We are just one week from our Season of Stewardship, which begins in October. I thought this year I would lay out some fundamental principles of faithful Stewardship before we get started.

1. Stewardship is partnership with the Lord.

2. The Lord promises to bless us. The Lord gives us talent, ability, opportunity, and resources to share with others.

3. We partner with God to fulfill his purpose when we use the gifts God give us to fulfill his purpose.

4. There is no faithful stewardship without a call to commitment.

Simple, that is all there is to it.

Our Stewardship Season comes at a time when our government struggles to address an economic crisis in our economy. The crisis is, no doubt, the most sweeping crisis our economy has faced since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Some say this crisis is even greater.

The cause of this economic crisis is both simple and complex. The complexity comes from the tangled web of financial instruments (Sub-prime Loans, Bundled Mortgages, Credit Default Swaps) that were created as a hedge against greed. But in an era of excessive greed, there is no hedge sufficient to prevent catastrophe.

Now, the government is trying desperately to rescue an economy that teeters on the brink. I am confident government intervention will fail. It will fail, even if it succeeds. As a matter of fact, if the 700 $Billion bailout succeeds it will teach exactly the wrong lesson: Greed has no consequence.

The single most important insight into the nature of complex markets was expressed by Adam Smith in 1776. Individual behavior in the economy (driven by self-interest) manages the relationship of supply and demand better than human intervention. This is the “Invisible Hand” of classical capitalism.

The market “corrects” for unwise economic choices. Businesses that make unwise decisions fail. Today’s crisis is expressive of the Invisible Hand. A “correction” is underway. If the correction is potentially catastrophic and massive in scale it is only because the folly of the economic choices of millions of Americans over the past twenty years or so has been massive in scale.

Unwise choices related to the housing market have been made for years and years – buyers buying more house then they can afford, mortgage brokers colluding with buyers in misrepresentation of income on loan documents, bank managers willingly looking the other way in order to increase their book value, investment bankers buying mortgage paper and hedging their investment against bad debt in a mind boggling shell game to play both sides of the balance sheet until the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

This behavior spread across millions of transactions can only lead to consequences that are catastrophic and massive in scale. And we have not even mentioned credit card debt, a parasitic health care system, and other systemic distortions of value that deny our responsibility to live as faithful stewards of God’s blessing.

I’m looking forward to the Season of Stewardship this year. I think we are going to have a lot to talk about.