What the Graying of America Means to the Local Church

Local congregations need to synchronize their ministries with the new reality of an aging population.

How can we please God in our relationships with the elderly? In past issues, CHRISTIANITY TODAY has examined retirement homes and the problems faced by adult children. A future issue will look at aging through the eyes of the elderly themselves.

But what is the place of the local church? How may its leaders and members love the elderly, and in turn be loved by them? Sociologist David Moberg picks his way between the extremes of indifference and smother love.

The “graving of the population,” evident today in all industrialized nations, is unprecedented in human history. Although a few people survived into their sixties and beyond in past centuries, the vast majority since the Noachian flood have died at earlier ages, and life expectancy at birth was seldom if ever beyond 30 years. Today it is in the upper seventies for women and approaching 70 for men.

One person in nine in the U.S. is past the age of 65, but the proportion is closer to one in four in some communities. Many church congregations consist almost entirely of people past 50. Even churches in suburbs dominated by young and middle-aged adults have a growing number of mature and retired people, and face special problems associated with the needs of leaders’ and members’ parents. The leaders of every congregation are increasingly caught up in need for ministries with the aging.

Biblical Mandate

Even though the current gerontic explosion is unprecedented in the annals of history, Christians receive guidance from biblical descriptions, principles, and commands that pertain directly to every society. We hardly need a reminder that, despite the lengthening of the human lifespan, duration of life is limited (Gen. 6:3; Ps. 90:3–6, 9–10; 103:15–18; Isa. 40:6–8; James 1:9–11; 1 Peter 1:23–25).

Although death is the inevitable end of the earthly life cycle (Heb. 9:27), it is not the end of human existence (1 Cor. 15). The wise person will consciously prepare for both the future life and for his or her own future years on earth (Ps. 90:12; Prov. 3:1–2; 9:10–12; 10:27; 22:6; Eccl. 12:1–8, 13–14; 1 Peter 3:9–12).

Certainly pastors and other church leaders need no explicit mandate to recognize their responsibility to assist their people to be good stewards of the lifelong aging process. All of the teaching, preaching, counseling, organizational, and service activities of the local church bear on their effectiveness in performing this task The demonstration of deeds and a good example will impress people much more than verbal presentations alone, important as they are.

American society is characterized by a high level of ageism, the social disease of prejudice and discrimination against people based solely on age, a disease endemic in a youth-oriented culture. It is easy to assume that such behavior is a modern phenomenon, yet there were instances of it even in ancient Israel (e.g., 1 Kings 12:6–20; Job 32:4–10). The “old man’s prayer” asking God not to reject him in old age (Ps. 71:9–12, 18) is indirect evidence that there were actual instances of neglecting the elderly even in that society.

The explicit biblical instructions to the aging all center around the commandment to honor one’s father and mother (Exod. 20:12; Deut. 5:16), which was extended to respect for all elderly people (Lev. 19:32; 1 Tim. 5:1–21; 1 Peter 5:5). If honorific behavior flowed automatically out of the goodness of human nature, it would not have been necessary to call for it in the Decalogue. This has widespread implications for us today, but it is still easy to distort its meaning when it comes to action, even as some religious leaders did during Jesus’ earthly ministry (Matt. 15:1–9). It is easy to say we honor the older generation; it is another thing to practice that command.

Dishonoring The Elderly

In many ways, the church is the best institutional friend outside the family the elderly have ever had. More older Americans are members of religious organizations than of all other voluntary associations combined. The church has taught biblical values of love and ideals of compassion that have contributed to their well-being. It has been a major force behind the establishment of retirement homes, hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices to serve their needs. It has provided them with pastoral care. It has fostered their personal faith, cultivated their spiritual welfare, and increased their satisfaction with life.

At the same time, however, many congregations have unwittingly yielded to sins of omission and of conformity to cultural standards that have contributed to the problems of senior citizens. Here are a few examples of such discriminatory action:

• Their emphasis upon youth and families with children has tended to alienate widowed persons, the unmarried, and older couples whose children are no longer at home.

• Their elections and appointments have removed aging members from positions of leadership, often at the very time when retirement from work has given them more time than ever to serve God through their church. This has taken away an important source of their sense of worth.

• Their glorification of youthfulness in sermons, educational materials, and other contexts reflecting cultural values has made many of the elderly feel they are no longer needed, wanted, and respected. When accompanied by the implication that anything old is out of date or worthless, the problem is compounded.

• Their equating of personal worth with occupational roles has made many a person feel, “I’m retired; I’m a nobody.”

• Their architecture has made it difficult for people with physical limitations to participate in church activities. Stairs to climb, poor lighting, inconveniently located toilets, echoing or deadening acoustics, slippery floors, lack of handrails, deficiencies in ventilation, inaccessibility to public transportation, and the small type used in Bibles and hymnals are significant barriers for some younger people as well as for many who are elderly.

• Their schedule of programs for adults of all ages is often predominantly in the evening hours when only the most active minority of elderly members can participate comfortably.

• Their outward-looking calls to evangelize and serve people in the community, wholesome as they are, often give elderly members the feeling that their day has passed, that they no longer can serve, and that their church has ceased to be a source of personal comfort and hope for the future.

• Their social activism is easily (and often wrongly) interpreted as denying or ignoring the importance of personal spirituality.

• Their appeals for increasing financial support make many who subsist on fixed incomes feel unworthy because of their inability to meet social expectations.

• Their pastoral care is centered on persons with acute needs, leaving the chronically disabled, ill, and shut-ins both out of sight and out of mind unless a family member or friend brings them to church activities.

The presence of even a few of these or similar conditions is evidence that a church is infected by the widespread societal disease of ageism.

Ministries For The Aging

Much of what the typical church does in the normal course of its affairs can minister effectively to aging members while also serving people of younger generations. Worship services, adult education programs, social activities, and pastoral visitation help to serve their needs, especially when not compromised by such problems as those mentioned above.

Integrating the aging and elderly into the overall life of the congregation is a worthy goal for every church, but usually more is needed. To limit church action for its older constituency to the activities for all adults is inadvisable. Aging members have special needs just as much as children, adolescents, young adults, and parents of young children.

When a church becomes aware of the special needs of aging members, it may show its active concern by helping them participate in church activities through offering transportation to services or installing a ramp, elevator, seat pads, or hearing aids. (However, sometimes this is done in such a way that the people who might use them feel singled out and demeaned; when that occurs, they tend to avoid them. A church needs to be sensitive to the social interpretations and psychological implications of giving and receiving help.)

A local church will find almost no end to possible ministries for the aging. They range from traditional spiritual ministries to cooperation with other agencies trying to change evil conditions in society. Because of the high value placed on individual self-sufficiency in our culture, it is important to develop the idea that when help is given, what occurs is a genuine exchange, rather than a one-way process. Actually, this fits the perspective that every member of Christ’s body has spiritual gifts to use for the benefit of the entire body (1 Cor. 12). It also fits the current perspectives in the helping professions that it is far better to work with people than simply to do things for them.

Ministries With And By The Aging

There is a growing emphasis upon the differences between the “young old,” who still are healthy, energetic, independent, mentally alert, and capable of helping others, and the “old old,” who show evidence of declining vitality, physical strength, and sometimes mental acuity. Both compulsory and voluntary retirement plans have taken many of the young old out of the labor force. If given appropriate challenges, opportunities, and rewards, many of them will help serve other people.

The Foster Grandparents program has shown that the elderly can effectively serve mentally retarded children in institutions. Public programs like Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and many privately sponsored projects associated with missionary enterprises around the world have benefited from their contributions. Lillian Carter, mother of the recent president, was a Peace Corps volunteer in her late sixties. Sam Linden, a retired contractor in Sylvan Way Baptist Church of Bremerton, Washington, constructed greatly needed buildings for missionaries in Ethiopia. Widower Phil Christenson of Bethlehem Covenant Church in Minneapolis has repaired facilities of his own congregation and of agencies in his denomination, besides helping wheelchair patients in a hospital. Enabling retired Christians to identity similar opportunities for service is an appropriate role for the church.

Most of the opportunities for service will be less glamorous. They may be as simple as reading to a sight-impaired person once a week; providing a few hours of respite care for a family with a dependent elderly person so that its members can have time off from daily duties; helping a shut-in person with house cleaning or other household chores; making a daily telephone call to an elderly person who lives alone; transporting a frail person to a medical appointment; sitting beside a dying person, or telling stories about the past to children. Yet they also can be as complex as collecting competing proposals and bids for insulating a church building; coordinating volunteers who provide diverse types of services to hundreds of needy people in the community; helping a non-English-speaking refugee family to cope with its numerous problems of adjustment when it settles into a community; supplying advocacy for a needy person struggling with the red tape of a bureaucratic social welfare system; or assisting others in the preparation of income tax returns.

Individual differences in abilities and interests will play a significant part in the matching of the donors and recipients of services. My 85-year-old mother has knitted dozens of beautiful sweaters for children of foreign missionaries through the women’s missionary society of the First Baptist Church of Yucaipa, California. If we had record, it probably would show that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of elderly people are actively contributing their volunteer services through churches and Christian agencies. Annals of modern “heroes of the faith” who perform valiantly for God and his people can be compiled in every community.

A mere news release or “public announcement” seldom suffices to recruit volunteers for such activities. Usually a personal invitation is needed, from someone who knows a person’s abilities and interests, as well as details about the need and conditions of service. Even then, the older volunteer needs to be reassured of his ability to meet the need or provide the service; this encourages him to overcome the initial insecurity and reticence so commonly found among the aging.

For the “young old,” the question of exchanging goods and services is usually no problem, but the “old old” often see themselves as exclusively on the receiving end. A church can overcome this barrier to the effective delivery and receipt of services in at least two ways. One arises because most such persons have given services to others in the past either directly or indirectly through their support of the congregation’s ministries. They now are receiving benefits from activities they once supported.

More significantly, few people are so infirm that they are incapable of giving something. If nothing else, they give others the joy of helping someone else (Acts 20:35). Their cheerful spirit, expressions of thankfulness to God and to other people, reminiscences about mutual concerns, and above all, intercessory prayer are among the gifts even bedridden Christians share. Both to elicit such prayers and to encourage their continuation, however, it is important to give them regular reports of prayer requests, prayers answered, news of the church, and needs of its community and members. Mindel and Vaughan reported from their research findings (Journal of Gerontology, Jan. 1978) that the elderly may remain active participants in the life of a congregation long after they are unable to attend its services.

When a church harnesses its older members’ interests, abilities, and resources of wisdom and experience to serve their own generation and others, it will have a much more effective ministry with its immediate constituency and with people outside its fellowship. The work of the pastor will become much more effective when he shares it with lay members.

Lay ministries, where members visit the sick and shut-ins, offer home care, and reassure people through the use of the phone, can greatly extend the influence of the congregation, even as they relieve the pastor of responsibility for many details that otherwise would consume much time. For example, Ned Gilbert of the First Baptist Church of Milwaukee has a nearly full-time volunteer ministry as he visits other retired people at home and in hospitals and nursing homes. His voice, bringing cheer, passages from the Scriptures, devotional readings, and prayers, offers a contact with the outside world that has richly supplemented the work of pastors for several years.

Work with the aging and elderly in a church is far more efficient and effective than merely work for them. It enhances their sense of freedom and self-worth. It makes them aware of their high calling as children of God and members of the body of Christ, and enables them to view their lives as good stewards of their resources and abilities.

Steps To Take

Where and how ought the leaders of a local church to begin their ministries in the midst of a graying population? A pastor cannot do everything, yet his support is crucial, for without it, it will be difficult (although not impossible) to make significant progress. Most of the work, however, should be done by the lay members and leaders, and involves several stages.

The best way to begin is by discovering facts about the local situation. For example, this descriptive stage may ask how many members of the church are past the ages of 50, 60, 65, and 75.

How many are shut-ins?

What are their residential arrangements, social relationships, styles of church participation, roles in leadership and other areas, attitudes, actual and felt needs, abilities, skills, interests, and friendship patterns?

What are the attitudes of church staff, lay leaders, and members toward aging and the elderly?

To what extent are they afflicted with gerontophobia—a fear of their own aging—which contributes to unconscious prejudice and discrimination against the aged?

In addition, what needs are evident from characteristics of the aging and elderly in the surrounding community?

Identifying resources to serve the aging and elderly within the church and its community is also part of the descriptive task. What programs and services are presently available?

Are there supportive services to enable older people to remain in their own homes even after some disabilities afflict them?

Does the community have a senior center, meals on wheels, home care services, a visiting nurse program, transportation for the handicapped, regular congregate meals for the elderly, a telephone reassurance program for frail and shut-in people, lifelong opportunities for education, and a “living history” project to record significant memories of the elderly?

Are there opportunities for intergenerational activities?

Are the elderly encouraged to meet one another’s needs in the church and community?

A second major step toward action is evaluating the extent to which the resources available match people’s needs. Who actually takes advantage of the social and spiritual services available?

Does the service delivery extend only to those who are the most capable of meeting their own needs, leaving many people friendless, isolated, needy, and disabled without receiving significant help? (It is one thing to have services available, but another for people actually to take advantage of them.)

It is also important to coordinate the service programs of various groups with each other. Do their staffs, as well as pastors and other church leaders, know what is available through channels outside their immediate domain?

Frequently the most neglected area of wholistic well-being concerns spiritual needs. Can Christian ministries provide these more effectively?

The evaluation will reveal that many needs are met as completely as is reasonably possible, while others are hardly satisfied at all. That leads naturally into the prescriptive task of planning future action by matching human problems with available resources in order to correct existing flaws, serve unmet needs, coordinate programs, and design new service projects within the church or community. Specifically what ought to be done will depend on the local situation—the needs, spaces available, interests and abilities of cooperating people, and similar matters.

“Typically, the best way to initiate a new program is to focus on one particular need. This may be done through a monthly fellowship gathering (including a warm lunch) at the church, a weekly Bible discussion and prayer group, one or more lifelong learning classes in either “secular” or religious subjects of interest to a group of people, recreational excursions by bus or auto, or on such services to others as a tutoring program for high school students, literacy services for immigrants, gospel teams to jails and nursing homes, or any of hundreds of other possibilities. As senior citizens associate with each other and work together, they learn of one another’s strengths, weaknesses, and needs, becoming a mutual support group. They may also become aware of community problems and act as an advocacy group for elderly or other disadvantaged people.

A new program is not likely to get off the ground if church leaders assume that the pastor must carry all its organizational and administrative responsibilities. Certainly the pastor is a key person in terms of stimulating ideas, demonstrating support, giving publicity, gaining cooperation, recognizing leadership, and legitimizing the activity. But typically he or she already has too many other responsibilities to carry the entire load. The key to successful implementation of the project, the fourth stage of program development, is often the finding of a key lay leader, such as a retired person who has appropriate administrative and human skills, together with the cultivation of a support group to assist in planning and administration.

Continual evaluation is advisable throughout the program’s duration, but periodic appraisals of progress at least annually are essential. This will lead those concerned to modify, extend, and sometimes discontinue activities. Most congregations will not develop the extensive repertoire of diverse programs exemplified by the Good Shepherd Center in Kansas City, but many may eventually have a package of community-related activities like that of the Point Loma Community Presbyterian Church of San Diego, described in Robert W. McClellan’s Claiming a Frontier: Ministry and Older People (Univ. of Southern California Press, 1977).

Some Final Considerations

Self-fulfilling prophecies often hamper the effectiveness of church ministries. When a church assumes that its future lies only in its youth, it fails to develop other avenues of service (and as a result, its youth programs suffer along with the rest). If the elderly are presumed to be set in their ways, evangelistic efforts will tend to ignore them, even though many aging non-Christians are more open to spiritual truth than they have been for decades.

Happy is the pastor and blessed is the church that has retired members actively involved in ministries of, for, with, and by the rest of the body of Christ, for they still bring forth fruit in old age (Ps. 92:14).

The number and percent of the aging population varies greatly from one community to another, as do the characteristics of church congregations. It is unwise therefore to suggest any particular pattern of services and activities as a standard. All, however, must include a specific concern for the needs of the aging in order to serve all people. Some approaches to planning such ministries have been suggested briefly, but one overriding consideration still needs attention.

While it is easy for a church to undertake many activities that the educational, civic, recreational, social welfare, and health-related agencies of a community also provide, it is impossible, however, for those agencies to emphasize the religious values central to spiritual well-being. If the churches do not make these their central task, many seekers will turn to cults and pseudoreligious movements.

Spiritual nurture is the number one task of the church in its work with the aging. But other ministries, rightly conducted, will aid in performing that task and increase the effectiveness of the church.

How the Elderly Respond to Church

To find out how the elderly feel about their churches, CT asked Biola College sociology professor Alfred Fox to do “roving reporter” interviews among persons at Calvary Church in Santa Ana, California, where he serves as pastor to senior adults.

Question: What is the church doing right and what mistakes is it making in its ministry to older members?

Leona Sebastian: I appreciate that our church has a special staff person in charge of the older people. This gives us a good feeling. We know we have someone who understands our needs, who can represent us. When you have a problem, you need a pastor who is uniquely yours.

Florence Fiske: The churches that are doing a good job taking care of their retired people recognize they have needs and problems unique to their age group and try to meet them. What I appreciate most is transportation.

William Planchon: Too much attention is being given to the oldsters. Old people have lived their lives; they know the ropes, and they ought to be able to take care of themselves. The children and the youth—they are the ones who really need a lot of help.

Tay Crawford: I couldn’t have asked for anything more. But the church can’t do everything. We’ve got to help each other, and there is no reason why we can’t. We need to communicate with each other. When someone calls me with a problem, I’m more than happy to help. The idea of sitting back and expecting the church to do everything for us is ridiculous.

Martha Planchon: The youth should be emphasized, but I don’t mean to the exclusion of older people. My concern is that we keep things in balance and not go to the extreme.

I. H. Pennington: My wife was bedridden many months before her death. I have been adjusting to life without her after over 60 years together. The church is doing a tremendous job of helping to meet my needs. It has been very hard, but I know I can count on the support of my church family.

Nat Travis: The church is doing as well as it can under the circumstances. It has many limitations of time, money, and personnel. No one or two people can do it all. Every member has to get involved in mutual caring, not rely on official programs or paid staff.

Dorothy Williams: My only serious criticism is that people in convalescent hospitals and nursing homes are not visited often enough. Loneliness is a big problem. You might not think you are doing much good by visiting them, but they appreciate the attention.

Joseph Miller: When you get to my age and your health is not real good, you can’t participate as much as you’d like to. Before we found this chinch, we were in a good church, but there were no people our age. We were happy to find a church with a special ministry to older people. I don’t drive anymore, so we really appreciate the van that comes by our place. We love the class every Sunday morning and the other activities.

Bertha Cannon: The church is doing a good job, but it is letting a lot of older people off too easy. I see so little participation by people in our age group. It is hard to get them to do anything, to volunteer, to come out to a picnic, or to take part in a special activity that is really for all the church. We may have forgotten that it is a two-way street. If you can’t do something for the church, how can you expect the church to do something for you?

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