Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Stewardship, apparently, gives off a bad smell. Or at least it does in Spanish.

I’ve recently heard several Latino leaders wonder aloud whether we should continue using the Spanish word for stewardship. A steward - un mayordomo - has generally referred to the head manager of a large estate, one of those devastatingly efficient souls who is beloved by the landowner and reviled by most everyone else.

In this video, the Rev. Antonio Contreras of St. George’s in Flushing, Queens sums it up nicely - he says he was perplexed the first time he heard mayordomía as a lay person and that it called to mind a Mexican telenovela he once watched called, simply, “The Steward.” And who was the steward? “The steward was a gossip, spoke poorly of everyone, treated the landowner well but was cruel to all the workers.” In other words, probably not the person you’d want taking the pulpit on stewardship Sunday. 

But generosity, on the other hand... Now that’s a word Fr. Contreras understands!  

In what is undoubtedly the most moving part of this video, Fr. Contreras talks about how he grew up seeing generosity all around him. He describes his mother as someone who fed him, his family, and - depending on who was down-and-out that day - the rest of the folks who lived on his street. “Generosity means having to manage with a little less on your plate so a neighbor can eat a full meal.”

Personally, I love the word stewardship. So much more than just a pledge card, stewardship reverberates with the second creation story’s notion that we humans are tenders of the earth; it connects how we relate to our congregation with how we relate to the wider world. And yet, perhaps because of the grand scale that stewardship tends toward, we may end up missing the intimate examples of generosity that surround us: generous spirits, for instance; and generous portions too.