Christian stewardship
Concept in Christianity, that refers to humanity being responsible for the world
Christian stewardship is a theological concept in Christianity that concerns the management of resources and gifts that God has entrusted them. Rooted in earlier concepts of Jewish stewardship in the Hebrew Bible, stewardship theology provides guidance for Christian adherents on how to raise funds for christian institutions and how to allocate resources. Stewardship is an all encompassing concept that is derived from the notion that the Earth was to humans by a higher power such as God. In many denominations of Western Christianity, stewardship is heavily rooted in the concept of anthropocentrism and the notion that humans are specially chosen by God to have dominion over the Earth. Views on stewardship are variable based on tradition and the faith background of the Christian group.
While stewardship is theoretically all-encompassing in scope, many denominations regularly use the concept in relation to the financial management of a religious institution, such as a church or an educational institution such as a seminary, although this is a very narrow facet of stewardship. In recent years, stewardship has been expanded to include concepts of environmental sustainability as a religious response to human-caused climate change and environmental degradation.
Etymology
The notion of stewardship is derived from the ancient concept of appointing a steward to represent a monarch in the affairs of a kingdom. Steward is derived from Old English stíweard, stiȝweard, from stiȝ "hall, household" + weard "warden, keeper"; corresponding to Dutch: stadhouder, German Statthalter "place holder", a Germanic parallel to French lieutenant. Stewardship of a kingdom did not denote ownership, rather, it meant management in service of the monarch.
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This entry incorporates text from “Christian stewardship” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.