When you hear the word “stewardship,” do you tense up? Is there conflict in your heart between what God or the Church might ask of you and what you feel you have to give? Do you have misgivings about where you are allocating the “talents” or resources God has given you?
Deep down, we all want to be the servant who invests wisely, making a good return for our Master, rather than the one who misallocates what has been given. But even though our ideal is to be the “good and faithful servant,” we struggle to make the right decisions with our resources.
This question of good stewardship—the proper allocation of resources toward the greatest good—is at the heart of Level 3 of a Trinity House, the Household Economy. Why is it so difficult to invest our “time, talent, and treasure” toward God’s will for our home, family, and community, his will that we know will result in repairing the damage done by sin and building up God’s kingdom on earth?
It’s so difficult because the world and our own fallen nature tend to operate on a principle that is opposed to good stewardship. Instead of allocating our resources toward God’s will, we tend to want to direct them in a way that will increase ourselves—our comfort, our satisfaction, or our image in the eyes of the world. We want to spend our time, talent, and treasure on ourselves every time.
But when we mainly allocate our resources to growing what author David Brooks calls the Big Me, we eventually realize that those choices don’t lead to happiness. No matter how we try to assuage our sense of how we should experience our days or how we should look or what we should achieve, the results never satisfy. Hopefully, once we’ve hit that wall over and over again, we might come to really contend with how to spend ourselves.
This subject has been nothing short of a monumental struggle for us. Individually and as a couple, we’re both driven to misallocate everything we’ve got toward ourselves. In our life, this drive toward the Big Me is somewhat obfuscated by the fact that we are in ministry, but anyone with experience knows that even ministry can become a form of self-aggrandizement.
Over and over again, we’ve seen how we must turn to the concept of good stewardship to gauge whether the decisions we make—with our scheduling and how we spend our time, with our charisms and what we do with them, with our money and how we spend it—are really contributing to the greater good or just to a greater sense of self. Is our home really a Trinity House, a place where each learns to put the other first, or just a facade where each allows the other to vaunt the self?
One way to answer this question is to spend time with biblical teachings on stewardship. Here’s a compilation. These teachings have the power to expose the lie at the core of our society: that it’s my life, my career, my marriage, my kids, my home… These teachings have the power to gradually replace that lie with a commitment to good stewardship based on the recognition that everything we have is God’s. These passages even have the power to change us so that there is no conflict between God’s will and ours.
If you’ve already made these shifts in your own heart and daily life, thank God. But if not, take these passages and your role as a steward to prayer, asking the Lord to change the way you make decisions about your resources. We are still doing this ourselves, to say the least. Sometimes we feel we are in an endless loop of asking the Lord for this type of transformation!
Soon, we pray along with so many Christians, we won’t have to tense up when we hear the word “stewardship.” Instead, we can smile and give thanks to the Lord who chose us, made us His adopted children, and entrusted us as His stewards. In the end, there will be nothing to be defensive about—we will be truly good stewards of our time, talent, and treasure. Lord, help us to move away from the world’s “mine” mentality and toward what will truly make us happy!
Heaven in Your Home Toolkit
Bishop Barron illuminates the Parable of the Talents in this 8-min. video by drawing a connection between the talents and God’s mercy. “You can’t cling to it [God’s mercy] or bury it,” he notes. “What you have to do with the weightiness of God’s love and mercy is spend it as liberally as He does, and you’ll find it increasing 30, 60, 100-fold.” Amen!
What I Wish I Had Known About Stewardship by David Briggs at Christianity Today offers helpful insights, including, “Thankfully, in my mid-20s I was exposed to some outstanding teaching about the biblical perspective on stewardship. It changed the trajectory of my life. Things I had never seen before jumped out at me.”
What Are Stewards in the Bible? Meaning and Importance of Stewardship at Christianity Today includes a list of verses mentioning stewardship.
To Be a Christian Steward (A Summary of the U.S. Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on Stewardship) offers a comprehensive overview of stewardship. “The life of a Christian steward models the life of Jesus,” the bishops write. “It is challenging and even difficult, in many respects, yet intense joy comes to those who take the risk to live as Christian stewards.”
The Diocese of Charleston offers a number of resources entitled A Spirituality of Stewardship, including a Spiritual Gifts Inventory.
Around the Corner…
This Thursday, Sept. 17, Trinity House Community will partner with Fr. Thomas Cavanaugh of St. John the Apostle in Leesburg for the 2nd week in a 10-week Bible study called “Signs & Wonders: A Bible Study of the Gospel of John,” from 7:30-8:45 pm (in the sanctuary, and also on FB live via the St. John’s website) on Thursday nights. At the kick-off week, over 150 attended either online or in-person! Trinity House Community will continue to offer brief weekly challenges based on the Bible study and specifically focused on strengthening your home and family.
Testimonial
“The Heaven in Your Home Workshop has a lot to say about parenting, and we are grateful we attended. On a practical level, we loved the “project management” approach to creating relationship among our family members. We left the workshop and implemented it in our home that evening. On a spiritual level, we loved the focus on using the Holy Trinity as a model for familial relationships. We also attended a Trinity House Community Gathering event a few weeks after the workshop—it was a great place to socialize with other people who are walking the same path as us. Thank you to Soren and Ever for bringing a new approach to building up our family, and we can’t wait to continue participating in the Trinity House Community.” — Mark & Erin Voorheis, Leesburg, Va
4 Practical Ways You Can Help Expand the Trinity House Community Ministry
1. Pray for the ministry—for the many families who are striving to apply what they’ve learned in the Heaven in Your Home Workshop and Letters; for the hundreds of guests who visit the ministry’s Trinity House Cafe each week in Leesburg, Va.; and for the many families in our country who are struggling at this time, and in need of vision, encouragement and practical tools.
2. You can help the ministry of Trinity House Community by choosing us as your AmazonSmile non-profit recipient. Just go to to your Smile.Amazon.com page, and under “Your Account,” choose “Your Amazon Smile” and select “Trinity House Community” as your recipient. And then don’t forget to shop at smile.amazon.com rather than just at amazon.com. Thank you!
3. Help us to reach more families with the weekly Heaven in Your Home Letters by suggesting it to a friend! You can be a part of growing this part of the ministry from our current 520 subscribers to even more, as we encourage families to build their Trinity Houses with fresh insights and strategies on a weekly basis. Signing up is easy at www.trinityhousecommunity.org.
4. Are you encouraged by ministry testimonials like these which point to the ways individuals, couples and families are being blessed by Trinity House Community? Our ministry is 100% supported by individual donations. Join this story of grace and renewal by becoming a monthly supporter of the ministry at the level of $10, $25, $50, $100 or more. Your life-changing monthly or one-time gift is tax-deductible and can be set up in just a few seconds at our giving page. Thank you!
Please Join Us In Prayer
Deep down, we all want to be the servant who invests wisely, making a good return for our Master, rather than the one who misallocates what has been given. But even though our ideal is to be the “good and faithful servant,” we struggle to make the right decisions with our resources.
This question of good stewardship—the proper allocation of resources toward the greatest good—is at the heart of Level 3 of a Trinity House, the Household Economy. Why is it so difficult to invest our “time, talent, and treasure” toward God’s will for our home, family, and community, his will that we know will result in repairing the damage done by sin and building up God’s kingdom on earth?
It’s so difficult because the world and our own fallen nature tend to operate on a principle that is opposed to good stewardship. Instead of allocating our resources toward God’s will, we tend to want to direct them in a way that will increase ourselves—our comfort, our satisfaction, or our image in the eyes of the world. We want to spend our time, talent, and treasure on ourselves every time.
But when we mainly allocate our resources to growing what author David Brooks calls the Big Me, we eventually realize that those choices don’t lead to happiness. No matter how we try to assuage our sense of how we should experience our days or how we should look or what we should achieve, the results never satisfy. Hopefully, once we’ve hit that wall over and over again, we might come to really contend with how to spend ourselves.
This subject has been nothing short of a monumental struggle for us. Individually and as a couple, we’re both driven to misallocate everything we’ve got toward ourselves. In our life, this drive toward the Big Me is somewhat obfuscated by the fact that we are in ministry, but anyone with experience knows that even ministry can become a form of self-aggrandizement.
Over and over again, we’ve seen how we must turn to the concept of good stewardship to gauge whether the decisions we make—with our scheduling and how we spend our time, with our charisms and what we do with them, with our money and how we spend it—are really contributing to the greater good or just to a greater sense of self. Is our home really a Trinity House, a place where each learns to put the other first, or just a facade where each allows the other to vaunt the self?
One way to answer this question is to spend time with biblical teachings on stewardship. Here’s a compilation. These teachings have the power to expose the lie at the core of our society: that it’s my life, my career, my marriage, my kids, my home… These teachings have the power to gradually replace that lie with a commitment to good stewardship based on the recognition that everything we have is God’s. These passages even have the power to change us so that there is no conflict between God’s will and ours.
If you’ve already made these shifts in your own heart and daily life, thank God. But if not, take these passages and your role as a steward to prayer, asking the Lord to change the way you make decisions about your resources. We are still doing this ourselves, to say the least. Sometimes we feel we are in an endless loop of asking the Lord for this type of transformation!
Soon, we pray along with so many Christians, we won’t have to tense up when we hear the word “stewardship.” Instead, we can smile and give thanks to the Lord who chose us, made us His adopted children, and entrusted us as His stewards. In the end, there will be nothing to be defensive about—we will be truly good stewards of our time, talent, and treasure. Lord, help us to move away from the world’s “mine” mentality and toward what will truly make us happy!
Heaven in Your Home Toolkit
Bishop Barron illuminates the Parable of the Talents in this 8-min. video by drawing a connection between the talents and God’s mercy. “You can’t cling to it [God’s mercy] or bury it,” he notes. “What you have to do with the weightiness of God’s love and mercy is spend it as liberally as He does, and you’ll find it increasing 30, 60, 100-fold.” Amen!
What I Wish I Had Known About Stewardship by David Briggs at Christianity Today offers helpful insights, including, “Thankfully, in my mid-20s I was exposed to some outstanding teaching about the biblical perspective on stewardship. It changed the trajectory of my life. Things I had never seen before jumped out at me.”
What Are Stewards in the Bible? Meaning and Importance of Stewardship at Christianity Today includes a list of verses mentioning stewardship.
To Be a Christian Steward (A Summary of the U.S. Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on Stewardship) offers a comprehensive overview of stewardship. “The life of a Christian steward models the life of Jesus,” the bishops write. “It is challenging and even difficult, in many respects, yet intense joy comes to those who take the risk to live as Christian stewards.”
The Diocese of Charleston offers a number of resources entitled A Spirituality of Stewardship, including a Spiritual Gifts Inventory.
Around the Corner…
This Thursday, Sept. 17, Trinity House Community will partner with Fr. Thomas Cavanaugh of St. John the Apostle in Leesburg for the 2nd week in a 10-week Bible study called “Signs & Wonders: A Bible Study of the Gospel of John,” from 7:30-8:45 pm (in the sanctuary, and also on FB live via the St. John’s website) on Thursday nights. At the kick-off week, over 150 attended either online or in-person! Trinity House Community will continue to offer brief weekly challenges based on the Bible study and specifically focused on strengthening your home and family.
Testimonial
“The Heaven in Your Home Workshop has a lot to say about parenting, and we are grateful we attended. On a practical level, we loved the “project management” approach to creating relationship among our family members. We left the workshop and implemented it in our home that evening. On a spiritual level, we loved the focus on using the Holy Trinity as a model for familial relationships. We also attended a Trinity House Community Gathering event a few weeks after the workshop—it was a great place to socialize with other people who are walking the same path as us. Thank you to Soren and Ever for bringing a new approach to building up our family, and we can’t wait to continue participating in the Trinity House Community.” — Mark & Erin Voorheis, Leesburg, Va
4 Practical Ways You Can Help Expand the Trinity House Community Ministry
1. Pray for the ministry—for the many families who are striving to apply what they’ve learned in the Heaven in Your Home Workshop and Letters; for the hundreds of guests who visit the ministry’s Trinity House Cafe each week in Leesburg, Va.; and for the many families in our country who are struggling at this time, and in need of vision, encouragement and practical tools.
2. You can help the ministry of Trinity House Community by choosing us as your AmazonSmile non-profit recipient. Just go to to your Smile.Amazon.com page, and under “Your Account,” choose “Your Amazon Smile” and select “Trinity House Community” as your recipient. And then don’t forget to shop at smile.amazon.com rather than just at amazon.com. Thank you!
3. Help us to reach more families with the weekly Heaven in Your Home Letters by suggesting it to a friend! You can be a part of growing this part of the ministry from our current 520 subscribers to even more, as we encourage families to build their Trinity Houses with fresh insights and strategies on a weekly basis. Signing up is easy at www.trinityhousecommunity.org.
4. Are you encouraged by ministry testimonials like these which point to the ways individuals, couples and families are being blessed by Trinity House Community? Our ministry is 100% supported by individual donations. Join this story of grace and renewal by becoming a monthly supporter of the ministry at the level of $10, $25, $50, $100 or more. Your life-changing monthly or one-time gift is tax-deductible and can be set up in just a few seconds at our giving page. Thank you!
Please Join Us In Prayer
- For all those impacted by the fires in California and Oregon; and for all those battling these fires;
- For all students as they begin the new academic year, that they might grow in wisdom, age and grace;
- For all individuals and families, that they might deepen their roots in the grace, peace, and love of Jesus Christ during this time of uncertainty;
- For healing for those struggling with COVID-19, and for strength and safety for all medical personnel;
- For the staff and ministry of Trinity House Cafe, and all Heaven in Your Home Workshop participants;
- For unity and healing in our nation, and for wisdom for all public officials;
- For all parents, that they may be refreshed and renewed on a daily basis by the Lord in prayer, as they seek to lead their families through the uncertainties of this time.
In Christ,Soren & Ever Johnson
Founders & Directors
Trinity House Community
Making Home a Little Taste of Heaven
