Do you ever have a nagging sense – maybe when you hear Jesus tell the “Rich Young Ruler” to sell everything he has and give it to the poor, or when Jesus tells his disciples that it is harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God– that Jesus had a different message about wealth than much of what gets said in church: “Support the stewardship campaign!” “Give generously!” “We need to be prudent stewards of the endowment!”

Miguel Escobar, after many years working as a self-described “church bureaucrat” for Episcopal institutions in New York City, had such a nagging sense; so, he researched and wrote a book exploring his questions more deeply, The Unjust Steward: Wealth, Poverty, and the Church Today. The book looks at the evolution of Christian thinking about money over the course of its first 500 years through twenty-four “snapshots” of Christian theologians and saints from that time period.

I found Miguel to be an insightful and provocative conversation partner based on his intimate knowledge of very different worlds of faith and wealth. Growing up in small-town Texas, as the grandson of Catholic migrant farm workers, Miguel has a deep appreciation for how the announcement of Jesus’ arrival as the Son of God in the Gospel of Luke heralds good news for the poor. As Mary sings in the Magnificat, “[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” In the world of his grandparents, Mary’s news about what God promised for the rich and for the poor was Good News. As an adult, Miguel has worked for the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Episcopal Church Foundation, and for Episcopal Divinity School at Union. In these roles, he has worked with and for wealthy organizations and individuals. For them (and for me), Mary’s news is challenging news.

Miguel and I talked about the worlds and experiences that have shaped his thinking around Christianity and wealth; the history of the church “stewardship campaign” and its ethical complexity; his advice for wealthy churches like Trinity Wall Street (Trinity has over $6 billion in its real estate portfolio); the parable of the unjust steward as an alternative ethic for “promiscuous generosity” (a phrase Miguel credits to Louie Crew); how to work through feelings of hypocrisy and shame around being wealthy and Christian toward faithful action; and the threat of middle-class churches becoming “boutique version[s] of Christianity” that don’t include the poor.

Helpful Links

• Here is a link to Miguel’s book, The Unjust Steward: Wealth, Poverty, and the Church Today.

• Here is a New York Times story about Trinity Wall Street, The Church With the $6 Billion Portfolio

• Miguel talks about the history of pew rentals, a common way that churches collected money prior to stewardship campaigns.

• There is more here about the history of the “every member canvass” replacing pew rentals in the early 20th century.

• Miguel references the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s critique of the stewardship model of Christian fundraising. Here is more about Reinhold Niebuhr. Miguel summarizes Niebuhr’s critique in the introduction of The Unjust Steward.