Stewardship: Generosity Report 2026

The organisation Stewardship recently published their third generosity report, seeking to capture ‘fresh insights into the impact of faith on generosity and the factors shaping Christian giving across the UK today’.

The key highlights are as follows:

Trust and generosity

1. Trust in local church leads to greater generosity

2. Regular teaching on generosity helps build trust

3. Trust leads to gratitude and joy in giving

Giving habits

4. Fewer Christians are giving in response to appeals

5. Over 25% of Christians give from savings

The future of giving

6. The wealthy, the young and ethnic minority Christians expect to give more

7. Younger givers are more open to teaching on generosity and appeals to give

8. Younger Christians talk more about giving

Further information is available here, from where (with an email address) a pdf of the report can be downloaded.

Stewardship: Generosity Report 2024

The organisation Stewardship recently commissioned a report to understand better how to help their partners - churches, charities and Christian workers – invite generosity and grow support.

The key highlights are as follows:

1. Regular church attendance more than doubles propensity to give

Practising Christians, who attend church, and read their Bible on a monthly basis, are more likely to give to every type of cause including their church.

2. Engaged faith leads to engaged giving

Practising Christians are most likely to budget to give monthly donations to their chosen Christian causes.

3. An appeal or personal approach triggers spontaneous giving

The research showed that most giving is reactive, rather than proactive. People need a prompt to consider giving.

4. Those who trust the causes they support are likely to be more generous to all causes

We found that those who trusted their church ‘a lot’ were much more likely to be regular donors across all causes (giving at least once a month).

5. People will feel more driven to give if they feel connected to a ministry or cause that can make a difference

The decision to give again, sign up for regular giving digitally, or increase giving is often a result of seeing the impact of giving, as well as feeling appreciated and connected to the cause.

6. Fewer people give to Christian workers, but the donations made to them are higher than for other causes

One of people’s top reasons for giving to Christian workers in the quantitative phase was ‘I could see how my money would be spent to directly benefit someone’.

7. Two key barriers to giving are feeling unable to afford to give and a lack of trust that donations will be used well

50% of those surveyed said that they can’t really afford to start giving or give more (it is worth noting this research was conducted in November 2023, when the cost-of-living crisis was acute), but we should also consider other barriers to giving.

8. Those who discuss their giving tend to give more themselves

Over 1 in 5 (22%) of those who give more than 11–15% of their income discuss their giving with friends or family more than every few months. Over 3 in 5 (61%) of those that give less than 1% never discuss their giving.

Further information is available here, and a pdf of the report can be downloaded (with an email address) from here.

Walter Brueggemann on Money and Possessions

Walter Brueggemann, Money and possessions (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2016).

Since I saw it announced, I’ve been looking forward to seeing this volume by Walter Brueggemann in the ‘Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church’ series.

Westminster John Knox has made available a pdf except here.

Here are some paragraphs from the Preface:

‘The purpose of this book is to exhibit the rich, recurring, and diverse references to money and possessions that permeate the Bible. While we might conventionally assume, as we do in practice, that economics is an add-on or a side issue in the biblical text, an inventory of texts such as I offer here makes it unmistakably clear that economics is a core preoccupation of the biblical tradition.

‘In writing the book I have, in ways that have surprised me, come to the conclusion that the Bible is indeed about money and possessions, and the way in which they are gifts of the creator God to be utilized in praise and obedience. In such a frame of reference, money and possessions are of course intensely seductive, so that they can reduce praise to self-congratulations and obedience to self-sufficiency. Whatever is to be made of this expansive inventory of texts, it is clear that the economy, in ancient faith tradition, merited and received much more attention than is usual in conventional church rendering.

‘It is my hope that this exhibit of textual materials might evoke in the church a greater attentiveness to a keener critical assessment of the extractive economy around us in which we are implicated and a more determined advocacy for an alternative neighborly economy congruent with and derived from the gospel we confess. It is clear enough that voices that may champion and legitimate such alternative policy and practice are minimal in our society; the voicing of such alternative urgently requires the recovery of the tradition of neighborly money and possessions that has been entrusted to us.’

Christian Reflection on Generosity

The latest issue of Christian Reflection, published by the Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University, is available online, this one devoted to ‘Generosity’. The whole issue is available as a pdf here, and an accompanying Study Guide is available here. The main articles, with their abstracts, are as follows:

Robert B. Kruschwitz

Introduction

Since generosity echoes God’s love, practicing it in our lives and congregations is essential. Our contributors explore the distinctive features of Christian generosity, its central role in discipleship, and why its practice is so difficult in a consumerist culture.

Douglas V. Henry

Generosity of Spirit

Generosity names not merely something we do, but an admirable quality of character, something we are. Undergirding the character of truly generous people is a special awareness of themselves, others, and God’s gracious provision for the world, and this understanding inspires genuinely generous activity.

Kelly D. Liebengood

Paul’s Expectations of Generosity

True generosity requires us to give to those in need and make a place for them in our gatherings. Such generosity, Paul reminds us, is enabled by the transforming grace of God manifested in the self-emptying life of Jesus Christ and made accessible through the life-giving Spirit.

K. Jason Coker

Subversive Generosity

God’s reign, founded on God’s subversive generosity, opposes Roman oppression in the New Testament. Today it provides the moral vision to see through the distortions of consumerism and gives an alternative way to understand our obligations to one another and to God.

Patricia Snell Herzog

Solving the Riddle of Comfortable Guilt

Most of us admit that our giving behavior does not match our personal or our religion’s ideal of what it should be. Yet we are oddly content with this. Why do we have this comfortable guilt, and how can we change our habits to be rid of it? 

Ruben Swint

How Congregations (and Their Members) Differ on Generosity

Not every church member responds to the same message about giving. Not every congregation’s culture supports the same approach to developing faithful stewards, or generous givers. What variables in congregational life foster giving differences in members and congregations?

Heidi J. Hornik

Imperial Gifts

Heidi J. Hornik

Stopping to Help

Anthony Carl

All Who Thirst

Sharon Kirkpatrick Felton

Worship Service

Jonathan and Elizabeth Sands Wise

In This Old House

While generosity typically involves donating money or goods, it includes giving less material things. In this way, hospitality is a species of generosity, a making room and giving space to others in your own place, or in your attention, or in conversation. 

Richard Stearns

Time to Tithe

In our culture, the chief competitor to dependence on God is money – what it can buy and what it symbolizes. We need to give generously in order to inoculate ourselves from the virulent cultural diseases of materialism and consumerism. Unfortunately, we are not getting our vaccination shots. 

Allen Walworth

Unlikely Champions: A Widow’s Might

Scripture tells many stories about unlikely generosity champions, men and women who play out their lives, often in obscurity, except for the watchful eye of the biblical narrator – and God. They are champions of the human spirit. Upon their faithfulness the world turns, and the kingdom of God advances. 

Jo-Ann A. Brant

Generosity in the Bible

Most of us wish to be more generous. The four books reviewed here not only demonstrate the centrality of the call to generosity that runs through the biblical canon, they also provide practical advice about how we can turn our well-meaning intent into action.

Arthur M. Sutherland

Toward a Theology of Generosity

Americans long have wrestled with how God gives, the obligations of the rich toward the poor and the poor toward the rich, and how generosity shapes public life. Three recent books continue the struggle by surveying, probing, and depicting generosity as an orientation toward life.

Stewards of the Gospel

An edited version of this article first appeared in the November edition of EG, published by LICC. The material had its origins in a series of seminars on stewardship at the Keswick Convention 2013, facilitated in partnership with Stewardship. See their website for further information and helpful resources and ideas on exercising generosity in different areas of life.

Stewardship, like discipleship, embraces the whole of life. More than just what we do with our money or our careful use of natural resources, stewardship encompasses every aspect of our existence, for all that we are and all that we have belong to God. Living generously and giving generously – whether of time, talents, treasure, or truth – is a way of acknowledging and living out God’s own generosity towards us.

Lavish Generosity

Ask a group of Christians for the best-known verse in the Bible about giving, and you’re likely to get several responses. A few might quote Acts 20:35, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’, words attributed to Jesus. Others may think of Jesus’ teaching on giving secretly rather than ostentatiously (Matthew 6:2-4), or the account of the poor widow’s offering (Mark 12:41-44). Still others will recall Paul’s treatment in 2 Corinthians 8-9 of his collection for the poor.

As it happens, the best-known verse in the Bible about giving is the best-known verse in the Bible – John 3:16 – ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son...’ And this is where we begin as stewards – with the God who freely gives us all things, not least his Son for our salvation. God is a giver – the supreme giver – of the supreme gift, which flows out of supreme love. His nature as one-in-three, three-in-one reinforces that, unspoilt love existing and expressed between Father, Son, and Spirit.

So it is that everything belongs to the Father, the creator and redeemer, whose abundant generosity flows out of his love, and who entrusts us to serve him and others with all he gives us as an act of worship and an expression of faith. Generous stewardship thus gets to the heart of our identity as disciples of the Son – seeking to live as those who follow the self-giving pattern of the one who became poor so that we, through his poverty, might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9). Then, empowered and enabled by the Spirit, stewardship embraces every dimension of life, as we offer ourselves to God and experience the liberation that comes with keeping in step with the Spirit, bearing his fruit in our everyday lives (Galatians 5:13-26).

Our generosity in how we steward flows from the abounding generosity we have first been shown by God himself. How great the love the Father has lavished on us. How amazing the grace of Christ in becoming flesh and dying and rising again for us. How precious the work of the Spirit in our lives, renewing us in the image of God.

Faithful Stewards

Our identity as stewards is woven through Scripture. It’s there, notably, at the start of the story. Created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-30), men and women are together called to be stewards in God’s house of creation on behalf of God – delegated to govern as God would, who created it to flourish and valued it as good, and placed our first parents in the garden of Eden to till and keep it (Genesis 2:15).

However, the stewards chose to ignore that the house belonged to God, and claimed it for themselves. They continued to work in it, but did so mostly to satisfy their own desires, not as stewards in the service of God. That’s where human beings now find themselves – caught in the tension between being made as stewards but where the exercise of that stewardship is distorted and frustrated through sin. But God wouldn’t leave things like this. Out of the overflow of love, he gave his Son to redeem the world, to reconcile rebellious men and women to himself, to restore relationships between alienated human beings, and ultimately to renew creation itself – and he recommissions his people as redeemed stewards to work in the world in his name.

As such, we are called to be faithful servants. This theme emerges in several of Jesus’ parables, where a master entrusts money to his servants to trade with while he is on a trip (e.g., Matthew 25:14-30), where the issue at stake is the loyalty of his servants while he is away. They are to represent him during his absence in the full confidence that he will return. As in Genesis, the steward is entrusted with resources that belong to another, and faithful stewards invest the resources as he intends them to be used – in his service and for the flourishing of others. ‘Each of you’, writes Peter, ‘should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms’ (1 Peter 4:10).

Graceful Mission

What might this look like in our relationships within the church and in our calling to take part in God’s mission to the world?

We get a flavour in 2 Corinthians 8-9, where the presenting issue is the giving of money to those in need, but where the principles are more widely applicable. Here, the model of generosity is Jesus (8:9) and the motive for generosity is the gospel: ‘Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, people will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone else’ (9:13). That provides a means of self-diagnosis. Do we find that generosity makes sense – of who Jesus is, of what the gospel is? Our desire to be generous stewards is one of the ways we know we’ve experienced the grace of God for ourselves.

Generosity with time, for instance, speaks volumes about where our trust lies. It’s also profoundly countercultural in a society pervaded by a sense of time poverty – the feeling of being constantly stressed, rushed, overworked and behind, with no time for oneself let alone others. And yet, we’re all too aware of the significance of investing time into people and relationships in order for them to flourish – helping a child with their homework, preparing healthier meals, visiting someone in need, making that phone call we’ve kept putting off – being generous stewards of time. Power and authority, likewise, are gifts to be stewarded, to nurture the best environment in which others can thrive – in the home or at work. If I steward the authority entrusted to me as a manager or a leader or a parent well, I paint in a positive light God who is the source of all authority.

Crucially, though, stewardship is not just about treasure, time and talents, but about the way we view our life on earth in Christ as his missionary people in this time before the end. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 4:1, ‘This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.’ For Paul, this is bound up with the revelation of God’s plan of salvation centred on Jesus. We are stewards of that mystery, that story of salvation, and it is our task as his created-and-fallen-but-redeemed stewards to express his redemption in the different areas of our lives, to gesture towards what will one day be the case when we dwell in a new heavens and a new earth. Being stewards locates us in the grand scheme that God is bringing about – not as masters of the universe, but nor as mere puppets either. God has entrusted us with the gospel of the kingdom, and it is through us – as stewards of his grace – that God chooses to continue his act of reconciling the world to himself.

Further Reading

Gerard Berghoef and Lester DeKoster, Faithful in All God’s House: Stewardship and the Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Christian’s Library Press, 2013).

Craig L. Blomberg, Christians in an Age of Wealth: A Biblical Theology of Stewardship (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013).

Kelly M. Kapic with Justin Borger, God So Loved, He Gave: Entering the Movement of Divine Generosity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010).

NIV Stewardship Study Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009).

R. Scott Rodin, Stewards in the Kingdom: A Theology of Life in All Its Fullness (Downers Grove: IVP, 2000).

Seasons of Giving (London: Stewardship, 2013), available from Stewardship.

Amy L. Sherman, Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good (Downers Grove: IVP, 2011).

Keswick Convention 2013 School of Stewardship

I had an enjoyable time last week in the Lake District, at Week 1 of the Keswick Convention 2013. Among other things, I was leading four seminars in a stream called the ‘School of Stewardship’. Although with the full support of LICC, by whom I am employed, I was largely doing these seminars on behalf of Stewardship, a great organisation staffed by some wonderful and lovely people.

The theme of the Convention this year is ‘The Transforming Trinity’, so we tried to allow the Christian conviction about the Trinity to shape our reflections on stewardship. Given how God has revealed himself – as Father, Son, and Spirit – and given who he is and how he works in the world and in us, what kind of stewards ought we to be? What might a theology of stewardship look like if we start with the creating God, the redeeming Christ, and the empowering Spirit?

Stewardship posted the handouts from each of the sessions on their website, currently available at the links below.

• Father – generous Giver

• Son – generous Lord

• Spirit – generous living

• Church – generous community

In addition, a fairly full list of resources (mostly books) is available here.

Stewardship have also posted links to several other helpful, practical documents.