As headlines of The Lutheran so directly pointed out four months ago, we are members of “The Shrinking Church”.  Some of us see it all around us; in our seminaries, our music programs, our smaller attendance.   It is small comfort that we Lutherans are not alone in this disappearing act. 

          A Waiting Resource:  Space Cowboys

The critical need for more attention paid by churches to older adults in their midst involves much more than just “the arrival” of the Baby Boomers.  Thanks to greatly increased effectiveness of our medical community, even “The Greatest Generation” of older adults are living longer.  Those who include older adults in their communities, including churches, have a responsibility to address the many changing circumstances faced by older adults as they age.  After all, we live in a culture that at least used to emphasize community – “E Pluribus Unum  --  Out of many, one”.   And we walk the halls of a church community that reads multiple Bible verses that instruct us to treat others as we would be treated.

So how about noticing older adults as an important resource rather than as akin to the church disappearing act?  We older adults have lived through the era when “community” was a positive concept.  Perhaps we can, if called on again, find ways to reinvent our churches in a manner that is seen as positive for our grandchildren as well as for us.  Perhaps we can help people reach across the isles to make and sustain friendships with new “kinds” of people, as we learned how to do in the military, years ago.  Perhaps we can help people notice that children, their parents and older adults can be partners in doing what needs to be done.  We are not just sources of support, entertainment, pleasure or charity for each other.

Older adults do make news these days;  mostly however, because, we are told, we use up so much of the wealth of the nation on our health and social security.  A secondary, apparently annoying but related feature about older adults is that there are so many of us. The Baby Boomers are retiring and thus add appreciably to financial worries.  Furthermore, we who no longer have to show up at 8:00 for work every day, are becoming an increasingly large segment of non-work related organizations, church congregations for instance.  This creates a frustrating question, “What to do about us?”

In what would seem to be a happier note: we older adults are also mentioned in senior-citizen-related publications with columns such as the “Best Things About Being Over 65”, and such.  As I read these columns and essays, typically written by people much younger than 65, I find a common theme;  older adults will find happiness by “picking themselves up by their own bootstraps”.  Described are a multitude of adventurous activities for us to try, from off-road biking and sky diving, to volunteering at school and … trying new meds.  Or we are encouraged to focus on our inner selves and to find joy in buying tickets to... 

All of these bits of advice can be helpful.  Not one is untruthful.  But these magazine essays, for instance, all more or less look at older adults, in a culturally-correct way, as if we all lived in our own individual silos, trying to climb up and down the inside rungs by ourselves.   These magazines articles hardly mention the existence of neighboring silos  -- unless, for instance, there is an ad in the corner of that magazine page of a somewhat younger person who is “reaching into our silo” to sell us a ticket for a Mediterranean cruise.  

Finding essays, suggestions, movies or conversations about older adults that include an emphasis on our social/collective human nature is more difficult.   Even harder, of course, is finding arguments for asking for help from the ranks of the retired.

Remember the 2000 movie, “Space Cowboys” about four old pilots who came back to NASA as old timers to rescue a falling satellite -- because they understand the old-fashioned systems that created that satellite?   The easy-handed cooperation among the old timers in the movie is in stark contrast to the ordered, divisive and individually focused world we seem to inhabit now.  I loved Frank Sinatra singing  "Fly Me to the Moon" as part of the closing sequence of the movie.  It captured the intertwining of adventure plus romance – an emotional togetherness among ordinary people that transcends today’s obsessions with celebrity.   If our church is akin to the falling satellite, can we older adults, like those Space Cowboys, pull ourselves together to cooperate “across all isles” to create new, 21^st Century ways of re-imagining our churches through listening and openness to new perspectives that intertwine with the old?

Who among us does not understand that happiness and thus our sense of well-being, comes typically in some form of our daily and personally meaningful interactions with family, friends, acquaintances, pets, local leaders, professionals and even with strangers at the grocery store.   We older adults cut our teeth in the era that still understood that if you didn’t cooperate with your kids and the farm families down the road, you wouldn’t get your crops harvested on time.  We knew, that with rare exceptions, nothing we did alone could solve the problems of the day nor would it solve tomorrow’s problems either.  If the church is looking for ways to survive, we can ill afford to assume that contemporary leaders can do it by themselves – they need help.

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On the chance that my pleas for planting partnerships that include leadership from older adults for reinventing the church for the 21^st Century seem too fanciful for you, let me try a different approach to the same end. 

Most of us have grown up with the understanding that for a Christian, it is more important to give than to receive.  Our benevolence program is the most obvious benefactor of this sense of purpose.  [I want to add, however, that the way we live out that purpose in our daily lives with our family, friends and neighbors, is probably more important to more people than all of our mission programs combined.]

I’m all for giving people help who need it.  Unfortunately, the most misunderstood aspect of giving to others is that continuing to give help to people over time, without making it possible for those people to give help back in personally meaningful ways, will make matters worse not better!  Church leaders* need to take seriously the option of asking older adults for help (a reciprocity of help, albeit) in ways that make sense to the older adult!; recognizing that the preferred ways of engaging in helpful activities will change over time for older adults as their capacities and interests change!

             *When I speak of church leaders, I am thinking not only the official leaders like the pastors, 

             church staff and the church council members, but also of all those parishioners who are 

             respected in one way or another and can influence a changing church culture through 

             empowering an older adult ministry.

Note:  A laissez-faire culture may work for business (The phrase laissez-faire means "let them do as they will," or "leave it alone") but neglecting the empowerment of older adults during their variable history of changes in abilities, capacities, friendships and daily living, can lead to feelings of marginalization and apathy.  These feelings can be preludes to potential spirals downward toward isolation and depression.  Church leaders can think that older adults know their way around the block, and they are free to organize or not according to their whims and desires.  This laissez-faire attitude by a church can come from seeing some older adults being quite active in church activities and church leadership roles and thus assuming that the rest would do the same if they wished.  However those visible older adults can be the tip of a diverse older-adult-iceberg.  The bulk of the older adults whose lives and capacities change with every passing year, can thus, inadvertently, find themselves being marginalized and falling further and further into the daily underworld of “not mattering”.

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So, what’s next? 

I have laid out two scenarios that will benefit older adults.  One is that older adults, if asked to step up to the plate, may be able to help “save the church”.  The other is to recognize that few people want to become a “pawn of professional care” or live an isolating life in a sterile hotel-like world.  No matter what our age, we want to feel that we are engaged in real life, that we matter to others in ways that are meaningful to them and to us, and that we are part of a “welcoming home community” in which we are able to contribute comfortably in ways that we are able.

So, “church”, ask us older adults, we potential Space Cowboys, to join in a partnership with our grandchildren and the grandchildren of our friends, and the parents of those “kids”, so that together we might reinvent our church and empower each other’s changing spiritual poetry of faith, hope & meaning.  Please don’t invite only those of us who are already popular, visible and involved.  Reach further into our mix and also invite by name those of us who are sitting by ourselves at the edges of the dance floor.       

Grace and truths are discovered in eternal conversation within community.

Bruce Roberts

http://agingandthechurch.blogspot.com