The combination of scientific research about the last 4-5 billion years and written history for the past few thousand years, indicates that creation was designed to grow, change and evolve. My personal experiences and observations over the past nearly seven decades confirm that we do evolve and grow and some of our most satisfying and exciting experiences are when we are thinking, reading or doing something that promotes growth. Michael, bless your heart, you did me a favor and honored me by asking me to share some thoughts with this great group about what I’ve been thinking, reading and doing. You caused me to grow by your request and I want to say thanks publically for the stimulation.

Also, I’d like to thank Brad Cecil even though he is not here and Tuck and Mark and all of you for the ways in which you generously share ideas through stuff you send out either directly or through Michael’s mailings. I specifically mentioned Brad because I felt he had some very important messages for us in February. I’ve listened to the tape of his comments several times since then. For the most part I agreed with his comments and I want to build on some of the things he said. As for specifically mentioning Tuck, his mailings nearly always include a piece entitled "The Times, they are Changing." I always enjoy reading his stuff and I have to agree the times really are changing; and at an ever accelerating rate.

And to the many teachers, authors and writers who provide much to think about, particularly the man named Jesus, I’m grateful.

Introduction

What I want to share with you is a potpourri of ideas about where we seem to be headed, how we got on the course we’re pursuing and the stewardship implications this course seems to have. I also have at the end, three, specific, but brief, recommendations for your consideration.

At the outset, let me tip my hand by saying that I believe a radical course correction is in order for the future in both our culture and our stewardship.

______________________

* Brad spoke to the February, 2001 Chicago meeting attended by DCM, deployed staff and others. His topic was stewardship leadership in a rapidly changing world; the nature of the changes and how to deal with them. He emphasized the importance of listening to, and sharing, authentic, personal, faith experience stories. He opined that open-minded, flexibility would be key to leading in what appear to be the turbulent times ahead for the institutional church.

I tried mightily to come up with a catchy title for what I want to share and couldn’t. Things I considered included:

Evolution and Stewardship

Thinking Outside the Box

The Original Sin

Stewardship of Consciousness

Emergence of Spirit and the Beginning of Stewardship

Thinking, Reading and Doing

None of these felt right so I just called it:

"Thinking about Thinking and How Thinking Relates to Stewardship"

Before getting to the meat of my comments, let me digress for a moment to tell you just a bit of what Brad Cecil might call my personal story. Perhaps this will help you know a little about where I’m coming from.

Our Sense of Mission Affects Our Thinking

I’m a fairly straight-forward guy who has made a life-long practice of asking questions and trying to think about what’s important and meaningful. Sometimes I did this well and sometimes poorly. In addition, I’ve been happily married to the same wonderful woman for 45 years. She was responsible for my being a Lutheran and that’s only one of the zillion things for which I’m grateful to her. I spent my entire adult working career with one company. It was in the energy and power generation field. During that career, I had much interesting and challenging work.

In connection with one of my last business career efforts, I helped to introduce a total quality program into our company. While in the midst of that effort which covered about two years, I developed – purely for my own purposes – a personal mission statement. This was not an easy task. I spent bits of time during a six month period scratching down thoughts, filing them away and revising them as time permitted. What I was trying to do was come up with something brief that could serve as a sort of guide or reference for my life, something that could serve as a high-level basis for making decisions and thinking about my role in the world as I had come to understand it. I certainly didn’t have stewardship in mind when it was developed but God works in mysterious ways. It actually was, and still is part of my story. As a way of putting my response to Michael’s request in perspective, I like to share my mission statement with you. My mission is to:

Honor God in everything I think, say or do.

Love all of creation unconditionally

Help other people live meaningful lives

Move the world’s value system toward permanent sustainability

Continuously Improve all the talents I’ve been given

Vision To become an ever more joyful servant in all the roles I play so that when this phase of my life ends, it can be said: "Well Done"

Creating and periodically referring to this mission statement has been at times helpful and at times painful. I highly recommend the process to any of you who have not done this.

As I have looked at this statement on many occasions since developing it, and particularly since taking on my church work, I have found it to be very much related to Stewardship; particularly when stewardship is considered from a whole-life or whole-creation perspective. You are all very familiar with whole-life stewardship and I’ll describe whole-creation stewardship a bit later.

Changing Our Thinking About Stewardship

Now before inviting you to think outside the traditional stewardship box with me, let me give a few stewardship definitions, most of which you will readily recognize.

- Stewardship is everything I do, after I say ‘I believe’

- Stewardship is putting faith into action

- Stewardship is love in action

- Stewardship is responsible, loving, accountable management of life

- Stewardship is how we live our whole lives

- Stewardship is how we use our time, talent and treasure

You no doubt could add many more to the list.

I mention these traditional definitions because they can serve as a reference for the remainder of my comments which I hope, by the time I’m done, will have an obvious and hopefully expanded relationship to stewardship.

Scripture Supports Right Thinking

What I’d like to do now is talk about stewardship from a perspective that is a bit non-traditional. I refer to this somewhat non-traditional aspect of stewardship as Stewardship of the Mind or Stewardship of Consciousness or even Stewardship of our Thinking or Stewardship of the Spirit.

As a scriptural underpinning, I’ve chosen some words from Paul’s Letter to the Romans:

Romans 12:1-2 NIV "Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will."

A Major Cultural Change Is Underway; A Change In What We Consider Important

I am convinced that Brad Cecil was absolutely right when he said to us in February, "We are on the edge of the greatest shift in epistemology that the world has experienced in the last 500 years." Complementary words from a different perspective are found in one of the books I’ve read recently: "Servanthood" by Bishop Bennett Sims of the Episcopal church. This book about Servanthood is in fact a great Stewardship book. Let me quote two paragraphs from the Preface:

The emergence of servanthood as a way of leading represents a new hold on the old truth that greatness lies in serving (Mark 10:35-45). It coincides with the leading edges of a vast turning point in human history, a sea-change of greater magnitude than any since the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago that inaugurated the use of human power to manipulate and exploit the earth. More and more we see the futility of "superpower" politics and its reliance on domination, threat, weaponry, and violence as problem-solvers. The atomic bomb cracked open the door to this perception; the unchecked advance of human population and industrial plunder has thrown it wide open. Slowly, very slowly, the value of caring for one another and for the earth gains the respect of the powerful. For their leadership of the world, made increasingly one, they need the supportive "velvet and steel" of millions at all levels of human leading, from parenting to presiding. They need plain people committed to the enduring power of love.

Love appears to have been here since the dawn of human consciousness, but contemporary science would go much further back in the history of the universe to speculate on love’s antiquity. Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, building on molecular bonding as an empirical reality, developed a view which quantum physics now ratifies. Quantum theorists are certain that there is a caring pulse of energy that animates and interconnects all the entities in the cosmos. Teilhard put his speculation outrageously for his time: "Molecules make love." For this statement, and others like it, his church’s hierarchy banned the publication of his books. But time has moved many hearts. Progressive thinkers in all contemporary fields now know and favor what Teilhard pioneered as a scientist theologian. Molecules do make love - or something akin to it – in their compulsion to reach for one another in creating the communities we call living organisms.

With increasing frequency, we read and hear mention of the importance of new ways of thinking about the world we live in. An increasing number of forward-thinking business leaders are talking about Servanthood, Stewardship and Love.

Looking Back In Time; Change Picked Up Speed When We Became Conscious

I think it can be helpful to look at the past when we are trying to understand the present or trying to look into the future to see where we may be headed. If our journey is picking up speed or there is reason to question the direction we’re headed, we may want to consider both our speed and our heading. We may find it very important to look at the forces affecting where we may be some months or years in the future. We could even learn that – like a large ocean liner – our direction and speed can’t be changed in sufficient time to avoid a collision.

Brad Cecil described quite well the past and some of the changes which have taken place particularly since the time of the printing press. I want to go back a bit further – about 10-15 billion years and relate it to Stewardship.

Brad also spoke about the hunger that seems to be growing for non-judgmental, experience-based faith stories. If everything we do after we say ‘I believe’ is our stewardship, then certainly experience-based stores are our stewardship. I want to expand on what Brad said by probing or at lest speculating about what may be causing the changes he talked about.

Now let’s go back in time. Let’s see if we can discern where something connected to stewardship first came into view. Perhaps its possible to put what we’ve been promoting in the area of stewardship for the past few decades into some sort of longer time perspective.

This whole wonderful thing we call creation began somewhere in the time frame of 10-15 billion years ago with what is commonly called the "BIG BANG". The universe literally exploded into existence and for the first several billion years stars were forming and disintegrating. The lighter elements like hydrogen and helium were forming. About 4.6 billion years ago the earth was formed. Matter had evolved but ht had taken somewhere around 10 billion years for creation of the more than a hundred chemical elements to form. God was clearly taking his time.

This chemical diversity became the foundation stone for living systems, and as soon a life became established, the rate of development increased. Changes took place not over billions of years but over millions – and later, even faster.

These lengthy time scales are a long way from our everyday experience; consequently it is hard to visualize the accelerating rate at which things were occurring. To help see this visually, think of the progress of Creation in comparison to New York’s tallest building, the World Trade Center which contains 108 floors.

If street level represents the formation of the earth, 4.6 billion years ago, the first living cells appeared 3.5 billion years ago on the 25^th floor. Photosynthesis evolved around the 50^th floor and bacteria that breathed oxygen about 10 floors later.

More complex cells, capable of sexual reproduction and possessing a central nucleus, appeared at about the 70^th floor. Multicellular organisms came about 10 floors later and crustaceans existed on the 95^th floor. Fish appeared at about floor 97 and crawled out of the sea on the 99^th. Homo Erectus did not walk on two legs until a few inches from the top of the top floor. It had taken 99.99% of life’s journey to reach this step and humanity was just beginning.

The Neanderthals, with their enlarged brains, simple tools and tribal culture, appeared in the last ¼ inch. Then came the Cro-Magnon people, with clothes, painting and language.

The Pharaohs ruled Egypt a fiftieth of an inch from the top. The Greek and Roman empires thrived a hundredth of an inch above that. Christ was born and ministered in that time people. The Renaissance occurred in the top 1/1000^th of an inch. And all of modern history occupies the thickness of a microscopic bacterium.

The age of the microchip, nuclear power, space travel, global warming, and the internet and the life of the ELCA is a layer almost too thin to measure.

One thing is clear; wherever we are going, we are going there faster and faster. But where are we going? What does the future hold?

As we ponder the Creation Story in Genesis, it may be logical for us to ask the question on Tony Everett’s bumper sticker: WIGIAT? (Where is God in all this?) And hey, Jim Taylor, what in the world does creation and evolution of the universe have to do with Stewardship? I’ll get there.

Some of you may have read with interest the July 23 issue of Time Magazine. The feature article was: "How Apes Became Man". You can bet that Time doesn’t run feature articles unless they are pretty confident of a high level of reader interest. People, both inside and outside the church are interested in this topic. The article expanded on some of the "upper floor" portions of the previous figure. It presented in a different way, the manner in which humans came onto the scene.

With Consciousness Came A New Quest and New Questions

One clear overall impression we get from this information is that God made an evolving, changing universe that is pro-life. (And by pro-life, I mean really PRO-LIFE in the broadest sense of the word; not just pro-human life.) For 15 billion years it has been striving to survive and change into higher forms. Something very unusual happened, however, somewhere around 100,000 years ago. Until that time the evolutionary process had been characterized by physical or biological changes. About that time something happened in the evolutionary process for homo erectus and human evolution took a dramatic turn. Consciousness came into the picture. For reasons which probably only God knows, we beings called humanoids became conscious or our existence. This, then, began the evolution of consciousness. Humans began thinking instead of acting solely on instinct.

And from a stewardship perspective, we can say that if everything we have is a gift from God, consciousness is one of those gifts; to be appreciated, cared for and managed well.

In other words, evolution took on a new, non-physical dimension. Creativity and language came into the picture and this gave evolution another boost. It was no longer necessary for each life to evolve solely on its own experiences of what worked and what didn’t work. Ideas could be shared and one being could learn from the experiences of others. But something else came along with the evolution of consciousness. Our drive to survive took a turn which is very relevant to stewardship; relevant to how we lead our lives. With consciousness came the beginning of a search for meanings and psychic or non-physical survival. Until consciousness came into the picture, the drive for survival was strictly physical. The physical drive for survival was well established; it had been in place for millions of years. With consciousness came the need for the spirit to survive. This brought a new evolutionary challenge: How to meet this need and satisfy this new drive.

At some point along the way, humans began pondering questions such as:

- Why am I here?

- Is this better than that?

- Where did I come from?

- Am I important?

- Why did that happen?

- How do I relate to that person or being or object?

And then the "Biggie"

- What happens when I die?

In the drive of consciousness and the spirit to survive, humans have come up with an almost endless array of stories, practices and gimmicks, and the proliferation of these survival techniques is accelerating in our time. The story of one way in which one segment of the human race did this is recorded in the Hebrew Bible; otherwise known as the Old Testament. The church and particularly the Christian Church is into survival of the spirit. Jesus spoke often about it. I personally believe all the talk about the Kingdom of God could more appropriately be called the Kingdom of the Spirit. I believe in some ways we can view the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as a group of stories about how one segment of the human race struggled for physical and psychic survival.

Other religions have different stories and traditions. Psychologists and psychiatrists have still more.

We are still today asking these same types of questions. Am I important? How do I relate or compare to that person? Am I OK? What happens when I die?

It is my conviction that this pursuit of spiritual or psychic wholeness is closely related to much of the dysfunction in our world today; that many of the issues we classify as separate problems (e.g., drugs, violence, war, family issues, etc.) are, in fact only symptoms of a deeper matter.

Let me try to give an engineer’s picture of what happened when and after consciousness came onto the evolutionary scene. Figure 4

Plotted on the vertical axis is something that could be labeled "HUMAN EFFORT SPENT ON SURVIVING" and on the bottom axis we have "TIME". There are two curves. Look first at the upper curve which has to do with effort spent on physical survival. In the time frame of 100,000 years ago, a large portion of effort was spent on satisfying physical needs; when consciousness and creativity and language came into the picture, the required physical effort began to decrease and for many people in the industrialized world today, the effort is still going down if we look strictly at basic physical survival. Now notice the lower curve showing effort spent on psychic or spiritual survival. When consciousness first entered the picture, the effort was low. I perceive that it has been constantly increasing particularly for people whose basic physical needs have been met.

Let me suggest an unoriginal explanation for the problems of the spirit or psyche that we seem to be facing in the 21^st Century and it has great stewardship implications. Jesus dealt with it often in his ministry. A growing number of us are trying in vain to satisfy spiritual needs with physical stuff. And we receive thousands of messages each day convincing us that it will work. Right thinking about satisfying spiritual and psychic needs is counter-cultural.

I think to a large extent, the needs of the spirit are still confusing people today. And I’m talking about people both within and outside the church. We still haven’t figured it out. But then again, we have only been working on it for 50,000 years or so, and in God’s time, that’s not really very long.

There are now in the 21^st Century a growing number of voices and writers and organizations that seem to be coming at the matter of spiritual survival and spiritual health from different directions. They use different words and call it by different names but there are similarities. Some of the voices are within the church (although often on the edges) but a growing number seem to be outside or separate from organized, institutional religion. From outside the church there are books like:

Waking Up In Time by Peter Russell. This is a wide-ranging, thoughtful book. I agree completely with one reviewer who said: "The principal spiritual challenge of our moment is the transformation of our immense power into planetary wisdom." For anyone interested in participating in this task, there is simply no better place to begin than with Peter Russell’s book.

The Emerging Mind This is a series of essays by recognized writers on the role of mind and consciousness in our world. The essays are based on a series of lectures sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute.

Who Moved My Cheese? Without ever mentioning stewardship or survival of the spirit, that’s precisely what this book is about. It is a simple and profound little book by Spencer Johnson who co-authored The One Minute Manager and wrote several other books of immense and practical value.

And from within the church, from some writers I have come to appreciate for their courage and forthrightness, a sample of very insightful and thought-provoking works are the following books:

Why Christianity Must Change Or Die by Bishop John Shelby Spong

Reading The Bible Again For The First Time by Marcus J. Borg

The End of Christendom and The Beginning Of Christianity by Douglas John Hall

I see a connection in all of these books and essays to our human search for the "Keys to the Kingdom" that Jesus spoke about and to our quest for psychic and spiritual health and meaning. I also see a connection to our way of seeing the world; our stewardship of thinking and consciousness. Each of these writers is, in their own way, expressing their own search for spiritual wholeness. In a variety of ways, I hear them saying the same thing Paul said in Romans 12:2 (NEB)

Adapt yourselves no longer to the pattern of this present world, but let your minds be remade and your whole nature thus transformed. Then you will be able to discern the will of God and to know what is good, acceptable and perfect.

We are stewards of what we think about and how we think about those things. We can and should consider our ability to think and be creative and change as gifts to be used in God-honoring ways. This is important because our behavior is in large measure determined by our thoughts.

New Thinking Is Appropriate Concerning The Human Place In Creation

Now let’s briefly take a turn down a different but connected road. One of the ways in which I believe we must think differently and begin to strive for more balanced thinking relates to the role of humans in Creation. The authors of scripture wrote from their existing perspective and the best understanding of their times but to me the Christian scriptures – and I think this is true for other religions as well – are much too anthropocentric; too human-centered. It may contribute to our psychic survival or our ego needs to believe that humans were and are the stars in God’s creation crown but we are just a part of an intricate, beautiful, awesome web of life. We are interconnected to, and dependent upon, a marvelous ecological life support system which we must consider part of our stewardship. Our culture’s current value system does not adequately recognize this. We must become more conscious about our place in this web of life and treat the whole system as a gift of priceless value.

If we continue to think of the rest of creation as something to be used primarily for human benefit, we will pay an unbelievable price. The price could be as high as the extinction of the human species. I believe we must think more aggressively outside the box about a concept which I will call "Whole Creation Stewardship".

As I was pondering the matter of species extinction, just for a moment, the story of Noah and the flood crossed my mind. While this may have had some connection to species extinction, it is also worth noting that we now know about a number of other mass extinctions that occurred prior to Noah during the previous 600 million years.

This figure represents several mass extinctions. With the exception of the present, all previous events are believed to have been caused by things like a meteor impacting the earth, massive glaciation and associated gross sea level changes, volcano eruptions and so on. But a mass extinction is currently in progress. And some estimates are that it is occurring at the rate of about 1 life form per hour. If this rate continues, it has been estimated that half of the existing plant and animal life forms will be eliminated over the next several hundred years. This mass extinction is happening in large part because of two factors: Based on what I’ve said so far you would not be surprised that the first factor has to do with our thinking and the values being promoted and supported by us in the industrialized world. Our materialistic, consumption-based culture has hypnotized us into believing that there is no such thing as enough. This is odd when we think about it; odd because on one hand we are the most creative and intelligent life form on the planet and on the other, we are the only life form which seems unable to determine how much is enough. But there is a second factor which exacerbates the first. That is population growth. When we look just at the time period of my life, the population of the planet has more than tripled.

A mass species extinction need not happen but even if it were to happen, the outcome could be good. Sometimes, I think it is healthy to remind ourselves that even though we may foul things up royally, God has a plan that can accommodate our foul ups. For us, however, to live as responsible, whole creation stewards, we must change our thinking, we must become less anthropocentric and less materialistic in our evaluation and decision-making as to what’s important. For us who follow the Christian tradition, we could place more emphasis on Jesus’ model to live sacrificially and to put ‘first things first’.

On a positive note, I think it is absolutely mind-boggling to ponder how freeing it could be to wake up each morning and say "I don’t need more stuff. I don’t buy the idea that my sense of wholeness and happiness is determined by having bigger and more things."

What Does the Future Hold?

Assuming humanity survives the critical times we’re in, what might the future look like? One thing is clear. Change will continue to occur faster and faster. We need only think back over part of our lifetime to find support for this trend. Since the microprocessor came on the scene in 1970, its performance has multiplied by a factor of 25,000. If this pattern continues, a personal computer in 2025 will be as powerful as the combined power of thousands of computers today. That may sound unbelievable but if someone had told me in 1970 that by the year 2000, I could carry in my briefcase the equivalent of the entire nation’s 1970 computing capability, I would have thought they were out of their mind. But it happened. And the changes in the next 25 years are likely to be even larger. These new capabilities will drastically affect the way we live and the way we communicate. Remember that in 1990, when the world wide web was first introduced, no one including its developers, had nay idea that it would evolve so quickly.

Peter Russell notes in "Waking Up In Time" how we have progressed from hunting-gathering groups into agricultural communities, followed by the transition to the Industrial Age and now to the Information Age. Each transition taking significantly less time. There is now no reason to believe that evolution will stop or slow down or to believe that we have reached our final technology. Russell believes the next major transition might well be called the Consciousness Age – a period when the exploration and development of the human mind will become our major focus; the thing we will be thinking about.

Could this possibly lead to new, enlightened, less materialistic means of feeding the spirit’s drive for survival and in the process become all that Jesus spoke about?

Could this lead to a vastly less exploitative value system in which there is a more ecologically healthy way of perceiving life for all of creation?

Is it possible that the church with its rigidity and bureaucracy could be more inhibitor than facilitator to such a change?

There are organizations outside the church that carry little or no denominational or doctrinal baggage working in that area now; and working aggressively. One such organization is the Institute Of Noetic Sciences. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. I have subscribed to their publications for about 15 years and find their work interesting, diverse and forward-looking. IONS was founded by Edgar Mitchell a former astronaut. As I come close the end of my remarks, I’d like to ask you to reflect on the little two page piece from the most recent IONS publication. (See Attachment) It was written by a young man (Segev Petets) who is a transpersonal psychology student and is entitled "A Dream of One World”. I think it is important for us in the church to stay abreast of what’s happening in organizations outside the church, and to support these efforts wherever possible.

Segev’s dream for one world would require, as he says, "a radical shift in consciousness." To put this in St. Paul’s words "it would require a renewing of our minds so that we could be transformed." From a stewardship perspective, it would require a transformation in our stewardship of thinking and how we set priorities. It would require a shift away from our current materialistic value system and a new appreciation for how interconnected we are. And it would require a balanced and healthy diet based on feeding the physical body what it needs and feeding the spirit what it needs. Jesus spoke of the water that quenches the spirit’s thirst completely. I think Jesus would strongly endorse such a shift in thinking.

It seems that the fits of consciousness and the ability to think are greatly under-appreciated. It also seems that a proper response for these gifts involves acknowledging our responsibility to think radical new thoughts; thoughts that could mean profound change in positions and practices of the institutional church. It could be health to ask radical questions like:

* Could it be that the dominant forces in our culture today (business and democratic capitalism) will be found to be completely incompatible with a sustainable planetary environment?

* Is it possible that the bricks and mortar of the institutional church as we know it today will be largely replaced by the internet?

* Is there any solid evidence to indicate that trying to satisfy the psychic drive for survival with physical things can be as addictive as any known drug? (Perhaps this was what Jesus had in mind when he told the rich young ruler to go sell all ………)

* We may be unbelievably close to demonstrating an inseparable link between thinking and prayer. How would we react if medical research could prove that prayer really does facilitate healing and health but is in no way related to the pray-ers’ religion?

Our stewardship responsibilities are great and awesome. But we have been given the keys to the Kingdom. By using the keys to open the door and by doing so with an open mind, we are likely to see and experience heaven. We would know still more fully what it means to be nourished with food and drink that eliminates hunger and thirst.

I want to close with a few final remarks and then give you three specific recommendations to consider. We need to use the gifts of consciousness and thinking to think new thoughts about stewardship. It seems clear that the course and speed of our current journey must change. It is not sustainable from an environmental standpoint and it does not nourish the spirit. In short, we are trying to satisfy both the physical and psychic drives to survive by physical stuff. As a result, the environment is being degraded, the body is being overfed and the spirit is starving.

This will not be an easy task. All of the industrialized nations – those which call the shots for the world economy – are doing everything they can to promote economic growth indefinitely. Whether we talk about annual growth rates of 3%, 2% or 1%, indefinite economic growth simply is not possible when a finite supply of natural resources is seriously considered. And this is particularly true when population growth is considered.

From a spiritual standpoint, the pace of change is driving people nuts. I just read a new book entitled "White Collar Sweatshop" which chronicles how the workplace has changed in the past 50 years as the pressure has increased to get more and more and more output from each hour of human input. And workplace stress ripples throughout our culture affecting families, schools, churches, how we react to traffic and numerous other matters.

The spirit of many people is crying out for something that has meaning and permanence. The culture responds by saying "buy more stuff" or "take a pill".

We have a huge stewardship challenge facing us and it is going to get larger. It is rooted in our thinking. I’d like to repeat the final sentence in Segev Peret’s article. "This will require the most radical shift in consciousness imaginable, an enormous, all encompassing, global change in paradigm – a shift that must occur one person at a time, throughout all humanity". One of the very important roles I see the church playing is to cultivate and promote support for these changes in a way which recognizes and honors God.

I believe growth in the understanding and practice of whole-life, whole-creation stewardship of consciousness can help to bridge human differences. We may be unique as individuals, but we all live on the same planet, we are all interconnected and we all have two common drives to survive. We simply must have a more balanced diet that distinguishes between food for the body and food for the spirit. Jesus said "I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly." Stewardship of right thinking is vital to the abundant life Jesus spoke about.

So I’ve been thinking about thinking and how thinking relates to stewardship!!!!

Three Recommendations For Your Consideration

1. Think deeply and often about stewardship of consciousness and of the mind

2. Turn up your sensitivity to matters related to whole-creation stewardship.

3. Devote some of your energy to finding relevant, meaningful ways to show people the difference between feeding the body and feeding the spirit.

I’d like to end with a verse from Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians I Cor 14:20. We all can benefit from his admonition.

Brothers and sisters, do not be children in your thinking; rather, be infants in evil, but in thinking be adults.