Growing up, my favorite people in church fell into the “senior” category. They were the most engaged in my life and were so happy to see me. I wasn’t a nuisance, even when I was incredibly embarrassing to my parents. I was so profoundly loved by the seniors at Trinity Episcopal in Alpena, Michigan.
This category, for our purposes may be considered retirement age (whatever that is today). AARP sends you stuff at 55. Sam Portaro in his talk, started it at 60. Like everything else, you know it when you see it. I also hear that you know it when you feel it, but that is something else.
With the rising average age of Christians in the United States, it is pretty easy to consider that the average member of a church on any given Sunday is actually a senior. For many, this is wonderfully homogenous. We might hear:
This is so much easier when we’re all the same! We all have the same needs and expectations!
For others, this is absolutely terrifying. We might also hear:
Oh crap! Everybody looks like me! How can we have a future when I don’t have a long one!
Excuse my caricatures, but you get my meaning. There is both comfort and discomfort with having the most numerous group in church being older. There are also real assets.
Calmness
Portaro highlights the primary benefit of aging is a sense of calmness. Seniors have seen everything already. They have survived turmoil and thrived in boom times. Their entire lifetimes serve as a history book that informs their next steps.
Continued Service to Others
Perhaps its wisdom or experience, but many seniors have developed a strong sense of service through that individual (and shared) history. And, in retirement, new-found time and opportunity to express that service.
Portaro also considered adding an additional grouping. His original model was 60-80 was named (less falteringly) “old age” and 80+ was “advanced old age”. But for our purposes, as he did for his talk, it seems appropriate to consider all of our seniors together.
6 keys to engaging seniors in church:
- Seniors are still learning. Perhaps it is wisdom and calmness, but many seniors take real pride in “not being done yet”. One of my favorite people in this group really only engaged his faith in any demonstrable way in retirement. Many discover along the way that the only true way to learn is through teaching.
- Encourage teaching. Just like Mid-Lifers, Seniors need to be mentors, teachers, and guides. But seniors have the added advantage of no longer being so “in it”. There is less risk and much greater reward in sharing those life lessons, particularly to generations that have grown up away from grandparents.
- Be surrogate grandparents. One of the generational differences we are living into is the Silent Generation (approx. those between 65-80 today), along with the WWII generation were the first generations of Americans to not live in the same place as their kids. Boomers left when they could or Silents and WWII parents retired in sunny Arizona or Florida, far from their kids. Gen Xers and Millenials have, as a generation, grown up without grandparents nearby. This means we have a whole bunch of children, youth, and young adults that need grandparents to spoil them on Sunday mornings and invite them over for brunch after church.
- (Don’t) Take advantage of the free time. Let’s face it, seniors are the only ones with the free time. At least as a whole. Yes, I’ve heard many seniors tell me that they were busier in retirement than they were the entire decade before. I buy that. But a big part of that busyness is church stuff. Here’s the cutting edge. Because seniors are the only ones with any real free time, they are called upon to do the brunt of the work. But they also feel as if they are always doing all of the work. We need to find a solution, which I will tackle in a near future post.
- Help seniors share the church’s future. One of the challenges of having a majority senior population is dealing with catering to the needs of those that are in the pews and those that we wish were there. We often don’t think we can do both. It is incredibly important that we move immediately toward a model of shared responsibility. The wisdom of seniors is an asset, only when it is not the dominant voice. Each generation needs to have a seat at the table, and seniors are in the best position to send out those invitations.
- Challenge seniors to keep it up. Perhaps this one actually scares us the most, but we need seniors to find value in numbers one through five. We all know those, who upon retirement, actually quit everything. They stop supporting the millage so that schools have running buses, stop leading formation programs because they’ve “done that” and “had their turn”, and sometimes stop showing up to anything at church at all! It is far too easy for all of us to lean on the wisdom of age as a replacement for honest Christian discipleship. Seniors need to be pushed to keep moving and growing.
This is the final age-group post in my “Engaging” series, but I have another one planned to summarize with an eye to the future and another tackling the issue of “enough time”.
When those are written I will come back and add links in this post. For links to the other posts in this series, find them in the post: “Engaging Everyone In Church“.
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