The Empowering Church:

Finding Spirituality, Engagement, Well-Being and Friendships

-- starting at either end to gain a double-loop of benefits.

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Our church is presumably a place where we find a relationship with our God in ways that make sense to us.  Our church can be also a place where we find friendships with others that bring us a positive frame of mind.  In this blend, an empowering church culture can stimulate a double-loop of social/spiritual engagement that can enhance our health and well-being as we age better than any other association in contemporary life. 

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This is a blog about well-being as we age.  I argue that empowering engagements encouraged, created and sustained within a church community offer a powerful opportunity for enhancing health and well-being for older adults.  But something seems to hold some of us back from recognizing the important role of a church for creating such meaningful contributions to the health of older adults.  We seem not to be all on the same page as we explore the potential significant relationship of “the community of our church” to “our health and well-being”. 

Because there is a strong connection between our positive emotions and our health, I suggest that we start anew noticing events at church that give us those positive emotions (say of joy, contentment, comfort or hope).  Then, if we recognize that whatever seems to benefit us in the community of our church may also benefit others as we “Do unto others what we would have them do unto us”, we can discuss together how we “got here from there”.  We can learn to notice in our church the behaviors and events that empower an increase of resilience and healing – as we age.  In the sharing of those positive events and behaviors we have noticed, we will be each other’s teachers.  Especially important will be our conversations about the double-loop of engagements we have noticed that likely increased the health and well-being of older adults.

Perhaps my telling the story of a real-life example of a beneficial double-loop engagement that I have seen will help us recognize their importance: 

When my parents retired they decided to move to Ft. Collins, Colorado.  My mother’s health deteriorated a bit but they chalked it up to aging.  After several years they chose to spend a few weeks with relatives in Pacific Grove, California.  They looked forward to enjoying the beauty of the ocean on the California coast.  Surprisingly, while in Pacific Grove for their visit, my mother’s health improved. 

Encouraged by this improvement they checked with a local physician who mentioned that the difference between the 5,000 foot elevation of Ft. Collins and the sea level elevation of Pacific Grove probably accounted for my mother’s health improvements. 

Furthermore, after my parents later moved to Pacific Grove to take advantage of her better health at this much lower altitude, my mother soon found enough improvement in her health and encouragement from new friends that she started regular walks along the many pathways in Pacific Grove. 

My mother’s decision to take regular walks was a double-loop of health improvements:

            Her move to a lower altitude increased her health and well-being.  Her newly improved health   and her friends motivated her to start regular exercise.  That exercise led to still further improvements in her health, which led to yet more…

So not only did my parents’ choice to move to Pacific Grove influence their anticipated appreciation of the year-around beauty of the ocean and their friendships with family and new friends, but their move also had an unanticipated double-loop influence on her health. 

But it is important to understand that the trip to Pacific Grove by my parents to “enjoy the beauty of the place” could have been made initially with the same positive results even if it had been prompted by a comment from a friend in Ft. Collins who encouraged my parents to “try out a lower altitude”.  The point is, the same positive health outcomes, the enjoyable family ties and new friend relationships and the consequent further positive engagements in her community could have been achieved with different starting points. 

Also important to keep in mind is that once settled into their new life in Pacific Grove, this mix of friendship, beauty, double-looped active engagement and health simply blended holistically together in their minds as a part of living in their new home.  Over time it would have been difficult for them to identify any single quality that contributed most to their well-being.  This is the way our mind and body link together all the time. 

But this invisible fusion of ongoing events that eventually created the development of this holistic mental process makes it difficult to give realistic advice to others for specific ways to get there from here.

Church is like this. 

We may have initially chosen to attend our church because we found an important congruence between our religious beliefs and the religious culture of a particular church.  Once embedded in that church we may have grown in our enjoyment of its activities and programs and gained important friendships that sustained our resilience. 

Or, for example, we may have initially chosen to attend our church because we found enjoyable friendships with people in the congregation.  Once embedded in that church we “grew” to find congruence between our religious beliefs and those of our new church home.

Either way, the positive emotions and religious congruence we felt at this church likely interacted with friendships developed to influence our health and sense of well-being.   And double-loop health benefits certainly would have accumulated if we then became further engaged in church-related activities and subsequent strengthening of friendships.

But here is the paradox.  Those of us who have been long time church members, starting in our childhood perhaps, have more than likely mixed the religious dimensions and the friend-supporting interactions and social programs of our church in our mind so much that they have become one and the same.  If this is the case, it may be difficult for us to identify the importance of specific outreach programs and empowering behaviors by congregation members that enhanced our sense of well-being.  Thus it will be hard for us to understand our own critical roles for empowering others at church to become further engaged in church-related activities that can strengthen friendships.

If we assumed that people get up in the morning fully clothed for the day, it would be hard to explain to a youngster how it is necessary to put one shoe on at a time.

Since it seems likely that a holistic perspective of their church community is how most church leaders understand their world, one of the first steps in any revitalization process for enhancing the well-being of older adults at church will be to engage the help of all older adults, not just the most active and visible.  Ask that group of diverse church members to begin an open and honest sharing of personal experience stories of the events and actions of others that brought them positive emotions (within a shared purpose).  Then can begin the church-wide process of encouraging more of those activities and behaviors that have worked in the past.

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Once, the logic of this powerful, typically nonconscious, link between our living church community and our religious congruence makes sense to you, we can begin on the same page to share diverse possibilities for revitalized church efforts to encourage a double-loop of church activities and behaviors that enhance the well-being of older adults.

Bruce