Celebrating Ministry To and With Older Adults
You see a need, a really huge and unmet need. You develop a vision around how to address that need. And now you are ready to tackle that need. Where do you go from there? I see a need within the church. We have more older adult (65 and older) than youth (18 and under) … Read more
I’m not sure when it happened.
Was it in the great worship revolution?
I’m pretty sure it was happening well before then. Maybe it’s happened for a long time and we just never noticed it.
When did the eyes finally get up the nerve to tell the hands that we don’t need you? When did the head finally decide the feet were no longer necessary?
Because that’s what seems to have happened in the church today. Somewhere along the line we’ve told our older members, “i don’t need you.”
As I move into my later 50’s, I’m seeing more and more of my peers struggle to find work in the church due to their age. Is my generation falling victim to an ageist environment that we had a large part in creating?
Ageism is perhaps the last of the acceptable ism’s and it is alive and well in the church. In fact, it may be worse in the church than in society at large. I fear that my generation may have played a key role in fostering that environment.
Close your eyes and think of yourself twenty years older. Forty years older. What do you see? Does the thought of growing old scare you? Do you see wheelchairs, canes, nursing homes? How about hearing aides, or severe memory loss? These are things we often assume are inevitable. We assume incorrectly. Old age is not … Read more
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just me, but this just doesn’t make sense. We now have more older people in our nation (60 and older) than youth (under 18), a difference even more pronounced within the church. So why does the church seem less interested than ever in ministering to and with older adults? Not … Read more
How can we take the insights from this book and apply them to Inter Generational Ministries in our churches? Marc Freedman had already been influential to me, through his book Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life. I read that book while beginning my own sort of Encore transition, stepping away … Read more