A novel take on stewardship

Rachel McDonough spends her days helping people integrate Christian values and sense of calling into their investment and financial decisions. Yet her newest project steps outside the spreadsheet entirely: a novel.

In a space normally dominated by nonfiction literature, The River and The Garden offers a unique approach by writing about family in conflict wrestling through the challenges of stewarding surplus wealth through the lens of a story.

Rachel has seen that many families struggle with stewardship not because they lack financial optimization tactics or strategy, but because their sense of purpose for the resources isn’t fully represented. She describes it as their heads and their hearts aren’t in the same room together. A novel can paint a picture of what this could look like in a way that a nonfiction “how-to” can’t.

We sat down with Rachel to talk about why she wrote The River and The Garden as fiction, what she hopes families take from it, and how it applies to the way we think about generosity, purpose, and what’s possible beyond the bottom line.

The interview below has been edited for clarity. 

Q1: How has launch gone?

A: The most amazing part is hearing from readers about the unique ways the book is helping them. One of our clients recently read it and gained clarity that she now has time and resources to do more intentional giving, impact investing, and volunteering now that an intense season of caregiving has come to an end.

Just today, I heard from an advisor who’s been very active in generosity and stewardship conversations with his clients for years and is a very generous person himself. He said his wife is also a generous person and has a heart for advancing God’s kingdom, but she’s just been … a little disinterested when it comes to the family’s financial conversations in general.

He ordered a copy of my book on Amazon, but she got the mail that day and started reading it herself. For that couple, I’m hoping this book will be an on ramp that might help her develop a language and a clearer vision for positive investing and generosity so she can more fully engage in those stewardship conversations. I absolutely love when both spouses are fully showing up and occupying their seat at the table, directing wealth with a sense of purpose.

And if that happens, I believe this couple is going to end up having way more kingdom impact together than they will if the level of engagement remains disproportionate. This story was a big praise God moment for me, because encouraging the less engaged spouse who doesn’t identify as a “numbers person” was one of the groups that I had in mind as I was writing this.

 Q2: Who else were you hoping to reach?

A: Business owners approaching a sale and inheritors. The ones who are experiencing a big increase in their (required) stewardship skills because there’s been a big increase in responsibility. Whether that’s through the sale of a business that creates sudden liquidity that used to be locked up, or a gift from family that brings with it new opportunities and new challenges.

The wealth management industry is really focused on optimizing: risk, return, tax efficiency, etc. There’s a certain type of person who feels comfortable and gravitates towards that and likes the puzzle solving. But those are not the only people that are stewarding wealth. And optimizing for efficiency and performance isn’t all that matters.

God uses stewardship decisions as the training grounds for our hearts. He invites us to co-labor with him in the way we hold and deploy wealth. I think the wealth management industry was never designed to help people walk through transformation. It doesn’t help them see wealth as fuel for purpose. And if we just focus on optimizing it well, good returns, low risk, and tax efficiency, there’s a real risk that we could miss the purpose. Why has God entrusted us with a surplus of resources? What is he inviting us into? We have to take a step back and get clear about the transformative purpose that God has for the surplus that he entrusted to us.

Often, the people who are maybe more relational—maybe they would call themselves a people person, not a numbers person—they’re often the ones who actually have more vision, clarity, and insight on the redemptive purpose of wealth. (But those people) are not showing up as much in conversations that lead to giving or investing transactions, which tend to be dominated by optimization thinking.

 Q3: How do we balance those two dispositions? Where does the story of The River and The Garden come in?

A: We are made in God’s image, and God made us with heads and hearts.

When it comes to investing, we have been trained to think, “that’s for the purpose of provision,” and so it should really be governed by our heads, right? We use our strategic analytical skills and focus on optimizing. Then our giving is for the “purpose of social or kingdom impact,” and so that should be governed by our hearts.

But I think we have a better outcome when we do head and heart investing and head and heart giving, as a starting point.

The characters in the book itself, Willow, the granddaughter, a 22-year-old artist, compassionate and relational, the type of person who notices what everyone else walks past, really embodies that heart-forward approach to life. Roger, her dad, is the analytical, hard-charging executive type who wants everything optimized and measured. And Gran, the matriarch of a family, prayerful and wise, a life-long gardener, is actually the one bringing both Roger and Willow into the family stewardship decision. She represents the Holy Spirit.

Together they illustrate what I’ve come to see as the ideal approach to stewardship: it’s the head and heart working together, led by the Spirit. It’s not head versus heart and which force will dominate.

Getting both wisdom and love to sit down at the same table, getting the head and heart aligned with where the Spirit is leading, that’s where we have really beautiful stewardship experiences. That’s where we learn to co-labor with God to bring about his plans and purposes and experience the joy of him working through us. It can result in wise giving that’s strategic, tax efficient, and effective at solving problems and “punching holes in the darkness,” to borrow a line from Gran.

It can also result in generous investing that considers the effect businesses can have on employees, customers, and communities—and there are some excellent fictionalized examples of impact investing in the story. Businesses can help drive down human trafficking, reduce teen pregnancy, create good jobs that lift people out of poverty, and so much more.

The point is this: God doesn’t need our help at all, but he invites us into stewardship. It’s like getting invited to participate in the family business for every person who is a part of his family. Stewardship is the training ground of learning how to co-labor with him, be his apprentices, and be led by his Spirit—even in the way we hold and deploy capital, our giving and our investing.

For the book title itself, the river is the river of capital, and the garden is what we choose to water and grow.

Our investing is like tending to a garden—paying attention to what’s growing, intentionally pulling out weeds, and directing the river of capital towards cultivating the things that are aligned with our vision and with God’s heart.

Q4: How does a family move from having stewardship principles and a practice of generosity to championing a specific cause with their wealth?

A: I find that it’s people’s lived experience with proximity to suffering that tends to bring clarity on which causes they want to champion. It’s either their own personal suffering, or they’ve been in proximity to someone who’s suffering, and were able to relate to that person. For me, it was growing up in Kenya when I was a kid and seeing other kids, just like me, living on the streets of Nairobi, begging for food. Encountering suffering just changes us. And I think that’s by God’s design. He breaks our hearts for the things that break his heart, and then they don’t really ever mend. They just stay broken. And then our broken heart calls the capital we steward and tells it where to go. That’s where we get this phrase we use with our clients: “capital calling.”

What is it that calls our capital? It often centers around things like poverty alleviation, gospel proclamation, or spiritual health and discipleship, education, creating good jobs, freedom and justice, reduced inequalities, and so on. So, we have a process to help clients get more specific and clear and it can apply to their investing too, not only to their giving.

It starts with understanding what causes you care about, but there’s still a lockup if we’re not clear about how much is enough. It’s the combination of clarity about how much I need for provision and clarity on what’s the purpose of the rest of it. Those two pieces working together are the unlock that allow capital to flow in alignment with calling.

 Q5: Why would The River and The Garden inspire those who believe there’s more beyond the bottom line?

A: There’s the world’s system of investing that’s focused on profit only or risk and return only. And there’s the charitable giving bucket, which is impact only. But does God see it that way? Does he see money we give away as “gone” the way we do, or is it treasure stored up in heaven? Does he see the money we think of as “ours” as incapable of doing good while it sits in our portfolio and provides for the needs of our family?

We have to stop drawing a hard line between giving and investing. And start seeing that giving is really just investing with an eternal time frame. It’s not actually that different from regular investing.

This book is meant to take someone on a journey where they can experience through story what investing that’s truly biblical can look like and the relational wisdom that comes from family members that see things differently learning how to hear and honor each other. The River and The Garden builds the context so that readers can be equipped for effective kingdom stewardship, just having read a novel that I sincerely hope is engaging and enjoyable. And, it was written in a way that isn’t only accessible to a Christian audience. I’ve already had two readers tell me they are sharing the book with their non-Christian family members in hopes of rebuilding connection and restoring relationship.

Couples and families are also taking the Garden Audit together, a free 15-minute assessment that helps clarify how investors are holding and deploying capital in alignment with their values and calling, their vision for what they’d like to see grow, and helpful next steps to bridge the gap between the two.

 Where Head and Heart Meet

Rachel’s framework echoes something central to how The Signatry approaches stewardship: investing and giving aren’t separate rooms—one for the head, one for the heart. They’re one calling. That’s what we try to hold together, inviting strategy and calling to sit at the same table.