Ministry with older people
We are in a time when people live longer. Retired people lead full, active lives. Modern medicine prolonges life – sometimes resulting in increasing care needs for longer.
How do we as church respond to this?
What place do older people have in church?
Do we recognise both our responsibility to and the opportunities and resource presented by older people?
At both ends of the age spectrum we may fall into a huge error in thinking young people are ‘the church of tomorrow’ and older people are ‘the church of yesterday’. The world is valuing the ‘silver market’; the church needs to wake up to the ‘silver congregation’.
Age is not always seen as positive. There are high levels of anxiety about getting old, about health, mobility, access to facilities, routine care and attention. The media and marketing concentrate on the young and images of what age might be are seldom encouraging. What is there to aspire to in age? What does the good life look like for those who do not have the opportunities – for financial, social or health reasons – to live as the marketing industry suggests you should? What does the marketing culture say about – and to – the elderly? It is not surprising if the prospect of age is unattractive to many. When Shakespeare’s King Lear mocks the attitude of his business-like daughters by admiting that ‘age is unnecessary’, he foreshadows the fear that surrounds this area: being old is being dispensable. Prejudice or contempt for the elderly is not a modern issue, even if it has become culturally more prevalent.
Ageing may feel threatening; it has the likelihood of sickness and disability and most frightening of all, the loss of mental abilities. If this is combined with an unspoken assumption that the elderly are insignificant because they are not consumers, the image of ageing is bleak. In contrast to a setting where age means freedom from having to justify your existence, age is often implicitly presented as a stage of life when you exist ‘on sufferance’. You are not actually pulling your weight; you are not an important enough bit of the market to be targeted in most advertising, except of a rather specialised and often rather patronising kind. And all too often that goes for the church too. We talk of family services – but mean young families with small children; we talk of all-age worship, meaning worship that children and parents will enjoy. What does this say to older people?
It has been said that how we perceive age is a spiritual issue. How do we include older people and ensure their dignity, value and worth, and help reduce some of the anxiety they feel. How can we nourish and build the relationship with older people in the community and congregation, on the assumption that we actually need our older citizens. The Bible present a very different picture:
Acts 2 v 17 / Joel 2 v 28 – 32, God has a place in ministry for older people
1 Timothy 5 Paul gives Timothy a list of instructions about treating those who may, for various reasons, be deemed vulnerable
Isaiah 46 v 4 – God's promise of care and sustaining in old age
It is God’s plan and intention that everyone has the opportunity to: have life and have it to the full. (Jn 10v10).