Ministry
How many times have you heard it? "I'm no good any more. I feel so useless. Why, when I was younger I could do anything, go anywhere. But now . . ." Does it sound familiar? Perhaps you have even muttered something like that yourself.
If we only knew it, God has given us older people the opportunity of a lifetime. In a world in which just being old is a social problem, because we just don't count any more, and industry and commerce don't know what to do with us, and institutions seem to wish we would hurry up and die, God Almighty Himself pays us honor. He gives us high responsibility, puts us to work, and rewards us for it.
It's a fact: Society — Western society, particularly — makes no bones about its attitude toward older people. Automatic retirement is the rule in business and government unless there are exceptional circumstances. Even though it is admitted that older people are a national resource and
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that valuable experience is lost when retirement regulations eliminate veteran professionals, the trend toward early retirement continues.
So it is a great boon to us seniors to find that in God's work program of harvesting, the age of the harvester only increases his or her value. The harvest is what Christianity is all about. Whether we are eight years old or eighty, bringing souls into the Kingdom, winning men and women to faith in Jesus Christ and preparing them for Heaven, is what we have been commissioned to do. Ministry is evangelism; that's our job. Conversion is new life; that is the work of the Holy Spirit. In earlier chapters I have tried to indicate some of the ways we senior men and women can participate as emissaries of Christ in the glorious apostleship of the Gospel. Now we shall face the challenge in earnest and bite the bullet.
When we look into the Bible we see that without elders the organization of the church, and before that the government of the nation of Israel, would have been impossible. The New Testament Greek word presbuteros, from which comes our word Presbyterian, means simply "an older person." Before he ever led his people out of Egypt, Moses summoned the elders of Israel for consultation. In the centuries that followed, Israelite elders "sat in the gates" of each community and made the political, military, and judicial decisions of the municipalities. Often their performance rating was high. For example, when Solomon's son Rehoboam was crowned king of
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all Israel, he consulted his elders on an important matter affecting the welfare of the people under his rule and received from them excellent advice. He then consulted a number of young men his own age. They gave him wretched advice. Rehoboam chose to follow the counsel of his young friends, and a popular revolt broke out. He suffered the permanent loss of half his kingdom.1
But let's not pay too much homage to old age. Just because their hair is gray doesn't mean that what people say or do is invariably correct. Jesus found the elders of His day were following rabbinic tradition rather than the commandments of God, and He rebuked them for it.2 Elders composed the Sanhedrin, which passed sentence on our Lord, and some at least were present at His crucifixion.3 Later when Peter and John were arrested and jailed for the proclamation of Christ's resurrection, it was the elders of Israel who questioned them.4
The book of Acts records that when Paul and Barnabas carried a relief fund from Antioch to the hard-pressed Christians of Jerusalem, they presented the gift "to the elders."5 Evidently these were older believers who were among the first followers of The Way. The earliest church council to be assembled in Jerusalem was attended by "apostles and elders."6 Paul's letters to the churches indicate that the appointing or choosing of elders was, in fact, the way the local church took shape everywhere.7 Thus the enormous influence of older people both in ancient Israel
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and in the early churches throughout the Mediterranean region became a paramount determining fact of history.
Today the administrative title elder is still in current use in many if not most churches. The word priest is itself a shortened form of presbyter, or elder, and priests are still commonly addressed as "father." Our interest, however, does not lie in that direction. We are looking rather at our whole older generation, and we keep asking, "Is there something for us to do?" The secular world appears to have forgotten us. So we ask, "What does the church offer us apart from prescribing (as Dorothy Sayers puts it) that we refrain from being drunk and disorderly and come to services on Sunday? Does in fact the church have a ministry for us?"
The answer is yes, it does. That's good news. So, assuming that we have met the church's spiritual and theological requirements, what can we do that will put our modest gifts and limited strength to work in the service of God?
Instinctively one thinks of a pleasant, white-haired usher standing at the sanctuary door with a boutonniere in his lapel and a bulletin in his hand. Or one thinks of a sweet, white-haired lady seated at a table, teapot in hand, pouring at a church social. I take nothing away from such essential people; but when one thinks of a senior's church activity, one must define the role more explicitly in terms of ministry — what the church is all about. There is a great deal to be done. The King's business requires a whole bundle
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of gifts. The harvest is plentiful, and the laborers are few. The seniors need to be involved and their talents used to best advantage.
I have suggested that one of the valuable gifts older persons contribute to the church is wisdom. Local churches often find themselves in difficulty because their officers insist on bringing their own biased views, not to speak of personal idiosyncrasies, into ecclesiastical discussions that are related strictly to the church and its role of ministry. "Personal vanity," John Stott wrote, "lies at the root of most dissensions in every local church."8 A wise older head is often needed in such cases to bring peace and harmony and to direct the church leadership back to its God-given commission, which is always to bring the blessings of the Gospel of Christ to all the people.
Tremendous responsibility is involved in appointing individuals to professional and voluntary positions in the church. In today's environment child abuse is rampant, but people trust their children to the church, believing they are safe. Young men and women expect to find a wholesome environment when they engage in church activities. Worshipers expect not only spirituality among their leaders, they expect tact, courtesy, and good judgment. Who is to choose such worthy leaders? Who has the background, the experience, the knowledge of human character? Older people, that's who. They have been through the mill. They have seen enough and heard enough and experienced enough to
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discern what younger heads often fail to grasp.
It's true that older people are inclined to be more conservative and to be slower to grant approval and are more apt to counsel waiting than to take immediate action in a matter involving the good of the church. That can prove to be a drag, and again we ought to bear in mind that seniors are not infallible; they certainly weren't when they confronted Jesus. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were outstanding exceptions.9
Older people, however, cannot be easily typed. We are full of surprises. We will often take the part of young people when everyone else is criticizing them. We will support the minister in a new venture when younger "elders" are resisting the idea. We like to kick up our heels in church as we do in other places, to show our impatience with red tape and bureaucracy and stuffy old-fashioned attitudes that are strictly custom-built on the last generation and have nothing to do with the spreading of the blessed Gospel.
The New Testament instructs older women to teach the younger women, and the rule still holds, for if they don't, who will?10 The moral foundations of human society lie, in the last resort, in the hands of godly elderly women who will take to the streets and stand up against anyone and anything and are afraid of neither mean young gangsters nor dictators nor generals in full uniform.
Since boyhood I have loved Whittier's patriotic poem about a ninety-year-old woman, Barbara Frietchie, who stood up to the whole Confederate
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army during its invasion of her home town of Frederick, Maryland, in Civil War days. The rebel troops marched down the main street of town, tearing up some forty Union flags as they passed. Dame Barbara retrieved one of the flags, went inside her house, and hung it out her attic window just as General Stonewall Jackson came down the street. According to the poem he ordered the flag shot down. Rifle fire smashed the window, but Dame Barbara snatched the flag as it fell, then leaned out and shook it at the troops.
Shoot if you must this old grey head,
but spare your country's flag, she said.11
The general gave orders to march on.
Another nineteenth-century poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, struck a blow for heroism among the elderly when he wrote:
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of note may yet be done.12
Billy Graham, now in his mid-seventies, is setting an example for elderly people everywhere. He has made it known that he expects to "die with his boots on," still winning souls in the magnificent world-wide ministry that God has given him. What a man! He has achieved a remarkable career, but he was not the first to devote his life to serving God in this way. He would be the first to tell you of older men and women who
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achieved great victories for God and brought many to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, as well as bringing great blessings on the human race. Never let age be a deterrent in evaluating a godly man or woman's effectiveness. We have it on the authority of Scripture that Noah, a "preacher of righteousness," was six hundred years old when he built the ark.13
Occasionally we hear people on television deploring the fact that so much sagacity and "know-how" of older people is left untapped in modern society and thus wasted. Part of the reason is that we older people do not make ourselves available to the younger set. Many younger people would like to sit at the feet of successful older folks and learn from them. The problem seems to be one of access. In my study is a framed picture of John Alexander Mackay whom I made quite an effort to consult at a critical point in my career. Some years earlier he had been my teacher. At the time I sought his counsel my question was whether I should make a change or not. His excellent advice was brief. "Don't change unless you have to," he said. That put the choice back on me where it belonged, and six months later I made the change. Dr. Mackay is dead now, but the fact that I consulted him gave me a feeling of confidence I could obtain nowhere else, and I revere his memory today. As it turned out, making the change was an eminently correct decision.
In his book Learn to Grow Old, Dr. Paul Tournier tells of meeting an old gentleman friend who
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had lost his wife. To Dr. Tournier's words of condolence the old man replied:
It's a great grief, of course, but I never have time to fret. About ten years ago I founded a club for retired people. There were forty of us to begin with. Now there are more than four hundred. I can assure you I've plenty to do organizing my programs and getting speakers and artists.14
In 1977, after I had retired from my position as editor of Decision magazine, I placed an item in the San Diego Union, inviting interested persons to meet in a local church if they would like to form a Christian writers' group. Today as a result of that notice the San Diego County Christian Writer's Guild has paid membership of over two hundred and fifty. These writers help each other to get their material into print, whether articles or poetry, fiction or non-fiction. They have also helped writers to come together in other parts of the country, and many of them are now successful professional freelance writers and published authors.
Every so often young Christians come to our home for counsel, and usually it is to talk about their writing. I have spent a good bit of time over the last thirty years helping aspiring young authors. Such persons have a high priority on my time; I love to work with them and am honored that they choose to come to me for help. I watch the television news and see hundreds of young people engaged in mindless violence or else being rounded up and handcuffed by police,
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and I think, "If only some older person could sit and talk with them, and take an interest in their problems, and encourage them. They need Christ! God never intended life to be like that." Even at my age I want to go wherever they are and show them Christ's love and perhaps offer some positive suggestions to them. They seem to have no one to turn to, no place of recourse.
I am aware of and support some of the splendid volunteer organizations that are offering help to such youngsters, and I also know that their budgets are usually strained to the breaking point. But what about the older people who know these young people and could befriend them and show them a better way? Where are they? Wasting time like the young ones? Playing bridge or bingo? Watching soap operas? Looking for ways to occupy them until the next meal or the ten o'clock news?
As the pace of life quickens in the 1990s, an old problem seems to be reemerging principally among American adult males in their thirties and forties. Many of them are realizing that they have lost touch with their sons. Wounded and grief-stricken, they are blaming themselves, searching their souls and trying to initiate a recovery process with respect to their own lost masculinity.
Robert Bly's book Iron John has evidently touched a sensitive nerve and opened a national debate. He and others are exposing buried rage on the part of growing and grown children who want nothing to do with their fathers.
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The fathers, immersed in daily work, are now desperately trying to figure out what happened to their family relationships and are turning, as Bly did, to ancient stories and legends in an effort to reassert their own manliness.15 They are being told that they never really graduated from boyhood; no one ever took them into the forest, as it were, and initiated them into the primitive warrior rites of true manhood.
What can we say, we who have been through the crises of adolescence and mid-life and are now classified as elderly, to all these unhappy people? There seems to be no doubt that they are unhappy. Every day both men and women, Christian and non-Christian, are living with children, parents, husbands and wives, friends and roommates with whom they seem unable to establish good communications and viable relationships. Life as a result has become in many ways a vast disappointment, and a reassertion of machismo only seems to make it worse. The wounds go deep.
Well, there is a lot we can do. First, we can offer them Christ. Dr. Mackay used to say, "No man is truly man until he is God's man." Amend that to include, "No woman is truly woman until she is God's woman." Instead of drinking blood with younger people in a forest ritual, we can tell them that God's man and God's woman can find their real maturity through Christ right in the vortex of their daily lives through the power and love of the Holy Spirit. That is the ultimate meaning of the Cross and resurrection.
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From the serenity of our sixties, seventies, and eighties we can reach out as mentors to these younger men and women. We can grasp their hands in ours and give them the mature assurance they seem to want so keenly even as they reject it from their own fathers. We can instill confidence in them, tell them we are praying for them and we believe God is going to give their lives rich new meaning. We can show them that they need to reach across the bridge to their own children and assure them of their love. God Himself will open up ways to do it! Sometimes plain words have to be spoken. Hurts and griefs must be aired. But the real movement off dead center may come when our own elderly voices speak love and good cheer, and our own faces shine with reassurance as the younger ones receive the hope that God has promised in His word.
We have been through it all! We know about it. And we know that while there is no way over or under or around or back, there is a way through, for we have taken that route and here we are.
God, said the poet, moves in mysterious ways. He may not use us as His direct agents of reconciliation, especially if a problem is domestic. After all, we Christian parents got our licks in during early childhood. Now that the children are grown, our words don't carry the weight they did, but at least we can love them. Meanwhile God has His own agenda. His word to us is "Wait and see!" Our best move is to open our Bibles and begin ourselves to plead the promises of
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God. There is no disappointment in God when Jesus is running the shop.
One of the areas of greatest need in America today is retirement, convalescent, or nursing homes. It is a well-known fact that an astonishingly high percentage of residents die within six months after being admitted to one of these institutions. Rather than go into a sociological study of the reasons for this rapid deterioration, which is beyond my competence, I would prefer to point out that here is an opportunity for ministry that is particularly suited to those older Christians who are still robust and ambulatory. To visit the sick as Jesus did, to pray for the lonely, to lay hands on the elderly, to spread warmth and cheer among people who have little to smile about is certainly to engage in what Tennyson called "some work of noble note."
For whatever reason, the number of older persons throughout the world is increasing. We hear a lot about the infirm ones, but not so much about the firm ones, those who are quite able to carry their own weight and fill their proper roles in society. They may not be as nimble as they were in their twenties, but their minds are sharp and their zeal is as strong as ever. On their behalf I have the temerity to address a word to the church as a whole: Don't treat us the way the world treats us! Put us to work, please. Set us to praying, teaching, building, cooking, feeding, clothing, serving on committees, going on deputations, working on budgets, exhorting, singing, playing instruments, entertaining, sewing, writing,
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broadcasting, lecturing on tours, leading home fellowships — whatever seems to fit our capabilities and qualifications. Just don't segregate us permanently into a Golden Age group and make us into a pale imitation of life.
It all comes back to the vision and the calling. I say without fear of successful contradiction that for millions of us old age is the best part of life, the happiest, the most fruitful, the most exciting we have known. I keep saying this because all the emphasis today is on those who are struggling with health difficulties, financial straits, loneliness, neglect, and other social problems. Those who are finding joy in ageing don't draw attention — and don't want it. Why should we? For many of us there are our own loved ones who look to us as their parents and grandparents and who are concerned about our welfare. That makes the business of everyday living a lot easier and certainly more pleasant.
We seniors are quite aware that we are not immortal and that somewhere down the pike our time will be up and the curtain will ring down. We trust the angels are waiting in the wings. Meanwhile it's great just to be alive and to be able to tell all the folks younger than we are that God is good, that His mercy is everlasting, and that His truth endures to all generations. That too is part of our ministry, and we hope they in turn will one day (should the Lord tarry) be saying the same thing to those who come after them.
Chapter 15 || Table of Contents
1. See 1 Kings 12:1-15.
2. See Mark 7:3.
3. See Matthew 27:41.
4. See Acts 4:5-7.
5. See Acts 11:30.
6. See Acts 15:6.
7. See Titus 1:5.
8. John R.W. Stott, Christ the Controversialist (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1978).
9. See Mark 15:43; John 19:39.
10. See Titus 2:3-5.
11. John Greenleaf Whittier, "Barbara Frietchie," The World's Best-Loved Poems, J. Lawson, ed. (New York: Harper, 1927), 300.
12. Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses."
13. Genesis 7:6.
14. Paul Tournier, Learn to Grow Old, 128.
15. Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990).
