Stewardship Is Bigger Than Money

You hear the word a lot if you go to church.

Stewardship Sunday. The stewardship campaign, with a pledge card tucked into the bulletin. By the time most Christian men have sat in a pew for a few years, "stewardship" has become a polite synonym for the season when the pastor asks us for money.

The word used to name a man who ran an entire estate.

The church let it shrink, mostly without meaning to, and now we have a generation of men who feel like faithful stewards because a cheque goes into an envelope twice a month, while the other six days of the week come apart at home and at work.

I want to put the whole word back on the table.

The word the New Testament uses covers a whole household

The Greek word the New Testament most often translates as "steward" is oikonomos. The root is oikos, the household. A steward in the ancient world was the man an owner put in charge of everything he had: property, workers, food stores, accounts, the relationships in the house, the schedule of the day. Money was one line on a long list.

The household was the unit, and the steward ran the whole of it on behalf of an owner who was someone else.

When Jesus told a parable about a steward, his audience knew exactly what he meant. A talent in Matthew 25 is a unit of money, a heavy weight of silver. The parable sits inside a household. The master is going abroad, and he puts his servants in charge of his property while he is away. The story asks what you do with what has been entrusted to you, in whatever form it arrives.

Somewhere along the way, and I think it happened gradually in North American evangelicalism over the last fifty years, that big word got reduced to one little corner of itself. Stewardship became code for giving. Giving belongs in there, at roughly one third of the whole.

Most pastors and writers I have heard reach for the same three categories, going back at least to the 1950s: time, talent and treasure. I cannot find a single biblical author who uses that exact framing. But I think it gets the shape of the thing right. The household God has put us in charge of is bigger than our bank account.

If we only steward the money, we are failing at the calling.

Time is the stewardship most Christian men are losing first

Ask a man what he would say his tithe of time is, and you usually get a long pause.

Most men can tell you, within reason, what they give financially. Ask where the hours go and the answer gets vague fast. They know the rough shape of a work week. They know they sleep. After that the picture goes dim. The week ends, they tell their wife there was no time for the thing she asked for, and they mean it. Then on Sunday they cannot account for where any of it went.

The numbers on where those hours go are not flattering.

Statistics Canada has found that Canadian adults spend about 3.2 hours a day in front of screens for recreation, and adults in their thirties tend to trend higher than that. Add streaming and television on top of phone time, and for a lot of men the total runs to five hours a day or more. Every day of it gone before you have prayed with your wife or read a book to your child.

I have lost evenings to my phone. I have closed the laptop at 11pm wondering where the night went.

We are stewarding time badly, myself included, and most of us have never named it as a stewardship category at all. Time is the most levered resource in your life. Every other category of stewardship runs on it. Your marriage runs on hours. So does your work, and so does the prayer life you keep meaning to start. Steward your money perfectly and your hours like a sieve and you will end up a wealthy man who never knew his children.

A simple stewardship question, asked weekly: where did this week's hours actually go, and would I make those same trades if I were doing it on purpose? Most weeks the honest answer is no. That is data. Most men have never collected it.

Talent is the stewardship hardest to see in yourself

The second category is harder to talk about, because we live in a culture that has trained men to be either falsely modest about their gifts or falsely impressed by them.

The biblical picture of "talent", to keep using the parable's word, turns on use. The question is whether you are putting to work what you were handed, and being good at it comes second. The third servant in that parable kept his master's capital perfectly safe. He buried it. He held on to it because he was afraid. And the master's response when he came home was severe.

There are men everywhere who are very good at things they do not use for anyone.

The man who is the most competent person his entire family knows when it comes to fixing things, and has never once offered to help the widow at his church look at her furnace. The man who has a finance degree and has never sat down with his younger brother to walk him through what to do with his first paycheque. The man who can preach a better sermon than his own pastor at the kitchen table to his wife, and has never once taught a Sunday school class.

I have been every one of those men, which is the only reason I get to name them. The instinct to keep your gifts inside the house, where they stay safe, is a strong one. Lending them out, where they get used up and occasionally cost you something, takes more.

The steward in the parable was praised because he put it to work. From the master's point of view, buried capital and squandered capital come out the same. You can lose the money foolishly or protect it carefully and still produce nothing with it.

A man's vocation, the daily work he does to earn his bread, is also a talent. The way he does that work, and the care he takes in it, is stewardship. So is what he does with the off hours of his gifts. The handy man who fixes one neighbour's eavestrough a year. The teacher who spends an hour a week tutoring a struggling teenager from his small group. The accountant who does a Saturday morning of free tax help at his church each spring. That is stewardship of talent.

It is also one of the most reliable ways men come unstuck from depression and listlessness, by the way. A man who is using his gifts for someone other than himself sleeps better.

Treasure is the easiest one to name and the hardest one to do well

And yes, finally, there is the money.

I run a personal finance site for Christian men. The money matters, and I want to say why in a way that does not shrink back down to the version of stewardship most of us inherited.

When I open my TFSA app and look at the balance, the temptation is to read what is on the screen as mine. The dollar sign in front of the number does most of that work. The whole architecture of modern money was built to make ownership feel obvious and immediate.

The screen is wrong about that.

The money in your TFSA is God's, and you are managing it on behalf of the One who gave you the breath to earn it in the first place. Scripture makes that claim directly, and it means it literally. The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it (Psalm 24:1). What do you have that you did not receive? (1 Corinthians 4:7). On the Christian view, all of it is his. We hold it for a season and we answer for how we held it.

That one word, entrusted, does all the work. If the money is yours, how you spend it comes down to preference. If it was entrusted to you, how you spend it becomes a question of fidelity, and the same paycheque starts asking a different question of you without a single dollar having moved. (That distinction is also why frugality on its own is a thinner virtue than we assume.)

In practical terms in 2026 Canada, the tools we have been handed are extraordinary by historical standards. The TFSA contribution limit for 2026 is $7,000. The RRSP limit is 18% of earned income up to a maximum of $33,810. The Canada Education Savings Grant adds 20% to the first $2,500 you put into an RESP for your child each year.

Almost no civilization in history has ever given an ordinary worker tax shelters and matching grants of this kind.

Taking full advantage of them is a financial question, and a good one. The stewardship question sits underneath it: are you using them as a steward, for provision and generosity and the long obedience of raising a family and leaving something for the next one?

That changes what the TFSA is for. It becomes a tool handed to the household, to be used for the household's purposes.

You can be generous with money and a poor steward overall

You can give 10% of your gross income and still be a terrible steward.

If you give a faithful tithe and spend the rest of your week on your phone, ignoring your kids, sitting on gifts you never share with anyone, working a job indifferently because you have already paid your spiritual dues at the offering plate, then you have been a good giver. Giving is a real thing and I am glad you do it. Good giver and good steward are two different words, and we use them as though they were one.

It runs the other way too. There are men who give almost nothing financially because they are buried in debt or still paying off mistakes from years ago, and who steward their hours and their gifts, their relationships and their work, with a fidelity that puts the rest of us to shame. They are stewards in a season when the cheque is small, and the category was always bigger than the dollar amount.

This argument does not take the pressure off the money. Tithing matters, and so does generosity beyond the tithe. The man who hears "stewardship" and reaches only for his chequebook has misunderstood the word, and a misunderstood word will bend a whole life out of shape eventually.

The bigger frame has another advantage. It is much harder to fake. You can fake generosity with money if you have enough of it. The big cheque written from a heart of pride still clears the bank, and it means nothing, because money is a heart issue before it is a math problem. Time and gifts are harder to counterfeit. There is no way to pretend you have stewarded your Tuesday evenings well, and that is a more honest signal of what kind of man you are than the way you fill out an offering envelope.

Two weeks of honest tracking will tell you more than a year of resolutions

One concrete thing to do this month.

Pick the category you are most avoiding. For most men, it is time. For some it is talent, the gift they have buried because using it would be uncomfortable. For some it is treasure, the budget they have not opened. Pick the one your gut already knew, before you finished reading the last paragraph. (If you want a quicker read on where you stand across all three, the Steward's Map quiz takes about five minutes.)

Then for the next two weeks, just track it. Leave it exactly as it is and write down what happens.

If it is time, write down at the end of every day where the hours went. Rough buckets will do. Work, family, phone, TV, church, reading, exercise, errands, just the shape of it. After two weeks you will have a picture you have never had.

If it is talent, list the things you are good at on one side of a page. On the other side, write where you used those gifts for someone other than yourself or your employer in the last six months. Stare at the gap.

If it is treasure, open the budgeting app you have been avoiding, or pull up the last two months of bank statements, and look. Just look. Where does the money actually go.

Two weeks of honest assessment, with no pressure yet to change anything or to feel bad about it. Then take it to a Sabbath morning, with a coffee and an open Bible and a prayer that goes roughly: Lord, you have given me all of this. Show me what to do with it. And listen.

After that you will know what to do without anyone handing you a system.

Take the whole word home with you

If you walk away with one thing, let it be the size of the word.

Most of us treat stewardship as a 10% question. It is really a 100% question. It reaches past the offering envelope on Sunday morning and into your Tuesday evening, the gift you have kept to yourself and the calendar that fills up without your permission. It reaches the money in the account you have been afraid to open.

The steward in the parable earned his commendation for managing the whole household his master handed him. The money was one room in it.

You have never been the owner. Acting like one means carrying everything alone and running your life as a private kingdom, which is heavier work than it looks. The relief of being a steward, even when the stewardship is demanding, is real.

Look at your life and ask, gently, what you have been given. Then ask what you have done with it. Start with the next true thing.

That is what the Master is looking for.

Common questions

What is biblical stewardship?

Stewardship is managing everything God has entrusted to you, as a manager who answers to the owner. The Greek word is oikonomos, the man an owner put in charge of a whole household: the property and the workers, the food stores and the accounts. Everything you hold belongs to God, and you are accountable for the whole of it, room by room.

What does stewardship actually mean?

It means you are a manager of what belongs to God, holding it for a season on his behalf. Everything you have was handed to you to look after: your money and your hours, your gifts and the people you are responsible for. A good steward starts with recognition: every good gift comes from above, and even the breath in your lungs is grace you did not earn.

Is stewardship only about money?

No. Money is one room in the household. The old framing runs time, talent and treasure, and treasure is roughly a third of it. You can give a faithful tithe and still handle your hours and your gifts badly. Stewardship is a hundred percent question, and it reaches into every part of your week.

Do I really not own the money in my account?

In the deepest sense, no. When you open your TFSA app the balance looks like yours, and the dollar sign in front of the number reinforces it. Scripture makes the claim directly: the earth is the Lord's, and everything in it. You are managing that money on behalf of the One who gave you the breath to earn it.