Article

Culture

Economics

Generosity

12 November 2025

5 min read

Be generous: pass on values and vision, not just wealth

Millennials may not earn more—but they could steward more wisely

Annika Greco Thompson

Annika is Growth and Relationships Manager at Stewardship UK.

An illustration of a family around a table looking at graph on a laptop.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

For the first time in modern history, this present generation of 28 to 43-year-olds will not achieve a higher standard of living than their parents. This is due to factors including wage stagnation, exorbitant house prices, equally exorbitant student debt, and an unstable job market.

Paradoxically, this same generation stands to inherit the greatest amount of wealth in history. The Financial Times estimates this to be about £8.3 trillion in the U.S., £2.7 trillion in Europe, and £2.2 trillion in Asia.

For Christian families fortunate enough to find themselves in this situation, it’s important to consider that passing on wealth is not just a financial issue, it’s a discipleship issue. And before we delve in, I want to acknowledge that not every reader will fit the traditional family model. You might be single, part of a blended family, estranged from children, or mentoring younger people instead of raising them. The principles here still apply - ‘next generation’ simply means those you influence.

Talk about it

One of my soap boxes is to encourage people, especially Christians, in the UK to talk more about money and giving. This becomes especially important within families who steward a lot of wealth. If parents don’t speak to their children about their wealth – what they’re doing with it and why – they run the risk of their children

feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility and potentially making poor choices,

not understanding or valuing their parents' heart for good stewardship and potentially squandering the wealth,

doing things their own way and potentially dishonouring their parents’ wishes, or

feeling resentful that they did not inherit as much as they thought they would.

Being intentional and speaking openly as a family about your wealth will give you as parents a chance to inculcate your children with conviction about and purpose for what God has blessed you, and them, with. And it will give your children the opportunity to share their own heart and views on how to use wealth for good, as these may differ from yours.

There is a plethora of information out there, and plenty of professional advisors who would love to be called upon to manage your wealth transfer, but, if you are a person of Christian faith, let us challenge ourselves to look to Scripture as a first point of departure.

David and Solomon

King David looms large as a character in the Old Testament. One of his ambitions was to build a temple for the Lord in Jerusalem. But God explicitly told him that he didn’t want David to do the building; instead, this project was to be passed on to his son, Solomon. We know that David was a very wealthy man, and that the temple building project would require vast amounts of resources, and thus, perhaps we can consider this instance as one of the great wealth transfers of ancient times.

There are many takeaways from this story, but here are a few that stand out to me.

David’s desire to build a temple for the Lord comes after he’s built an extravagant palace for himself. This invites a question: how many of us might come to the end of our working lives and realise we’ve had similar priorities?

While we don’t have a way of knowing how much Solomon’s own ideas were welcomed in the planning and preparation, I think we can assume that David spent a lot of time imparting his vision and motivation to Solomon. There’s no way this kind of philanthropic project could’ve been executed otherwise.

While this transfer started well, it didn’t end well. Solomon went on to accumulate even more wealth than his father and ended his life in a downward spiral of excess and deception. I’m not saying there is a direct correlation between inheriting wealth and getting caught in a downward spiral, but there are many temptations and pitfalls to contend with.

There’s something to be said for timing. While one of the scripture passages that relate this story makes it sound like the handover went smoothly, another paints a very different picture. In it we see an elderly king clinging to his position and refusing to pass his mantle to Solomon until a coup by another son forces his hand.

What can we learn from this?

If we want our children to use their inherited wealth wisely and generously, it’s vital that they witness their parents modelling the right priorities. If I’ve pursued the accumulation of wealth more than I’ve pursued generously sharing my resources, my children are more likely to do the same.

If we intend to pass our legacy on to our children, we must involve them in the conversation early on. And we must be careful to allow room for their own ideas lest they grow disillusioned and disengage.

We cannot control what our children do with the wealth we give them; we can only do our best to model the right attitude before God when it comes to our resources. The best way to do this is to teach our children that everything we have comes from God and is to be used for his purposes, not for our own material excess.

Know when to pass on the mantle. If we hang on too long, we risk opening the door to unnecessary division and conflict within our family. It’s also worth considering transferring wealth earlier rather than later in order to be philanthropically active as a family. As in a relay race, the person being passed the baton must for a time be running at the same speed as his or her predecessor.

The great generational transfer

When the time comes to hand over our resources and our legacy to the next generation, there are many things to consider. We’re not just handing over our money; we’re handing over all of what we’ve learned and experienced in our walk with God. I would argue that this spiritual transfer is even more significant than any other kind. For that, we have many biblical examples we can turn to: Moses and Joshua, Elijah and Elisha, Paul and Timothy, and of course, Jesus and his Church.

Jesus told his disciples to go and make disciples of all nations, akin to what God said to Adam and Eve way back in the beginning: Be fruitful, fill the earth and exercise good stewardship over it. Our mission has always been to steward the earth, see it flourish, and point people to a relationship with God. To do this, God has put resources into our hands to be stewarded well and faithfully passed on to the next generation. It’s imperative that we do this well if our message is to be taken seriously.

What would it look like for your family, or the next generation you influence, to steward both resources and faith together?

Stewardship UK sponsors series 8 of the Re-Enchanting podcast. Find out more.

Stewardship UK

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Belief

Culture

Leading

Wisdom

7 May 2025

4 min read

Why does the Pope matter today?

The personal, vivid link to the origins of the movement that changed the world.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An Anglican bishop wearing purple shakes hands with the Pope.

The author meeting the late Pope, 2024.

There is something about the way popes are elected that captures the imagination. Whoever dreamt up the idea of black smoke for ‘no decision’, and white smoke for ‘habemus papam’ – ‘we have a new pope’ - was a genius at marketing. So much better than a press release or a tweet from the Vatican X account.

The conclave was brought to our imagination so vividly by the recent film with Ralph Fiennes. We love the idea of secret debates, intrigue, people locked away from the world until they come to a decision with arcane ancient rituals and an uncertain outcome. Was there ever a film whose release was better timed?

There are also the sheer numbers involved. There are approximately 1.4 billion Catholics in the world today – roughly the same as the population of India and China, the world most populous nations. Yet the identity of the new pope is of matters to the rest of us too. The leader of China of India is of interest especially to people living in China or India, but maybe less so for those of us who don’t. The new pope is the head of churches round the corner from where you live, or of people with whom you work, or, if you are Catholic yourself, your own spiritual leader. This appointment matters.

Yet it’s not just the optics, the drama, the numbers. And it’s not just for Catholics either. I am an Anglican, and since the Reformation of the sixteenth century, we have had in our own 39 Articles the statement: “The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.” That might seem to settle the matter that it’s of no interest to English Protestants. But that would be wrong.

I met Pope Francis once. It was at a gathering of Anglican Archbishops in Rome last year. We all were led through magnificent Vatican corridors into an imposing state room, adorned with fantastic frescoes, where the white-robed Holy Father was brought in on his wheelchair to deliver a brief 20-minute homily to us all.

It was a good talk, thoughtful, well-constructed, but in many ways unremarkable. It didn’t say anything much that I hadn’t heard from other sources. Yet somehow this was different. His words carried a weight, a gravity that went beyond the content of the lecture itself. It was as if, when he entered that room, he carried with him two thousand years of church history.

The line of Bishops of Rome goes back to St Peter, the gruff, unschooled fisherman who Jesus called from his mundane life to become an apostle, and who then on, was so captured by the person of Jesus that he gave his life in the cause. I left that room conscious of the weight of the office of the papacy, even if I don’t recognise him as my direct spiritual father.

Listening to this successor of St Peter felt like you were listening to one of the friends of Jesus – and this was not just the personal quality of the man himself, but something about the office he occupied. It was a personal, vivid link to the origins of the Christian movement, the first stirrings of the revolution.

The papacy is one of those unique things in modern life - an umbilical link to the past.

Of course, there have been some pretty terrible occupants of the papal see, whose personal lives showed scant evidence of any knowledge of, or relationship with Jesus. The sixteenth century Roderigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) comes to mind, who despite the rule on clerical celibacy, had several children from various mistresses, won the Papacy by bribing cardinals, and made his favourite son bishop of several lucrative sees at the age of eighteen, and a cardinal at nineteen. So, there is nothing automatic about this – which is why the Protestant Reformers denied the idea of any blanket automatic papal authority.

Yet when a person of evident holiness is combined with this notion of the weight of the office, the papacy becomes a gift to all of us, linking us back to the earliest followers of Jesus – even to Jesus himself.

The papacy is one of those unique things in modern life - an umbilical link to the past. Monarchies do something similar – linking us to the past through the long line of kings and queens of England, Denmark, Spain or wherever, yet more often than not, the events they lead us back to, the process by which those families took power, reveal murky politics, bribery and bloody battles.

This is a line in history that links us to the event that, if Tom Holland’s Dominion is to be believed, has had more impact in shaping western culture than any other – the remarkable life, death and resurrection of Jesus – a radical life full of love, self-giving and transformative power – for both individuals and whole civilisations. And for that, whether we are Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or even, perhaps, unbeliever, we might raise a prayer - or a glass - of thanksgiving.