Jesus tells a story about three servants and their master, who is about to leave on a long journey (Matthew 25:14–30). Before he goes, he hands them portions of his wealth to manage: five bags of gold to one, two to another, and one to the last. Then he leaves them. The first two put the money to work and double it. The third digs a hole, buries it, and keeps it safe. When the master returns, the third servant hands it back exactly as he received it.
We tend to expect the third servant to come off as, at worst, unremarkable. He didn’t lose anything. He wasn’t the prodigal son who squandered it. He was careful. He was “responsible.” Instead, he is the one the master condemns. The master calls him wicked and lazy, takes the one bag away, and gives it to the servant who already has ten.
Read that again, because it is the part about stewardship we keep getting backward. The third servant was not condemned for losing the money. He was condemned for refusing to put it to work.
The point of the whole parable
That is the parable in a sentence, and it is the whole idea of stewardship. Stewardship is not what you protect. It is what you invest. The master did not hand out his wealth so it could be guarded. He handed it out so it could grow. Burying it was not caution. It was the choice the master condemned, because it treated a gift meant for multiplication as a thing to be hidden.
English even kept the word “talent” from this parable. A talent was a unit of money, an enormous sum, but the word slid into English as the name for a gift you are supposed to use. The parable is baked into our language.
A buried, uninvested gift is a wasted one.
Why we bury it
Every church has been handed something worth telling. Not a story you invented, and not a more impressive version you wish were true, but the real one: who God has been to the people in your pews, in this place, and what he is doing among them still. That story is the gold in the parable. And a startling number of churches bury it, almost never out of disobedience. They do it sincerely, carefully, trying to protect something holy. But sincerity does not un-bury a gift, and there are two honest reasons the story ends up in the ground.
The first is that we do not understand the business. Look again at the servant's excuse, because it gives him away. "I knew you to be a hard man," he says, "reaping where you did not sow." He is describing a business he does not understand. To him the master's returns look like something out of nothing, a little threatening and a little unfair, and not something he knows how to be part of. Notice the exact confusion: he thought the money itself was the master's business, so he guarded it, kept it whole, and made sure not a coin went missing. The other two understood that the money was never the business at all. What they did with it was.
Churches make the same swap. They treat the story as a treasure to be protected and kept safe, pure, and unspent, as if safekeeping were the assignment. So it stays inside the walls, spoken only to the people already in the room, behind a mission statement nobody reads and a website nobody has updated since the last building campaign. Underneath it is often a leader for whom the whole world of Brand, messaging, audience, and touchpoints feels like reaping where you did not sow: a mysterious, faintly worldly craft that other people seem to know and they do not. So they sit on the story. Not out of rebellion, but out of not knowing what it is for or how it moves.
The second reason is fear. The servant says it plainly: I was afraid. Fear is almost always what is under a buried story, too. Fear of looking slick. Fear of getting it wrong. Fear of the world's tools, or the world's judgment, or our own inadequacy. So we "protect" the story by keeping it small and quiet, and we call the fear reverence. But the master never asked for our fear. He asked for our trust.
He handed it over on purpose
Do not miss how the story begins. The master did not keep his wealth and do the work himself. He put it into the hands of servants and left. He could have managed all of it, invested it perfectly, and needed no one. Instead he chose to entrust it, because the entrusting was the point. He wanted them in it.
Sit with that, because a lot of us quietly believe our part does not really matter. God will reach whom he will reach. The Spirit does the work. Who am I to think a website, an invitation, or a well-told story makes any difference? It sounds like humility. It is closer to the third servant's buried treasure, with a more spiritual-sounding excuse. The master handed over real wealth and fully expected his servants to put it to work. He was not looking for servants who stay out of the way. He was looking for servants who get involved.
So hear this as good news. Your involvement is not beneath the gospel, and it is not a distraction from the “real” ministry. It is the assignment. God has handed His church a unique story and, remarkably, chosen to move it through ordinary people who are willing to invest it. That is not pressure. That is trust.
What investing the story looks like
Investing the story looks like spending it. It means telling it out loud, and often, and clearly, in the places people actually are. It means treating the website, the invite, the first Sunday, the follow-up email, and the parking-lot conversation as places the story gets put to work rather than filed away. It means going to the marketplace instead of building a beautiful well and waiting for thirsty people, because the servants who were commended were the ones who carried the gift out into the world and let it move.
The return is not a number on a dashboard. The return is people. It is the neighbor who finally hears it in language that makes sense, the guest who feels welcomed before they believe anything, the person quietly changed because someone was willing to invest the story in them instead of keeping it safe.
This is not a license to sell Jesus like a product, or to dress the gospel in whatever gets clicks. Investing the story faithfully still means telling it truly, with dignity, and without manipulation. The servants doubled the master's wealth. They did not counterfeit it. Stewardship of the story means telling what is actually true about your church, and telling it as well as you possibly can, because it is worth exactly that much care.
Well done
The master's "well done" did not go to the servant who kept the gift safe. It went to the two who risked it and watched it grow. A story God entrusted to you was never meant to be buried in the ground of good intentions. It was meant to be invested, spent, multiplied, and handed back larger than you received it.
So here is the only real question about the gift in your care. Are you investing the story, or protecting it?
