‘None of This Is Mine’: Alton Brown on Stewardship

By Joseph Sunde

In an interview with Eater, celebrity chef Alton Brown was asked how his faith and religion play into his professional life. Brown is a “born-again Christian,” though he finds the term overly redundant.

His answer is rather edifying, offering a good example of the type of attitude and orientation we as Christians are called to assume:

As far as other decisions, my wife runs the company. We try not to make any big decisions about the direction of this company or my career without praying about it. We try to listen to what God says to us pretty hard and we say no to a lot of things because of that. We’re not rich and that’s because if we don’t get a clear feeling for what we ought to be doing, we don’t do it. We turn down endorsements. We say no to things. You know, none of this is mine. For some reason I am being trusted with it and I take the stewardship of it really, really seriously.

This nestles quite nicely with Lester DeKoster and Gerard Berghoef‘s view of conscience as the “watchful monitor” of stewardship. Consider also its resemblance to DeKoster and Berghoef’s approach to Christian stewardship in general:

The believer, because he is a true believer, knows very well that he owes God everything: “For the world is mine, and all that is in it” (Ps. 50:12). God has first claim by right of ownership to everything each of us calls his own. To ask with the psalmist, “How can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me?” (116:12) can only be completely answered by the acknowledgment: “All, Lord, is thine!”…

…God makes man the master of his temporal household. Like all stewards, man is not the owner. He is the overseer. For three score years and ten, more or less as the case may be, each of us is steward over those talents and those pounds allotted us by divine providence…As each has managed his stewardship, so will he be judged: “Well done, my good servant!” or, “But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and kill them in front of me” (Luke 19:17, 27). The quality of stewardship depends on obedience to the Master’s will. The steward who does not obey the Master’s law rejects the Master’s authority and serves another. Our stewardship is the test: Do we mean to serve God or mammon, the Lord or the Devil?

Read the full interview with Brown here.

Originally published at the Acton PowerBlog

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons