00:00:00 Welcome to episode 687 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Derek Guajardo from strong life coach. I encourage you to find your own journey to building your own strong life. And one way to be inspired to do that is by listening to this, this inspired stewardship podcast with my friend Scott Mader, to not only protect ourselves, but to also expand and serve others.
00:00:34 I think often during scary times, organizations begin to look inward on themselves and begin to just focus on protecting themselves and Kiki, keeping themselves alive. Welcome, and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcasts. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling and the inspired stewardship podcast.
00:01:05 We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. And today's spiritual foundation episode about developing your influence. I talk with you about why we need stewardship as a community, how this view can change all of us and how you can foster this view within a community. So the last couple of weeks we've been talking about stewardship and we started looking at it as an individual and how it affects us ourselves.
00:01:46 And then we talked a little bit about what it means to do stewardship as a family, especially with a parent with children, but even wider than that, what it means to work with the people that are closest to you and do stewardship. And I want to expand out another level here and talk about stewardship as the little C church or as a community of people.
00:02:10 When we get together, whether it's at a formal church relationship or whether it's in just our local community or an organization that we're part of or group that we're part of. I think that it's important that this idea of stewardship be part of that community culture, this idea that we, as a community need to both take care of our resources, that we are blessed with both in terms of being responsible with those resource.
00:02:40 But we also have to look for ways to take those resources and use them in ways that influence and are positive on others. We have to work together to be able to take those influences and actually use them positively, take those resources and create a positive influence on the world. If you think about it, whether you're part of a nonprofit organization, whether you're a company,
00:03:08 whether a group of individuals that have bound together like a homeschool organization, or whether you're members of a church, there's this constant tension and balancing act between taking the resources that you've been given and actually using them in a responsible way to do the mission that you've been called to do, to do the things that you've been called to do, and actually protecting those resources,
00:03:33 being quote responsible with them. And that tension is always there, but I'm going to speak specifically about a church organization. You know, if, if we're constantly spending down to having nothing in the bank and having to go from emergency to emergency, we're unable to pay staff and these sorts of things. And it's hard to run a church organization. And yet at the same time,
00:03:58 the mission that we're most often called to do lies outside of the church walls at some level, it's about reaching out into the community in the world and providing and spreading the word out into the world and doing service and other things that show the goodness out into the world. And that can be really hard to do if those resources are not able to be used in that way,
00:04:25 this tension between being a responsible steward and also being missional is attention that I think plays out at all levels. You know, I talked about it at the individual level in terms of this idea of using stewardship for justice and using stewardship for benevolence and how it's also sort of something that we're called on and that can be caused us to kind of almost hoard our resources if we're not careful.
00:04:53 But I think having this tension is healthy because it causes a dialogue and that dialogue is what can change the way we view the world. This dialogue can begin to make us look at things, not as scarcity, not as something that we always will run out of, but begin to focus on the amazing abundance that God pours out on. All of us.
00:05:17 It can begin to focus on how can we partner with other organizations to expand our reach? How can we actually help the people that need help by also getting them to help themselves, not in a manipulative way, but by partnering with them, by asking them, what is it that you need? What is it that you want? How can we best serve you?
00:05:39 Because instead of just looking at ourselves as the great hope that comes into a community and just pours out all of these resources, we can recognize that we get much further by partnering by growing, by serving, and by actually asking and talking and communicating. It changes the view you have of your organization. And I think it changes it in a healthy way.
00:06:05 As you begin to bring this tension into the, come into the organization, into the community and you begin to recognize it and be pulled back and forth. So how do you actually foster this feeling of stewardship? You know, I think you do it by raising the counter argument. See most, most organizations already have a culture. Most organizations already have a culture where by they're either sitting inside themselves and really focusing on protecting their resources and making sure that what they have today,
00:06:41 they still have tomorrow, or they tend to be focused on using those resources often in a way that leaves them strapped and causes problems. And this tension between these two can be created in a healthy way, by having a dialogue about it, by asking questions, is this what we're being called to do with these resources? Are we being called to protect them today?
00:07:06 And if so, why are we being called to use them today? And if so, why, what would it look like if asking those sorts of questions in a healthy way, and having that dialogue is how you begin to instill this communication. You look for the opportunities that we always have as an organization to not only protect ourselves, but to also expand and serve others.
00:07:34 I think often during scary times, organizations begin to look inward on themselves and begin to just focus on protecting themselves and Kiki keeping themselves alive. When in reality, recognizing that they have an opportunity to go outside of themselves and make an impact, even if their resources are very low, is a more healthy attitude. But it's hard to do that when you're scared.
00:08:01 So asking these tough questions, having these tough conversations, making people begin to think about what does it look like to be a steward? And what does it look like to be in mission and how these two things might at first glance be against each other, but in reality are in alignment is a good start. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast,
00:08:35 as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you enjoy this episode, do me a favor, go over to facebook.com/inspired stewardship and like our Facebook page and market that you'd like to get notifications from us so that we can connect with you on Facebook and make sure that we're serving you to the best of our abilities with time and tips there until next time,
00:09:15 invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact the world.