Elder Evangelism

This is the third in a series of blog posts inspired by Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.

Atul Gawande

Gawande writes about his experience as a physician and surgeon, but his real concern is the humanizing of our institutions. The story of medicine in the last eighty years has been one of break-taking technological advancement. But Gawande wonders if the patients have been forgotten amidst all the technical razzle dazzle.

The next phase in the evolution of medicine, Gawande argues, will not be technological but personal. It will involve rediscovering the patient as a mortal human being. Medical technology is about curing disease and fixing what is broken. But what happens when someone can’t be cured or can’t be fixed? What happens when medicine reaches its own limits? How do we deal with the inescapable truth that we are creatures who eventually wear out and die? By failing to face that question, medicine can actually do harm and deny to many patients the possibility of living as fully as possible in the face of the limits of mortality.

Gawande has put his finger on one of those wondrous paradoxes – that recognition of limits can be the path to a richer and fuller experience of life.  

I think there are many parallels here to the situation of the contemporary church. Modern churches, like modern hospitals, are products of a consumer culture. Programming is the church’s technology. For many years, churches were extraordinarily success in attracting religious consumers by offering a full range of organized programs for everyone, from cradle to grave. In turn, the contributions of those consumers supported modern denominational like the United Church of Canada.

But what happens when churches can no longer deliver the programs? As more energy and resources go into propping up a program based structure, does the spiritual well-being of people get lost in the shuffle? Are we preventing ourselves from being what we are able to be by our frantic attempts to be what we wish we could be?

For as long as I can remember, the mantra of most congregations has been “Children are our future.” If we don’t have children and young families, who will take over when we are too old to keep the church going?

But this attitude assumes that people are going to follow a lifelong pathway of religious commitment; that the wee ones in Sunday School today will grow up to be the church leaders and supporters of tomorrow.

That reality has almost completely vanished. Something like 4% of Canadians under 30 are active in churches. My guess is that most of them are in more culturally relevant so-called “evangelical” churches, which means that the number of “leaders of tomorrow” in mainline churches is vanishingly small, statistically speaking.

But here’s where Gawande’s insights might contain the seeds of a new opportunity.

As we age, we become more aware of our mortality. That’s especially true today when sanitation, nutrition and medicine can keep us alive for a long, long time. For most of human history, most people didn’t survive to see their fifth birthday, and of those who did, few made it past 50. Preventable diseases like cholera, typhus or puerperal fever could carry off otherwise healthy people in a matter of hours.  “Here today and gone tomorrow” was not just a cliché, it was lived reality.  

Today, most of us don’t think about mortality until the limitations of aging make it unavoidable.  

Atul Gawande argues that recovering a sense of mortality is essential to human well being.

But churches – especially churches with a significant number of older persons – are one place where it’s OK to talk about mortality. If people were to know that there is a place that will help them face their mortality with wisdom and peace and joy; that would guide them in living life to the full even as the natural limitations of time and aging become more pronounced – I don’t think our churches would need to spend so much time and energy frantically searching for a mission or a purpose.

Which brings us to evangelism. Evangelism is “sharing the Good News.” What’s the good news for someone struggling with aging and mortality? That is a question our churches would do well to consider very seriously.

My former congregation was next door to a 450 resident senior’s complex. Whenever the question of the future arose, someone would always say, “Oh well, we’ll be OK. We’ve got all those seniors moving in next door who will come to our church.”

To which I would reply, “But in the next 10 years, it will start filling up with old people who have never been to church!”

So what does it mean to introduce the Gospel to someone who is 65, 75, 85, and has no Christian memory? We assume that Christian formation is something that happens mainly when we’re young because that’s the paradigm of Christian experience we’ve grown up with.

But I predict that number of people whose senior years are going to marked by loneliness,

regret and the question “What has my life been about anyway?” is going to grow. And that may be a vast new mission field, white for the harvest, that we never suspected was there.

Let me repeat: This does not mean that we shouldn’t be concerned about ministry with children, youth and young families. It does not mean that we shouldn’t strive to build healthy intergenerational congregations. But I just think that, more than at any time in Christian history, the kind of community that traditional congregations are able to provide will be increasingly meaningful to people as they age.

With characteristic wisdom, Eugene Peterson has cautioned us about how “The church we want becomes the enemy of the church we have.” This insight may be the single greatest key to finding our way forward.