Beyond Scarcity and Prosperity

In 2022, I was asked to serve as the Regional Education Coordinator for the USA/Canada Region of the Church of the Nazarene. The request shocked me. My first reaction was not gratitude or excitement; it was disbelief. Why would the regional director think I could do this? The whole idea felt preposterous. That reaction revealed how deeply fear can shape our response to opportunity.

Looking back, I understand why I reacted that way. The invitation landed like a frontal attack on every inferiority complex I had carried for years—the limited mindset that, in many ways, was my inheritance. I was raised in the underserved, overcrowded townships of Johannesburg, where resources were scarce, and opportunities were never guaranteed. Scarcity like that does not stay behind in your childhood. It follows you. It screams that the big doors are meant for someone else, and it can keep you from faithful stewardship.

I very nearly let those voices answer for me. But I talked it over with my husband, and he believed I could do it. I asked a few trusted friends, and they agreed. So, against my own instincts, I accepted the post.

Four years later, I have decided it is time to step down. Looking back, I know I did the work well—that I can, in fact, function at that level. That is knowledge I would never have gained if I had let my scarcity mindset decide for me.

I tell this story because I know I am not the only one who hears those voices.

Perhaps you know this feeling. Maybe you were the first in your family to attend college. Maybe you grew up worrying about money. Maybe you learned early that opportunities were rare and mistakes were costly. Even now, when doors open, part of you wonders whether you really belong in the room.

Over time, I have come to see that many believers carry a version of the same tension.

For some, the struggle is not a lack of ambition but fear. They have spent so much of their lives simply trying to survive that they can barely imagine what it means to thrive. They hesitate to take risks, invest in themselves, ask for what they need, or pursue opportunities that could expand their impact. Even when a door opens, some part of them assumes it was meant for someone else.

Many Christians also live with conflicting messages about money and success.

On one side, they hear warnings about wealth and conclude that any pursuit of growth, influence, or financial stability must be spiritually suspect. Because Scripture cautions against the love of money, they assume that wanting more than mere survival is selfish or worldly.

On the other side, they encounter forms of prosperity teaching that reduce God’s blessing to a formula. Have enough faith, sow enough seed, say the right prayers, and success is supposed to follow. In that framework, blessing becomes predictable and measurable, and faith starts to look less like trust in God and more like a strategy for results.

Neither perspective tells the whole story.

Scripture does not condemn flourishing. From the very beginning, God created a world of abundance and entrusted humanity with its care. The opening chapters of Genesis portray people as stewards—called to develop, nurture, and wisely use what God has placed in their hands. Human beings were not made merely to survive. We were made to participate in God’s good creation and to help it flourish.

This means that people from disadvantaged backgrounds have every bit as much right to the opportunities of creation as those born into privilege. Opportunity is not reserved for a select few. Education, meaningful work, creativity, leadership, entrepreneurship, and financial stability are not worldly by nature. Each can become an expression of faithful stewardship.

Yet Scripture warns us about a danger on the other side as well.

The answer to scarcity is not endless accumulation.

Our culture insists that satisfaction is always one acquisition away. More income. More possessions. More recognition. More influence. But many people reach their goals only to find that the anxiety never quiets. The pursuit of more can become its own kind of bondage, an endless striving that never arrives at contentment.

The biblical alternative is stewardship.

Stewardship invites us to receive God’s gifts with gratitude, to develop them with diligence, and to share them with generosity. It lets us pursue opportunities without being ruled by them, grow without making growth our god, and seek excellence without rooting our identity in achievement.

This is why the conversation about scarcity matters so much to me.

Many of us have been taught how to avoid greed. Few of us have been taught how to overcome the fear that scarcity leaves behind. Yet fear can be every bit as limiting as excess. It can keep us from investing, creating, leading, and giving, from becoming the people God made us to be. I know because, for a long time, it nearly kept me from the calling I was made for. That is why this conversation matters: scarcity does not just distort our view of money; it can distort our view of what God may entrust to us.

My hope is that more of us would learn to move beyond both scarcity and excess: to recognize the ways a scarcity mindset has shaped our thinking, and to step into the opportunities God places before us anyway. Faithful stewardship is neither hoarding nor consuming. It is learning to live with open hands, receiving God’s gifts with gratitude, cultivating them with wisdom, and offering them back for the good of others. That is the path from fear to faithfulness.

The goal is not accumulation, status, or success. The goal is faithfulness.

God has entrusted each of us with resources, abilities, opportunities, relationships, and influence. The question is never whether we have as much as someone else. The question is: what will we do with what we have been given?

That is the journey from scarcity to stewardship.