Rethinking Stewardship

This week I have been attending the Rethinking Stewardship conference held by Luther Seminary for continuing education.  I chose attending this conference for both personal and professional reasons.

Personally, the conference was held at a church about a mile and a half from my parents house.  So I have been staying at my parent's home and am now going to stick around for the next few days to visit family and friends.  Plus as an added bonus (I know I sound like an info-mericial) we were asked to be godparents/baptismal sponsors for our nephew who will be baptized this coming Sunday.  It was/is nice to be able to spend time with family outside of the conference.  And on a stewardship note, staying and my parents and eating their food has been a way I have been a good steward of the congregation's finances.  So yes coming to the conference has been a great excuses to see family, but I probably would have still attended this conference even if it wasn't in my hometown.

Professionally, I was interested in attending this conference because stewardship is a topic that I think is often misunderstood in the church.  Quiet often we equate stewardship solely with money and with giving money to the church so the church can pay the bills.  But stewardship is so much larger, it is about taking care of what God has given us: the whole creation, our bodies, our families, our mental health and our finances and possessions. This disconnect is not often preached about or otherwise taught in churches and as part of my ministry at Bethlehem I want to be able to help the congregation understand stewardship as the second definition and not the first.

I was also interested in the format of the conference.  Most events I have been to, there is either one or a small handful of keynote speakers that talk at you for an hour or so at a time and then maybe some workshops.  And with workshops I often have the problem of choosing which ones I want to go to - it always seems like if there are four workshop times, I have too many options for three times and the fourth I'm not interested in any of the workshops.

For this conference, the organizers scheduled 12 keynote addresses (yes 12!) and after each speaker there was time for small group discussion.  The schedule was broken up into four sections of three speakers:  rethinking culture, rethinking theology, rethinking practices, and rethinking stewardship.  It was actually a wonderful format, being able to hear each speaker and having time to discuss and decompress the ideas presented before moving on to another topic/speaker.

Over the next week or so I plan on writing about each of these four topics, what I've gotten out of this conference and what I hope to pass on to the members of Bethlehem.  In the meantime feel free to check out the conference's website.  In the next few days power points from some of the presenters should be up along with other extras.