Beware the enemies of stewardship

“But I have this against you, that you have lost the love you had at first” (Rev. 2:4).

Stewardship was never designed to be an inherited mechanism. It is a lived response.

Every great movement of grace must eventually face the test of time. Stewardship is no exception.

Across the Church, communities that once embraced the stewardship way of life with pioneering zeal now live within its inheritance. The vision once forged through risk and prayer has become familiar – trusted, dependable, even assumed. What began as a daring act of faith can, with the passing of years, quietly lose its edge of wonder.

The history of the Diocese of Wichita offers a clear case study. The first generation – the pioneers of the mid-1980s – took the risk of faith. Around kitchen tables and parish halls, they prayed, debated, and decided to trust God’s providence. They stepped away from tuition-based models, chose to give from the heart, and built a Church that could live its mission through faith alone – a community, as they said, “funded by faith.”

The people of the second generation inherited that vision. They did not have to construct the system; they were raised within it. For them, stewardship was no longer an experiment but the ordinary air of parish life: something proven, stable, reliable.

Now comes the third generation: young men and women – single, married, and raising families – who have never known a parish without stewardship. It has always surrounded them as something assumed, dependable, and quietly present.

That familiarity presents both a grace and a danger: grace because the vision has endured, danger because what is inherited can too easily be taken for granted.

As the Book of Revelation warns: “But I have this against you, that you have lost the love you had at first.”

Third-generation stewardship faces temptations unknown to the pioneers:

• Amnesia – remembering the fruits while forgetting the roots;

• Complacency –  when sacrifice becomes routine, and the heart forgets its first love;

• Assumption – when familiarity replaces formation, and no one stops to retell the story;

• Fatigue – when repetition dulls wonder and gratitude lags;

• Entitlement – when gratitude fades into expectation, and we begin to feel owed; and

• Quid Pro Quo – when giving turns into a transaction and grace becomes calculation.

What began as a radical act of trust risks settling into comfortable expectation. The challenge is no longer external opposition but interior erosion: a slow cooling of gratitude, a quiet dulling of generosity, a fading memory of what once felt miraculous.

If the first generation built stewardship through risk and faith, and the second sustained it through gratitude and habit, the third must renew it through memory and conversion.

Stewardship was never designed to be an inherited mechanism; it is a lived response – a daily decision to receive and return the gift of grace. Every generation must choose it anew.

To name these enemies is not to cast blame but to bring the picture into focus. In early photography, the negative revealed the contours and contrasts that made the true image visible. So too with stewardship: Only by studying its shadows can we recover its full color and light.

Every virtue has its distortion. Gratitude can grow dim. Generosity can harden into demand. Mission can slip into maintenance. Recognizing these distortions allows us to recover the living image – the radiant, Eucharistic life God continues to develop within his Church.

The task before us is not to lament what has faded, but to remember what first set us aflame: the grateful conviction that everything is gift. When that memory returns, stewardship is no longer a system to preserve. It becomes once again what it has always been – a joyful, sacrificial response to a Father who has given us everything.

Throughout Lent, some parishes will publish brief “bulletin bits” that unpack six of these enemies of stewardship. The goal is not criticism, but clarity – to help us recognize subtle distortions before they take root. Awareness is a form of vigilance. When we can name the danger, we are better able to defend the gift.

And that love must be chosen again.