In the past, "stewardship" referred only to the main servant of a home.
The concept of stewardship has several meanings. According to the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ), it is the position , employment and office of the butler : that is, the main servant of a home or the officer who controls the expenses and administration of a brotherhood or congregation.
Resource management
In a broader sense, stewardship refers to the efficient management of resources , appealing to responsibility and ethics . This meaning is linked to the definition that we mentioned in the previous paragraph about the servant of a house.
Stewardship, at first, was the work carried out by the servants who were in charge of bringing the drink and food to the dining room . Little by little, the butlers began to take on more tasks until they were in charge of managing multiple issues of the family that employed them.
The use of this term had decreased considerably by the 21st century, as the job itself is becoming less common today. We must not forget that in its original use, it referred not only to a servant but in particular to one who attended to a family that lived in a castle , that is, to people of nobility.
Stewardship for clients
By extension, stewardship later began to be referred to as the service provided to the passengers of a means of transportation and to the customers of a restaurant , aimed at satisfying their needs. Thus we arrive at the use of the notion that is associated with the responsible administration of resources that belong to other people .
In this framework, stewardship implies avoiding the dilapidation and deterioration of other people's property . Even when it is feasible, it should favor the multiplication of said goods .
for religion
In the field of religion , finally, it is understood that stewardship is the ordering of one's life according to God's designs . The human being, in this way, is not the owner of his existence, since it belongs to divinity, who grants him time, resources, etc. to the person to manage them.
It all began with Creation, when God made the heavens and the earth, as well as all living beings and the objects that we can find in them. For the Christian religion, God is the absolute owner of everything and everyone , so he has the first and last word on its existence. A good Christian cannot ignore this point, since it is one of the bases of religion. Therefore, the first step to understanding stewardship is to accept our character as “third parties” in the world.
Among the purposes that God had for us is stewardship
The relationship that human beings have with God is explained in depth on the numerous pages of the Bible. We are administrators of our own lives, but not as isolated entities or without value in our individuality, but rather as collaborators of the Father , since He places complete trust in us from the first moment of our life. The use and control of our belongings also enters into this task, although they should always be given less importance than life.
All this is summarized by the apostle Saint Paul in a passage from his letters to the Corinthians, where he also defines us as "God's husbandry and building." If we start from this way of seeing the relationship of the human being with God and Creation itself, we can understand stewardship not as a concept that a person arbitrarily devised, but as the purpose that God himself had for us when he created us.