Sustainability and Stewardship are not synonyms!

Stewardship is a Biblical and spiritual principle--God created the world, he is the owner and appointed man to be a manager of his creation, a job for which he must give an accounting (Luke 12:42; 16:2; I Cor. 4:2). There are numerous Biblical stories about responsible servants and house/estate managers. The concept of stewardship affirms that God retains his sovereignty and that his creation is good and applies in all areas of life.

Sustain as a verb (to prop up, to maintain, to cause to continue, to endure) has a very different connotation than steward (to manage, to supervise, to control). In English, a very flexible, innovative language, you can make a verb into a noun by adding suffixes such as -ship or -ability or -ment. However, sustainability is not in my Webster's 2nd International (1948) nor my Webster's Collegiate 9th (1983)--so it developed sometime after the first Earth Day (1970), our most recent return to pagan goddess worship.

In contrast to God's revealed "creation is good" in Genesis, other religions treat the material world as bad and dark, always in conflict with the light, and it's up to humans to either rise above it through altered states (meditation), or redeem it.

In my opinion, as an ethical concept sustainability is an unruly teenage noun dressed in the latest fad fashion with tattoos and nose rings, chasing and teasing the much older and wiser noun, stewardship. It's an orphan who reports to no higher power, certainly not to our Father God, a newcomer who loves to hang out in pagan temples with secular and mystical spiritual leaders.

Think of it this way if the above is too esoteric. If you have a pension, do you want it to endure and run on the lowest level of maintenance, flat lining on life support with infusions from all cultures and governments around the globe, or do you want it to thrive with sound management and control in a market economy guided by the God of the Bible?