Legacy, Not Idolatry

Editor’s note: Monthly articles from LCMS Stewardship Ministry are hosted here on The Lutheran Witness site. Visit the “Ministry Features” page each month for additional stewardship content.

Stewardship leaders in local congregations have a multifaceted task before them. Few doubt the importance and impact of stewarding the Gospel in the present. Cultivating stewards who are faithful in worship, willing in service and consistent in financial support is central for Word and Sacrament ministry.

Preaching and teaching count on this. The local congregation’s Gospel presence in the community is made possible in this stewardship formation effort. Partnerships in mission and ministry regionally and internationally count on this. Stewardship in the present, while not always embraced by pastor and people alike, is essential!

Generations of faithful stewardship

But there is a second, more often forgotten, element to stewardship that needs to be considered. This is what is often referred to as “legacy” stewardship. This involves the lasting support of Word and Sacrament ministry that outlives the individual steward. Often called estate planning, it involves terms like bequests, wills, trusts and others. But the single most important part of legacy stewardship involves the death of the steward. For this reason, very few people want to talk about it!

This is unfortunate because legacy stewardship is a very impactful way to extend the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In congregations that have been around for more than a couple of decades, legacy stewardship is the foundation of the current stewardship. Faithful stewards of generations gone by are the ones who laid the foundations, not only of the building, but the entire framework of ministry that happens in the present day.

It is legacy stewardship that led a handful of families to take out mortgages on their farms and hold the debt privately rather than by the congregation in order to build the “new” church in 1890 to handle the influx of immigrants. In another congregation, it led families to commission and pay cash for stained-glass windows between the difficult years of 1929–1933. These instances provide a place for the current stewardship of the Gospel in these settings.

For other congregations, it is legacy stewardship that has set aside funds for ongoing Christian education in their communities and ongoing mission work around the world. Legacy stewardship plays a critical role in present and future ministry. Steward leaders would do well to attend to it.

The Gospel is for us, not about us!

But there is also a danger in legacy stewardship. It faces the same danger as every human heart and human endeavor: idolatry. Human stewardship is fraught with the danger of having the goal of the person, not the Lord, remembered.

Many congregations are pockmarked by nameplates that point to the donors rather than to Jesus. Humans fear being forgotten. Walk through a local cemetery and you will see names and dates of people who have long been forgotten. Certain sections of the cemetery haven’t had a visitor or fresh flowers placed in decades.

Dead and forgotten is not much of a legacy. In an effort to avoid this, sinner/stewards seek to leave something to remember them by. A building. A window. A hymnal. Something — anything — to avoid being forgotten.

But this flies in the face of the stewardship of the Gospel. The Gospel is FOR US, but it is not ABOUT US. Legacy stewardship that is about remembering a fallen, yet redeemed steward leaves a gap that may become idolatry. The human heart, which is an idol-making factory, can easily turn a building or a window that was originally entrusted to the congregation for Gospel ministry into an idol. Idols are clung to at the expense of the Gospel.

The Gospel is what points to the completed work of Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary. His perfect stewardship of the promise of the Father to the point of death, even death on the cross, is now the treasure of the Gospel that has been entrusted to the Church to steward. Any and all legacy stewardship that is to be regarded as faithful is stewardship that points only to Jesus!

LCMS Stewardship ministry features may be reprinted with acknowledgment given to The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.