kentucky. The dedication of the book introduces the ideas of scarcity and abundance. The book is dedicated…”most especially to all the kitchen ghosts, who transformed the scarceness of food first into survival and then into abundance. To you I am grateful.” God calls us to transform our scarceness of resources – time, talent, people, and money – into abundance.

The Presbyterian Foundation website provides resources to support congregations and presbyteries in matters of stewardship, and the annual Stewardship Kaleidoscope offers the church a focused conversation about stewardship. The 11th president of Columbia Seminary in Decatur, GA, the Rev. Dr. Victor Aloyo, spoke to the Stewardship Kaleidoscope conference last fall. Part of the presentation focused on Isaiah 55:1-9, reframing stewardship with abundance and grace. He says, [this text] “exhorts all who are thirsty to come to the waters and for those with no money to (c)ome, buy wine and milk without money and without cost…What is promised here is outrageous…The economy of the promise here is built not upon the scarcity of exile but upon God’s abundance.”

Presbytery of West Virginia, we come to this Season of Discernment thirsty, as those with no money. God says to us, come buy without money and without cost. Yes, we have resources. Yet this is the time for us to discern, to make decisions about how we will manage and use our resources for the Presbytery to which God is calling us to be, to do the work God is calling us to do. Let us listen to God. Let us put our faith in God. Let us make outrageously abundant decisions, all to the glory of this God we serve.