Exploring Alternatives to 'Stewardship' for Church Anew

In the second part of my posts on stewardship for Church Anew, I explore some possible alternatives to the language of stewardship. I know it’s much easier to critique stewardship than to offer something constructive, so in this piece I share a few directions I hope to experiment with in the coming years: the language of offering, koinonia, women's patronage, and tithing.

"I recognize that I am not offering a single neat or easy alternative, and I am well aware of how deeply ingrained stewardship is in the mainline church (some even consider stewardship the North America’s most important contribution to global Christianity). It will take years of exploration and experimentation to move beyond it. What matters is that we keep seeking language and practices that draw us closer to the witness of the Gospels."

The full blog post is here.

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Welcome!

My name is Miguel Escobar and I am an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Long Island, currently serving a two-year curacy at San Andrés Episcopal Church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. My work centers on the intersection of faith, justice, and economics, including through research and presentations on Christianity’s complicated relationship with money, wealth, and poverty. I write and think about these issues from my location in a parish setting, and more specifically as someone committed to Spanish-language, Latino ministry. As a writer, I focus on how Christianity has wrestled with questions of money from its earliest days to the present. My first book, The Unjust Steward: Wealth, Poverty, and the Church Today , traces how the early Church’s stance on wealth shifted over the first five centuries, going from a position of sharp critique to eventual accommodation, and reflects on what was gained and lost in that transition. I’m currently working on a second book that explores the...

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Miguel Castilleja Escobar

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