Stewards, Not Owners: Exercising Divine Authority in a Secular World

You must hold this dual reality in tension: the present world system, with its underlying assumptions of scarcity, competition, and power defined as dominion over others, is fundamentally at odds with the economy of the Kingdom you serve. Its foundations are not yours, and its ultimate allegiance is elsewhere. To believe you can fully adopt its ethos without contradiction is a fatal error. You are, as Scripture describes, an exile and an ambassador—present, engaged, but never fully naturalized. Yet, this is not a call to quietist withdrawal. Your mandate is to exercise a particular kind of authority over them. This authority does not stem from your own brilliance, electoral mandate, or market share; it is a delegated stewardship rooted in a higher order. You rule, or more precisely, you steward and govern, because you are operating under the commission of the Creator-King who owns it all and has temporarily placed you as a regent in a specific sphere to reflect His wisdom and character.

“You are a foreign regent: your authority to rule this world flows not from its systems, but from a King who owns it all and has placed you here to govern with His character.”

This theological framework finds its genesis in the opening pages of Genesis. God creates the world and then immediately gives humanity a mandate: “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air…” This is the original charter for human authority—a benevolent, creative stewardship exercised under God’s sovereignty. The Fall corrupted this mandate, twisting “rule” into exploitation and “subdue” into oppression. In Christ, this authority is redeemed and restored. As the Apostle Paul states, “all things were created through him and for him,” and the risen Christ holds the ultimate authority. You, as one in Christ, are called to step into this restored governance. Like Joseph in Egypt, you are to administer a system you did not design in order to preserve life and enact justice. Like Daniel in Babylon, you are to interpret the times and operate with a wisdom that confounds the conventional logic of the court. Your right to be there is not granted by Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar; it is granted by the God who sovereignly positioned you “for such a time as this.”

History demonstrates both the promise and peril of this concept. When the Church in the Roman Empire transitioned from persecuted sect to holding imperial influence, it often confused spiritual authority with temporal control, leading to the coercive excesses of state religion. This was a failure of theology—an attempt to own the system rather than to reform it from a position of principled influence. In contrast, consider the impact of the Clapham Sect in 18th-century Britain. This group of evangelical Christians, including William Wilberforce, operated from within the highest echelons of political and economic power. They did not seek to overthrow Parliament; they sought to rule over the system of their day by subjecting its laws to a higher moral order. Their decades-long campaign to abolish the slave trade was an exercise of this very principle: using the tools of legislation, journalism, and economic persuasion (like sugar boycotts) to subdue a brutal systemic evil, because they answered to an authority that declared all men made in God’s image. Therefore, your posture must be one of confident, yet cruciform, authority. You enter the boardroom or the legislature not as a supplicant hoping for a seat, but as an agent of a different kingdom, equipped with a better vision for human flourishing. Your strategies should be superior because they consider long-term sustainability, human dignity, and communal good, not just short-term gain. You have the right to reform, to innovate, to challenge unjust precedents, and to build new systems that better reflect the divine order. But this authority is always tethered to the character of Christ—it is authority for service, power for healing, and influence for liberation. You rule by serving the common good, you subdue corruption by introducing integrity, and you fill your sphere with the fruitful outcomes of God’s wisdom. Do not apologize for this mandate. Execute it with excellence and humility, remembering it is on loan from the One who said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” Your task is to locally apply His.

“Your mandate is to be a steward, not an owner: wield the tools of power not to dominate the system, but to bend it towards the justice of a Kingdom you represent.”