Stewardship summit develops strategies for changing time
2/12/2003 By United Methodist News Service* United Methodist leaders are charting a course to make stewardship a central part of discipleship for church members. "We
need to put together again what we believe with how we live," said Gary
Moore, counsel to Ethical and Spiritual Investors. "There is a need for
us to reconnect the political economy, our personal finances and our
stated beliefs."
Moore was among the speakers at the Stewardship
Summit, held Feb. 4-6 in Atlanta. The event brought together more than
100 leaders from annual (regional) conferences, general agencies,
fund-raising organizations and the denomination's Council of Bishops.
The United Methodist Church Foundation, affiliated with the church's
finance agency, convened the event. The foundation is a not-for-profit
organization that raises and manages endowment funds for official groups
in the denomination.
The summit was an important step forward
in meeting the challenges faced by a changing church, said Sandra
Lackore, the denomination's treasurer and staff head of the General
Council on Finance and Administration.
"Stewardship in the
Wesleyan tradition includes not merely properly using what we have, but
also what we choose not to have in order for others to have the
necessities for living," said Bishop Kenneth L. Carder of Jackson, Miss.
Focusing
on John Wesley's understanding of stewardship, Carder reminded the
group of nine components of the Wesleyan stewardship tradition. They
include acknowledging God as the source of all gifts, sharing in God's
mission through living, expressing love for God and neighbor through
stewardship, practicing economic justice, making personal and
institutional responses to the needs of others, choosing vocation,
living simply, modeling of stewardship by leaders and applying biblical
critique to economic systems.
Lackore said the denomination's
fiscal agency is listening to financial concerns across the church and
is "energized by the renewed commitment to focus on personal giving as
part of Christian discipleship as a core value of our denomination."
In
her address to the group at Ben Hill United Methodist Church, she
offered specific approaches for developing a shared vision of hope. They
included focusing on the church's primary mission of making disciples,
emphasizing channels of giving, working on process rather than program
development, and increasing cross-agency cooperation. The denomination's
general agencies are partners in ministry with the local churches and
annual conferences, she said.
Bruce Birch, dean and professor of
biblical theology at Wesley Theological Seminary, stressed that the
essential responsibility of Christians is to be stewards of hope in a
broken world.
A team from Africa University, the denomination's
pan-African school in Zimbabwe, offered insights on the global
manifestation of financial stewardship. Retired United Methodist
missionary Dayton Edmonds provided stories from the Native American
tradition to focus understanding of how stewardship is faithfully lived.
More information about the United Methodist Foundation is available at www.umcfoundation.org.
# # #
*Information
for this story was provided by Steve Zekoff, an executive of the United
Methodist General Council on Finance and Administration in Evanston,
Ill.
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