Since the fall of 2008 I have been engaged in study toward the Doctor of Ministry degree. My dissertation project is entitled, A Heart of Wisdom: Embracing the Vocation of Elderhood within a Congregation. The project seeks an understanding the nature of elderhood within the context of a multigenerational congregation. The study develops an approach for drawing out the voices of a specific population within a congregation, for congregational ministry and for use in developing ministries. And it is intended help us understand how to include members of a particular population as a vital part of congregational life.
I focus this study on a particular group within the
congregation: men over fifty-five years of age. This is a group within the
congregation who are less often heard on the issues involved in becoming
elders. The focus on older men provided a clear limit to the scope of the
inquiry. It focuses attention on a less verbal and less transparent population.
Despite their reticence in volunteering information about their inner lives,
older men have something to say. The diversity of experience found among a
relatively focused set of interviewees highlights how worthy they are of
attention. Twelve years ago an older group of men at another congregation
invited me to join them for their monthly lunch. As I discovered, similar as a
group of older men may look to the outsider, the breadth of experience and
insight they have to offer can be a part of the pastoral adventure of working
with this population.
We need to hear from these people and make their voices more
audible. How are they aware of the vocations of elderhood? How they are
embraced by and within the context of congregational life? But – best to ask for elders’ own perceptions.
And so I have been asking older men active in the
congregation a few questions.
· How has your faith developed as you
have gotten older?
· How has the congregation
participated in this growth?
· What calls you now as a vital way to
live out your faith?
· How does the congregation embrace or
celebrate it with you?
Having now listened to a dozen and a half of the older men
active in the congregation, in leadership, worship or service, I am aware of
how grateful I am for their participation and their presence in the congregation.
As I evaluate what they have said to me, both common themes and unique
perspectives, I am glad to be honoring their voices.
In this paper I will discuss what I am learning from
listening to elders, in light of social-science theories and theologies of the
human person, with an eye to how congregations and their leaders can become
better at serving and serving with their older constituents.
In evaluating research interviews for this project, I found
that I was dealing with two different senses of elderhood, no matter how
closely I had defined the term in the preliminaries of the conversation.
On the one hand, for some of the interviewees, elder simply meant older, as in older than. They identified elderhood with
seniority. In other words, they conflated chronos time with kairos time, duration with fulfillment, and persistence
with responsibility.
On the other hand, several other interviewees approached a
meaning similar to the characterization of a functional elder offered in a
recent book on ritual: an elder with a vocational “ministry of wisdom and
presence within the faith community.”
In other words, an elder is someone who has gained wisdom
based in reflection on experience, and who is recognized and affirmed (however
informally) by their community for the call to serve others – in active sharing
or modeling of wisdom, or more subtly in their prayerful presence in the
consciousness of their community’s members.
Communities affirm calling; the called contribute the gifts
of their callings to community.
Church was for some interviewees primarily seen as a type of
voluntary association, in many ways a mutual benefit society. This leads to an
inadequate vision of church as civic institution, service organization or club.
As a friend remarked in conversation, the problem with thinking of church as a
family is that it too easily collapses into a club.
Church and pastoral ministry must be something more. As one
senior pastor remarked:
The work of the priest is not to
produce bulletins, nor administer, nor even visitation. All of these are means
to a greater end. The purpose of ministry in a secular world is to proclaim the
message: the reign of God has come, which is characterized by love. Some of us
clergy used to discuss whether our brethren ‘had a message.’ If we do not have
a message, then the institution that we serve becomes a secular organization or
a club. [The parish] is not a club, it is a point of light where Jesus Christ
is proclaimed and loved and ‘where prayer has been valid.”
The interviewees who saw most clearly
elderhood as a vocation shared some characteristics:
- They had a clear sense of vocation themselves;
- they actively expressed their vocation in ministry, service, or work;
- they exhibited a lively seeking faith: faith for them was dynamic and challenging, not static and not always comforting; and
- they somehow stood apart from the “core” of the congregational family system.
To paraphrase a Eucharistic prayer, they come to the Holy
Table not for solace only but also for strength, not for pardon only but also
for renewal.
In Stages of Faith
and other works, James Fowler correlates ongoing growth in faith with stages of
the human life cycle. The family system of the study congregation seems to have
an established norm of synthetic–conventional faith (Fowler stage III) and these six people appear
to have reached the level of individuative–reflective faith (Fowler stage IV) at least. The system will
resist this departure from the norm. Indeed most of these people, as much as
they have tried to work within the system, have found their most fruitful and
creative outlets for the expression of their faith in other venues.
I would look for these characteristics of potential
elderhood: sense of vocation expressed in active ministry, experience of
transformation, and ongoing growth in faith and life. Growth for which they
take responsibility: each is an actor and not simply a recipient in their
religious life.
An elder plays an active part, prominent or not, on the
stage of life, and does not simply stand by as a supernumerary present to
augment the volume of the crowd.
Elders have lively, seeking faith; engaged beyond parochial
boundaries in their ministry or expression of vocation, they stand outside or
somehow independent of the core family system of the congregation. Even if
deeply involved they do not draw their identity from role or relationship
within the group. This may indicate a shift from conventional faith to an
individuated faith, at least. Certainly they have taken the life of faith as a
gift of God to be received and applied rather than taken as personal validation
and kept to oneself.
What can we take away from this? An active faith seeking
understanding in the company of friends, an orientation toward service to
others, and a living curiosity expressed toward life, all are signs of dynamic
vocation.
Growth and development can continue throughout life’s
changes. Congregations can make room for that growth to occur in a context of
faithful community. One opportunity for congregations to encourage that growth
is during the character-formative years of young adulthood.
Reading my great-grandmother’s psychology textbook, I came
across this observation: “The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology
tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by
habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.” William James, writing
for college students 120 years ago, was urging his readers to look to their own
moral development during their twenties – before character has set like
plaster. He saw habits of the body and the mind forming and setting by the age
of thirty. James urged his readers to make nature their ally instead of their
enemy in this formation of character. (James, William. Psychology. American Science Series, Briefer Course. New York:
Henry Holt. 1892. 149.)
The challenge for congregations and pastoral leaders is to
encourage throughout the life cycle the development of habits of continuing
growth toward God. This can be done through many means. Pastors may create a
context by active, in-depth listening. Congregations may create a context for
transformation, by establishing a place for worship, fellowship, and prayer,
and by collective acts of service beyond their borders.
See also:
Psychology, Culture and Religion
See also:
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