Fall is a season of transition. The leaves begin to change, the days grow shorter, and cooler nights remind us that one season is giving way to another. In places where we experience four distinct seasons, fall invites us to prepare for what lies ahead.
For many congregations, fall also marks the beginning of a new year of Christian education and formation. It is a season when we welcome children and young people back into the rhythms of congregational life and remind ourselves that the formation of the next generation is not simply an educational task; it is a sacred responsibility.
One celebration I especially value is Blessing of the Children Sunday. When I served a congregation, this Sunday often brought children and families into worship, including families who were not members of the congregation. We blessed the children with the sign of the cross, prayed for teachers and administrators, and asked God’s protection over students as they traveled between their homes, bus stops, and schools.
But our prayers were never simply about getting children safely from one place to another. They were also prayers about the kind of world into which we are sending them.
We prayed for schools to be places of learning, belonging, liberation, and empowerment. We prayed for educators who have accepted the profound responsibility of nurturing young minds and shaping communities. We prayed for administrators and school personnel who carry this responsibility amid increasingly complex social realities. And we prayed for the safety of students in a society where violence has too often entered the places where children should be able to learn, grow, and imagine their futures.
Those prayers reflect more than my personal experience of education. They reflect a theological conviction: education is a matter of justice.
Every child deserves the opportunity to learn without fear, develop their gifts, discover their voice, and imagine a future beyond the limitations imposed by poverty, violence, racism, or social circumstance. When we pray for our children, therefore, we are not merely asking God to protect them. We are also accepting a responsibility to help create communities in which children can flourish.
Stewardship Is the Stewardship of Life
As we enter the fall season, let’s ask a broader question: What are our hopes for what comes next?
For the church, one answer is found in our understanding of stewardship.
When I speak of stewardship, I am not referring only to an annual financial campaign. Stewardship encompasses the whole of life: our time, our gifts, our relationships, our financial resources, our influence, and our responsibility for the world entrusted to our care.
The question that most often brings me back to this understanding of stewardship is found in Psalm 116:
“What shall I return to the Lord for all his goodness to me?” —Psalm 116:12
The question is deceptively simple. What can we possibly return to God for all that God has done for us?
The psalmist’s answer is not merely financial. The response encompasses worship, thanksgiving, service, commitment, and public witness. The psalmist speaks of lifting the cup of salvation, calling upon the name of the Lord, fulfilling vows in the presence of God’s people, and offering a sacrifice of thanksgiving.
The movement is significant. What begins as a personal experience of God’s goodness becomes a public expression of faith. Gratitude becomes responsibility; blessing becomes generosity; faith becomes action.
We Are Blessed for the Sake of Others
Psalm 116 is part of the Hallel collection, Psalms 113–118, traditionally associated with Jewish festivals and celebrations. These psalms give voice to gratitude, deliverance, praise, and communal remembrance.
The psalmist’s experience is personal, but the response is not private. That distinction matters for the church.
We live in a culture that often defines success in individual terms. We are encouraged to think about what we have earned, what we have accumulated, what we have accomplished, and what belongs to us. Scripture offers a different vision. It reminds us that our lives are gifts and that our gifts carry responsibilities.
The theological wisdom expressed in the phrase “I am because we are” points toward this understanding of human community. The biblical witness challenges the assumption that human flourishing is an individual achievement. Our lives are sustained through relationships, communities, institutions, and generations that precede and surround us.
If we have received an education, someone taught us. If we have opportunities, someone helped create them. If we have resources, someone invested in us. If we have experienced freedom, someone struggled to secure or protect it. If we have found our way through difficult circumstances, someone likely walked beside us.
Our lives are therefore profoundly interconnected. Stewardship asks not simply, “What do I have?” but “What has been entrusted to me, and how will I use it for the flourishing of others?”
Stewardship and the Work of Justice
This is why stewardship cannot be separated from justice.
Christian stewardship cannot celebrate the abundance of God’s creation while remaining indifferent to the economic and social conditions that prevent our neighbors from experiencing that abundance. We cannot pray for the safety of children while accepting violence as inevitable. We cannot proclaim that every person bears the image of God while tolerating systems that deny people dignity, opportunity, or voice.
The stewardship of life requires us to examine how our individual choices, congregational practices, and institutional commitments contribute to the well-being—or suffering—of the larger community.
It calls us to ask difficult questions:
Who has access to opportunity, and who does not?
Who is protected, and who is vulnerable?
Who has the resources necessary to flourish, and who is asked to survive without them?
What are we willing to share so that others may have what they need?
How are our congregations using their resources to address the conditions that shape the lives of our neighbors?
These are not questions outside the life of faith. They emerge directly from our understanding of God’s grace. The God who frees us also calls us to participate in the work of liberation. The God who provides for us calls us to become people who provide for others. The God who welcomes us calls us to build communities of belonging.
Stewardship, then, is not merely the management of what we possess. It is a vocation: the faithful use of what God has entrusted to us for the flourishing of God’s people and the healing of God’s world.
Worship Forms Our Stewardship
This understanding also changes the way we think about worship.
The next time you gather for worship, pay attention to the movement of the service. We begin with the Call to Worship. We confess our sins and hear words of assurance. We encounter Scripture and the proclaimed Word. We celebrate the Sacraments. We receive an offering. Finally, we are sent into the world with a Charge and Blessing.
This movement tells a theological story: God calls. God forgives. God speaks. God nourishes. God receives our gratitude. God sends us into the world.
Our worship is, at its heart, a response to God’s goodness.
We do not worship because God needs our praise. We worship because we have encountered grace. We do not give to purchase God’s favor. We give because grace has already been given to us. We do not serve because service earns salvation. We serve because God’s love calls us to participate in God’s work in the world.
This is particularly important when we think about the offering. The offering is not simply a means of meeting the church’s financial obligations. It is an act of theological witness. When we give, we acknowledge that our resources ultimately belong to God and that our lives are bound together with the lives of others.
Our giving can support ministries that proclaim the gospel, educate children, accompany people in crisis, strengthen communities, challenge injustice, and bear witness to God’s transforming love.
Stewardship Begins With Formation
This is why Christian education and stewardship belong together.
If we want to cultivate generous churches, we must cultivate generous disciples. Children and young people should learn that stewardship is not simply about putting money into an offering plate. This formation begins long before a young person can write a check. It begins when a child sees adults welcome a stranger, serve hungry neighbors, advocate for children and families, and demonstrate that faith has consequences for how we live and treat others.
The church’s ministry with children, therefore, is itself an act of stewardship. We are entrusted with the formation of people who will inherit institutions, communities, churches, and a world that we are shaping today.
Our responsibility extends beyond preserving the church we have inherited. We are called to consider what kind of ecclesial community, society, and world our stewardship will make possible for those who come after us.
The question is not simply what kind of church we will leave them. It is what kind of world we will leave them—and what kind of people we are forming them to become within it.
What Shall We Return?
As we enter this fall season, I invite us to consider what comes next by beginning with what came first: God’s grace.
Before we ask what we will accomplish, let us remember what we have received.
Before we ask what we will give, let us remember what has been given to us.
Before we focus on the church’s budget, let us remember the church’s mission.
Before we speak about stewardship as an obligation, let us reclaim it as an expression of gratitude and vocation.
And before we pray simply for God to protect our children, let us ask what God is calling us to do so that children can live, learn, worship, and flourish in communities marked by peace, justice, opportunity, and hope.
Psalm 116 asks: “What shall I return to the Lord for all God’s goodness to me?”
The answer is not found in a single offering, a single program, or a single act of service. It is found in a life shaped by gratitude and directed toward the flourishing of others.
God’s blessings are not intended to terminate with us. They are entrusted to us so that, through our lives, they may move outward into the world.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, “What is the chief end of man?” The traditional answer is, “To glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” Perhaps that is the invitation of this fall season: to glorify God, enjoy God, give thanks, share generously, pursue justice, and serve faithfully.
So, as the leaves change and another season begins, may we ask not only “What comes next?” but also:
“What shall we return to the Lord for all God’s goodness to us?”
May our answer be more than words.
May it be a life of praise.
Rev. Ashley
