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Most ministries hit a ceiling somewhere. You get busy. You run out of weekends. You run out of staff. Sooner or later you start saying “no” more often than you say “yes.”

We hit that ceiling. And rather than shrink back, we decided to rethink the whole model for how we teach biblical financial stewardship.

So let’s say this plainly at the start: what follows is not a wind-down. It’s the beginning of something bigger.

 

How We Got Here

Life Institute began in 1986 as the ministry wing of Life Financial Group. The goal was simple. Help local churches and individual Christians apply biblical principles to their money.

Over the decades, that work expanded nationwide through the Stewardship Lifestyle Seminar. Tens of thousands of families have walked through those weekends. Honestly, the number may be well into the hundreds of thousands by now.

Our mission has never changed: help Christians become even better stewards over all of the assets God has entrusted to them.

The Hard Limits of a Live-Only Model

The three-day seminar is powerful. We’ve seen God use it in ways we could never have engineered. But the format comes with limits that no amount of effort can get around.

It only exists live. There are only so many staff members. And once you factor in holidays, special Sundays, summer schedules, and the needs of our own families, there are roughly 20 usable weekends in a year.

That creates two real problems.

First, scheduling becomes extremely difficult. Churches that want the seminar sometimes wait a long time for a date.

Second, our own team members get pulled out of their local churches and away from their families on the very weekends they should be home.

Here’s the bottom line. The three-day seminar is still a very important part of this ministry. It just isn’t scalable.

Why We Started the Stewardology Podcast

Since we couldn’t scale the seminar model on its own, we started a podcast. Praise the Lord, it has grown and taken on a life of its own. It has reached people we never would have reached through live events alone.

But there’s an honest trade-off worth naming.

The podcast is a drip campaign. It’s excellent for someone who has never attended a seminar, and it’s a great reminder and encourager for those who have. What it can’t do is the deep, sequential work that a multi-session course does. Twenty minutes to an hour at a time is wonderful. It just isn’t intensive.

The Video Curriculum We’ve Been Praying About for Years

A scalable video curriculum has been on our hearts for a long time.

Think of something in the same category as Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University, but gospel-centered and distinct in its emphasis. A curriculum like that gets biblical financial stewardship into homes, small groups, and churches all over the world.

It lets the work of the ministry expand far beyond the number of weekends our team can physically travel. We’re sharing a brief overview of the curriculum in the next episode, so stay tuned for that one.

Will the In-Person Seminar Disappear?

Short answer: no.

Both the seminar and the video course will continue. They simply serve different levels of engagement, and we think they’ll strengthen each other. We’ll unpack exactly how the two work together in the next episode.

Why We’re Moving Toward the Name “Stewardology”

“Stewardology” is a term we coined during COVID. It means the study and application of biblical stewardship, and it captures our passion better than anything else we’ve come up with.

Whether you’re a pastor, a church leader, a stay-at-home mom, a business owner, or a young adult just getting started, the question is the same. How do we honor God with the resources He has entrusted to us?

We’re creating a new division that will house all of these efforts:

  • The Stewardship Lifestyle Seminar
  • The Stewardology Podcast
  • The upcoming video curriculum
  • Additional resources for pastors, students, church finance teams, and counselors

The goal is a clearer one-stop shop for biblical financial stewardship education.

This is not a retraction. It’s an enhancement. Instead of keeping everything under the Life Institute banner, which has primarily served pastors and churches through the seminar, we want to place these offerings under the broader name Stewardology. That name communicates what we’re actually passionate about, and it makes the resources more accessible to the wider body of Christ.

We’re still in the planning process. We don’t have every answer yet. But this is something we’ve been pondering for quite some time, and we’d be grateful for your prayers as we walk through it.

Three Passages Shaping Biblical Financial Stewardship in This Season

  • 1 Peter 4:10 (ESV) — “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace.” This verse captures the heart of everything we’re trying to do. Every believer has received something from God. Our entire ministry exists to help people steward that varied grace well, whether it’s money, time, influence, or opportunity.
  • 2 Timothy 2:2 (ESV) — “and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.” The live seminar model is limited by the number of people we can personally teach. A video curriculum and a broader set of resources let us entrust these principles to faithful men and women who can then teach others, multiplying the reach far beyond what our travel schedule ever could.
  • Habakkuk 2:2 (ESV) — “And the Lord answered me: ‘Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.'” We’re in the middle of clarifying and writing the vision for this next season. Making it plain is exactly what we’re after, so that churches, small groups, and individual families can pick it up and run.

Would You Pray With Us?

We’d genuinely love your feedback on this. What resources would be most helpful to you, to your family, or to your church? What’s the gap you keep running into?

Send your thoughts and ideas to StewardologyPodcast.com/idea. We read every one of them.

 

 

Next Steps

 

Material presented is property of The Stewardology Podcast, a ministry of Life Financial Group and Life Institute. You may not copy, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, or exploit any content without the expressed written permission of The Stewardology Podcast. For more information, contact us at Contact@StewardologyPodcast.com or (800) 688-5800.

The topics discussed in this podcast are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific investment advice or recommendations.  Investing and investment strategies involve risk including the potential loss of principal. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.

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