Restoring the Meaning of Stewardship: Vocation in an Age of “Me First”

On April 29, 2026, Jerome Powell stood at a podium for the last time as Chair of the Federal Reserve and did something quietly remarkable. He reminded the room — and through them, the public — of why the institution exists at all. “The Federal Reserve exists for one fundamental purpose,” he said, “to foster the economic conditions in which American families and businesses can thrive — stable prices, a strong job market, and a financial system they can depend on. Every decision we make — whether about interest rates, or regulatory and supervisory matters, or other issues — is made in service of that purpose.”[1]

It was not a triumphant exit. Powell had led the Fed through some of the most turbulent years in its history — the pandemic, the worst inflation in four decades, and a political pressure campaign unlike anything a Fed Chair had faced in modern memory. He was criticized from the left and the right. He was publicly pressured by the White House to lower interest rates at moments when his mandate — and his judgment — told him to hold. He was investigated. He was threatened. And through all of it, he held the line. Not because he was indifferent to the pressure but because he understood something that the current cultural moment has largely forgotten: the role he occupied did not belong to him. It belonged to the American people. His job was to serve them, not himself.

In an era defined by the logic of “me first” — politically, economically, professionally — Powell’s final statement is a small and striking counter-witness to the dominant spirit of our moment. Here is a man who, at the moment of maximum personal freedom, chose the obligation of the post over the comfort of departure. He did not ask what staying produces for me. He asked what the institution requires of me.

That distinction — between what a role offers you and what it requires of you — is older than the Federal Reserve. It is as old as the question of what it means to be entrusted with something that belongs to another. It is, in fact, the question that sits at the center of one of Jesus’ most searching and least comfortable parables. In Matthew 24 and 25, in the shadow of the cross, with his disciples asking about the end of the age, Jesus tells three parables about servants entrusted with their master’s goods while he is away. Together they form a sustained meditation on what it means to steward well the goods of another in a world that tells you those goods are yours to use however you wish — keeping you first, always for you — and that when uncertainty rises, the wisest move is to play it safe, to protect what you have, and to wait for better conditions. It is, in other words, a passage written for a moment very much like ours.

But before we arrive at the parables, we need to go further back. Stewardship is the original human calling. When God made humanity in his image in Genesis 1 and 2, he placed them in a world of extraordinary abundance and gave them a vocation: to tend it, to cultivate it, to care for it on his behalf — not to own it, not to extract from it for personal gain, but to represent the character of the creator in the management of what he made, in a way that makes the world more fruitful, more flourishing, more alive. The fall distorted that calling — turning stewardship into ownership, abundance into scarcity, the care of the world into the exploitation of it. But redemption restores it. The redeemed life is not a life waiting passively for the consummation. It is a life already living out, in the long interval between redemption and the renewal of all things, what it means to be the steward the creator always intended. The question for all of us who inhabit this in-between time — whatever our vocation, whatever our season of life — is not whether we have been entrusted with something. We have. The question is what it means to steward it faithfully in the actual life we are living, in a world that has largely forgotten what stewardship is for.

In the Parable of the Talents we meet three servants. The master, before departing on a long journey, entrusts each of them with an extraordinary sum — five talents to the first, two to the second, one to the third — each according to his own ability. A single talent represented roughly fifteen to twenty years of a laborer’s wages. This is a staggering, almost incomprehensible sum placed into the hands of ordinary servants. The master gives no instructions, no investment thesis, no timeline for his return. He simply entrusts and departs. When he returns after a long time and settles accounts, he finds that the servant given five has produced five more, and the servant given two has produced two more. To both of them he says the same thing: “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.” But the third servant comes forward with nothing but the original talent, wrapped in a cloth and buried in the ground. He had been afraid. And what looked like caution is met with the severest of judgments.

This parable, embedded within Jesus’ teaching on the end times, is not simply a story about money. It is a portrait of what it means to be entrusted with something that belongs to another — and what faithful stewardship looks like in the long interval before the master’s return. In it we find three movements that together define what it means to steward well.

The first is the most foundational: steward faithfully. When the master returns and settles accounts with the two servants who have put his money to work, the word he reaches for is not ROE. Not IRR. Not maximally profitable or strategically optimal. The word is faithful. In a world where the success of any deployment of capital is measured by return on equity, internal rate of return, and annualized yield, the master reaches past all of those metrics. His verdict reveals his criterion: were you faithful with what I gave you? Of all the things he could have said — well done, shrewd servant, well done, productive servant — he says “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Faithfulness is the first and foundational criterion of good stewardship. And it is a word that has nothing to do with outcomes and everything to do with posture.

The third servant fails not because he produces a poor return but because he does not try. His failure is the failure of faithfulness — and the parable is careful to show us why. He has constructed a theology of the master that makes faithfulness feel irrational. “Master, I knew you to be a hard man,” he says, “reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed.” A master like that, he thinks, is not worth risking for. He buries the talent and waits. When the master confronts him, he does not simply rebuke the decision — he exposes the logic behind it. The master himself says: “Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest.” But we must be careful not to miss what the master is actually saying. Banking in the ancient world was nothing like the regulated, insured, governed institutions we depend on today. Depositing money with a banker in first-century Palestine carried its own substantial risk of loss. The master is not pointing to a safe alternative. He is pointing out that even the riskiest conventional option would have been better than doing nothing at all. The servant did not try. He did not move. He did not act. Precisely that — the complete absence of effort, the total refusal to engage — is what the master judges. “You wicked and slothful servant,” he says. Notice what he does not say. He does not say you failed. He does not say you took a risk and lost. He says you did nothing. In the economy of the kingdom, inaction is not neutral. It is wickedness.

Scripture does not leave us without a portrait of what faithfulness in the interval actually looks like. It gives us Joseph. What makes Joseph so searching a portrait is not merely that he was faithful — it is the conditions under which he was faithful. The third servant was handed a staggering sum and chose to do nothing with it. Joseph had everything taken from him — his robe, his freedom, his youth, his family, his future. He did not receive a talent. He was stripped of everything he had. Sold into slavery by his brothers. Falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife. Forgotten in prison by the cupbearer he helped. At every turn the circumstances conspire against him. At every turn Joseph is faithful anyway — faithful in Potiphar’s house, faithful in the prison, faithful in Pharaoh’s court. The third servant buried his talent because he was afraid. Joseph had nothing left to bury — was faithful anyway. Not because of sheer willpower or professional discipline. But because of a deep, settled conviction that the same God who gave the dreams would be present in the prison, that the one who made the promises would be faithful to them regardless of what the circumstances suggested. Joseph was faithful because he believed God was faithful.

This is what it means to put faith into action. Faithfulness is not merely a virtue or a professional ethic. It is faith made visible in the ordinary decisions of a working life — the same movement a child makes when they step toward a parent with arms outstretched, not because they have calculated the odds but because they know who is holding them. Joseph stepped forward in every circumstance — the pit, the prison, the palace — not because the conditions were favorable but because he knew whose hands he was in. That is the root of faithful stewardship — nothing more, nothing less, than taking what has been entrusted to you and putting it to use. Not hoarding it. Not protecting it from risk. Not leaving it idle. Faithfulness is simply faith in action — the refusal to let what God has entrusted to you sit still. It is the foundation of everything we mean when we talk about stewarding our vocations, our capital, our lives well.

The second movement is this: steward redemptively. The master’s commendation has two words, not one. “Well done, good and faithful servant.” We have dwelt on faithful. Now we turn to “good.” When the master says good, what does he mean? Does he mean good returns — the financial productivity the servants have demonstrated? Or does he mean something deeper about the quality and effect of the work itself? In the biblical vocabulary, good is not merely a quality of character. It is a description of effect. Good work is work that produces life. It is the word God uses over creation in Genesis 1. The world that came into being through his labor was good — teeming, flourishing, abundant, life-giving. When Jesus tells his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount to let their good works shine before men, he is not calling them to impressive religious performance or works-based salvation. He is calling them to pour the life of redemption into the labors of their daily work — to let it overflow into everything their hands touch, as a sign to the world around them that something has changed, that a different order has broken in, that the kingdom is already present and already producing life. Good work, in other words, is not the condition of redemption. It is the evidence of it. But what does that actually look like in practice?

The judgment scene of Matthew 25 follows the Parable of the Talents without interruption precisely to answer that question — to show us what good work looks like in its most concrete form. The Son of Man sits on his throne. The nations are gathered. The criterion of judgment, when it finally comes, is shockingly ordinary: bread for the hungry, water for the thirsty, welcome for the stranger, presence for the sick and imprisoned. But this is not works-based salvation. Jesus is not saying feed the hungry to earn your place in the kingdom. He is showing us what the lives of the redeemed actually look like from the outside — lives in which faith has become action, in which the new order of the kingdom has broken into the ordinary texture of daily work, in which redemption has produced its inevitable fruit. The redeemed do not feed the hungry to be saved. They feed the hungry because they are saved — because the life of the kingdom is already in them and it cannot help but overflow into the world around them. This is the new order. This is what redemption looks like when it takes root in a vocation. And in this light the master’s commendation becomes luminously clear. When he says “Well done, good and faithful servant,” he is not simply praising financial productivity — though the productivity matters and the returns are real. He is recognizing servants who have taken the capital entrusted to them and put it to work in a way that generated life — who have let the talent become bread, presence, dignity, restoration. Profit and life-giving work are not mutually exclusive. The master celebrates both. But he names the deeper one first. That is what good work is. That is what it means to steward redemptively.

Joseph’s vocation was not only faithful — it was redemptive through and through. What is striking is that it begins not in the palace but in the prison. Even there, in the lowest and most forgotten place of his life, Joseph is attending to others. When the chief cupbearer and the chief baker are thrown into the same prison, Joseph came to them in the morning and saw that they were sad. He does not ignore them. He does not protect what little energy he has left for himself. He asks: “Why do you look so sad today?” He listens. He counsels. He interprets their dreams — not as a professional service but as an act of care for two men in distress. He uses the very talent he has — the ability to interpret dreams — not for self-advancement but in service of others. This is redemptive stewardship at its most ordinary and most costly — attending to the need in front of you even when your own need is overwhelming. It is also, as it turns out, the small faithful act that builds toward the larger one. The cupbearer’s dream leads to Pharaoh’s dream, which leads to Joseph’s release, which leads to the administration of Egypt’s grain supply that saves the known world from famine. Redemptive stewardship rarely announces itself. It begins with a question asked in a prison to two troubled men — and ends with a civilization kept alive.

But the redemption Joseph’s stewardship produced was not only agricultural. It was relational and covenantal in ways that could not have been planned or predicted. His brothers come to Egypt for grain and find, standing behind the throne of the most powerful empire on earth, the brother they sold into slavery twenty years earlier. In that moment Joseph holds more power over them than any person ever held over those who wronged him. He could have taken revenge. The logic of self — the America First logic, the maximize my own return logic — would have demanded it. He does not. He weeps. He reveals himself. He restores. He says: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” If Joseph takes revenge there is no reconciliation. There is no Israel. There are no twelve tribes, no covenant people, no lineage through which the Messiah comes. Joseph’s decision not to use his vocation for self-vindication but for redemption is not merely personally virtuous. It is cosmically generative. His good work — work that produced life rather than taking it, surplus alongside restoration, grain alongside reconciliation — participates in the unfolding of God’s own redemptive purposes in history. This is what the master’s second word means. Good work is redemptive work. It bends toward the restoration of what is broken — relationships, communities, systems, bodies. Surplus and life-giving work are not enemies. Joseph’s administration of Egypt produced both — and the master who says “good and faithful” in the parable is pleased with both.

The third movement is this: steward eschatologically. Of the three movements this is the most distinctive — and the most misunderstood. We know what faithfulness looks like. We recognize redemptive work when we see it. But eschatological stewardship sounds abstract, theological, distant from the day to day realities of our lives. It is in fact the most practical of the three — because it is the one that gives the other two their ultimate meaning and direction.

To steward eschatologically does not mean to predict when the master returns. This is where the surrounding parables become most instructive — and most searching. In the first parable of Matthew 24:45-51, the wicked servant says to himself: “My master is delayed” — and that assumption licenses the abuse of the interval. He beats his fellow servants. He eats and drinks with drunkards. He lives as though the reckoning is far off. In the second parable of Matthew 25:1-13, the five foolish virgins make the opposite mistake. They assume the master is coming soon — soon enough that a small amount of oil will suffice. They do not prepare for the long wait. Both figures are calibrating their behavior to a guess about timing. Both are catastrophically wrong.

In contrast, the two productive servants in the Parable of the Talents never once ask when the master is returning. There is no calculation, no estimate, no hedging of behavior against a projected timeline. The master departs — they simply work. Faithfully. Immediately. Without reference to when he might come back. This is the first liberating insight of eschatological stewardship: the timing does not need to be known. What needs to be known is who the master is and what he is building. The two servants did not know when he would return. They knew what he had entrusted to them. They put it to work. Their deployment of capital — the five talents, the two talents, set immediately into motion — was itself an act of alignment with the master’s purposes. They were not waiting for the end. They were working toward it.

This is what it means to steward eschatologically. The Scriptures are not silent about the destination. God is moving all of history toward the complete renewal of creation — the world made finally right, every broken thing restored, the new Jerusalem coming down, death mourning crying pain passing away. This is the telos of all things. Not a vague hope or a distant abstraction. A destination. A promised end toward which the whole of history is being drawn. Eschatological stewardship is the discipline of letting that destination — not the timing of it but the reality of it — define the praxis of business, investment, vocation now. Not as an aspiration that floats above today’s decisions. But as the living horizon that reaches down into them — shaping what gets built, how capital gets deployed, what gets refused, what gets risked, what gets aimed at. The destination determines the direction. The coming kingdom defines the present work. This is why eschatological stewardship requires resurrection faith — the conviction that the master is returning, that the reckoning is real, that the new creation is not a metaphor but a destination toward which all faithful work is already moving.

The judgment scene of Matthew 25:31-46 is the destination made visible. The Son of Man on his throne. The nations gathered. Every act of stewardship across the entire interval — every deployment of capital, every decision made in faith, every surplus generated, every relationship restored — now stands before the one who entrusted it all. The criterion of judgment, when it finally comes, is not a financial report. It is not an ROE or an IRR. It is bread for the hungry, water for the thirsty, welcome for the stranger, clothing for the naked, presence for the sick and imprisoned — the living signs of what the redeemed life looks like when it is poured into vocation. This is what the new creation looks like from the inside. This is the world the master is coming back to restore — not an abstraction, not a theological concept, but a world where the hungry are fed, the forgotten are remembered, the broken are made whole. The eschatological steward is the one whose present work is already shaped by that coming world  —  who has let the destination so thoroughly invade the present that the life of the new creation is already visible in the texture of ordinary working days. Telos and praxis become one — the destination of all things folding into the texture of ordinary working days. The coming kingdom is not something waited for — it is something already being lived into, one act of faithful stewardship at a time.

Joseph understood this at the deepest level. On his deathbed, after a lifetime of faithful and redemptive vocational labor, he says something that reveals the eschatological horizon within which all of it was done. He tells his brothers: “I am about to die, but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” And he makes them swear an oath: “God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here.” He knows that his story does not end in Egypt. He knows that God is moving toward a promised future — the Exodus, the covenant, the land, the kingdom — and he wants his bones to be part of that movement. His entire vocation of saving the world from famine was not merely humanitarian or even redemptive in a general sense. It was eschatological — a present enactment of a future salvation, a foretaste of the great deliverance that was coming. The telos of all things — the complete renewal of God’s covenant with his people — defined the praxis of his administration of Egyptian grain. He stewarded in light of what God had promised, and he asked that even his dead bones be oriented toward that promise — toward the resurrection and renewal of all things that is still to come.

The question for every generation that follows is the same: what would it look like to steward the resources of our own moment — our capital, our companies, our vocations — with that same orientation toward the world that is coming? In 2006, John Mars — chairman and one of the family owners of Mars Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the world — asked his internal think tank a version of that question, one that had apparently never been asked in the history of modern business: what should the right level of profit be for the company? In the world of Milton Friedman’s financial capitalism, the answer was assumed — as much as you can possibly extract from the value chain. But John Mars suspected something different. He suspected that true stewardship of a company required more than maximizing financial returns for shareholders — that taking too much profit actually weakened the whole chain, that a business is only as strong as its weakest link.

That question, given to an internal think tank called Catalyst, became the seed of an entirely new economic framework — one that stewards not just financial capital but the full range of what sustains human flourishing: social capital, human capital, natural capital alongside financial capital.[2] Tested at both extremes of the market — from the poorest communities in East Africa to the wealthiest consumers of premium pet food in Europe — what began as one honest question has become a model called the Economics of Mutuality: a rigorous, empirically grounded framework that seeks to steward profit and purpose together, creating profitable solutions to the real problems of the world and regenerating the communities, relationships, and ecosystems that financial capitalism has largely treated as externalities.

No economic system is perfect. The Economics of Mutuality is not the kingdom of God, and it makes no such claim. But it is, in the language of the parables, a signpost — a provisional, imperfect, but genuine approximation of what the economics of creation were always meant to be. In many ways it echoes the logic of Jubilee — that ancient Old Testament vision of an economy that gives rest to laborers, to the land, and to capital itself, that remunerates every participant in the value chain rather than extracting from them without limit. An economy, in other words, that treats the whole of creation as something worth stewarding rather than consuming. This is not yet the new creation. But it points toward it. A business model that asks what is the right level of profit rather than what is the maximum profit, that accounts for the flourishing of communities and the health of the land alongside the financial return, that refuses to treat people and ecosystems as mere externalities — this is a business already living, however partially, by the logic of the world that is coming. These are the signposts of the kingdom. Not the destination. But arrows pointing unmistakably toward it.

In a world where the true meaning of stewardship has been lost — drowned out by the logic of me first, maximum extraction, protect what you have — our Lord Jesus, in the shadow of the cross, with his disciples asking about the end of the age, tells three parables about ordinary people managing ordinary responsibilities in the absence of the one who gave them their assignment. Through these parables he does not tell them to withdraw. He does not tell them to wait. He tells them to steward — faithfully, redemptively, eschatologically — and in doing so to participate in the mission of God that is broader and deeper than any single vocation, any single company, any single act of faithful deployment of capital. The mission of God that began in a garden, was carried through a famine by a dreamer in an Egyptian prison, was embodied in the life and death and resurrection of the master himself, and will not be complete until the one who entrusted the talents returns to make all things new. This is the telos — the ultimate vision — that is to be embodied in the praxis of our vocational stewardship now, in this world of the already and the not yet. We do not yet possess the new creation. But we are called, in every act of faithful stewardship, to live as though we already belong to it.

[1] Jerome H. Powell, “Transcript of Chair Powell’s Press Conference,” Federal Reserve, April 29, 2026, www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCpresconf20260429.pdf.

[2] Jay Jakub, “Jubilee and the Right Level of Profit,” Christian Business Leader with Darren Shearer, hosted by Darren Shearer, May 12, 2026, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-KcmtGiFfE.