In 2013, after I surveyed readers over the age of 40 about their relationship with the local church, I surveyed pastors and church leaders. I heard from more than 80 of them. After unpacking the survey results on my blog, I made the following observations about what they shared:
Church leaders must do some serious thinking about their models for spiritual health, growth and church “success”. Yes, I know there are hundreds of people speaking and writing about how and why to do this, all promoting their specific fix for the problems of our churches (Be missional! Be multi-site! Formal liturgy/modern worship/yada yada yada! Reformed theology! Reach families/youth!). The focus many leaders have had on endlessly building and tinkering with church forms and structures has burned (and burned out) a sizable number of older members. Many of my survey’s respondents willingly participated in earlier versions of the same old carnival ride when they were younger and wisely recognize that it is insanity to keep repeating the same cycle of church life and expect different results.
Church leaders need to reconsider how they speak of and nurture spiritual maturity in their congregations. The fact that almost half of those over 40 who took my survey are less involved in their congregations today than they were ten years ago is, in many cases, a marker of their spiritual maturity, though precious few church leaders would likely assess it in that way. Many older people are limited from church involvement because they’re caregivers for frail parents, ill spouses or their grandkids. Others have “aged out” of their church’s family-centered programming, and have found other ways in their community to connect, serve, mentor and learn. Filling a slot on a church org chart may be a sign of a member’s church commitment, but it is not a measure of his or her spiritual maturity. Churches that understand themselves as launch pads rather than destinations appear to be poised to best equip those over 40 to flourish when those in their second adulthood are bearing their fruit outside the four walls of a local church. These congregations that embrace and celebrate these people will have the additional benefit of continuing to access these members’ gifts, experience and presence.
At the time I was doing these surveys, I was a student at Northern Seminary. One of my professors, Scot McKnight, suggested that there are three general categories of pastors in our modern world: the Entrepreneurial leader (think Bill Hybels or Rick Warren), the Preacher-Teacher-Theologian (John Piper is an example of someone whose primary focus is to give the congregation excellent sermons each week), or Pastor as Spiritual Director (Eugene Peterson, a shepherd committed to formation of souls).
While Entrepreneurial types have always been with us – think Billy Sunday or Charles Finney, for a couple of examples from a few generations ago – many Boomers really gravitated to the oh-so-modern control-and-command style of leadership. The main alternative to having C.E.O. helming a church in most Evangelical congregations was the Preacher-Teacher-Theologian (P-T-T) type. (I would suggest that of the three in the hypenated list, “Teacher” tended to be up at the top of the list, many of these gifted communicators aren’t particularly pastoral.) Church-as-classroom made many of us over 40 feel as though we on familiar turf at church. If we acquired a nugget of koine Greek from the message and a task to do or fix in our lives in the coming week, then church had done its work in us. While some of the parents of Boomers may have grown up in small churches with a spiritual director-type pastor, this type of pastor is far less familiar to most of us.
C.E.O. and P-T-T church leaders offer tools and motivation to those in the first half he first-half-of-life business of building a family, career, and identity. (Richard Rohr’s meditation on second-half spirituality, Falling Upward, notes that churches in general tend to focus on “first half” concerns.) I’d like to suggest that those in the second half, who are given to dismantling first-half of life structures in order to create meaning and leave a spiritual legacy, may be looking for less command-and-control and more spiritual direction from their churches. I’d even suggest that some of the issues of inflexibility and spiritual malaise from older members that some pastors reported in my recent survey might be this desire in a form that congregants maybe haven’t even been able to articulate, except in the form of becoming a problem to a leader.
What do you think about this proposition?
Note: If you have not yet read Mary DeMuth’s excellent post “Ageism In An Age Of Hipster Christianity” at A Deeper Story, please hie thee there ASAP. She is touching on many of the themes I’ve tackled in my posts and surveys in this space about the relationship of those over 40 with their local churches.
No one believes me but I watched as it all unfolded. As a satellite, an outlier, it was easier for me to see the whole because I wasn’t in the deep middle. What I witnessed was the morphing of church in the noble, if desperate, attempt to keep the youth from being pulled away by the siren call of the flash and sparkle of the modern world. Thus, church adapted to the call to build sanctuaries that are more like community centers. Add stages, coffee shops, book stores. Remove the cross or any religious symbols, less these offend the unsaved who might wander in. Craft the narrative to appeal to the youth, the war cry “SAVE THE YOUTH!” Reassign the olders to background functional tasks, their collected, earned wisdom no longer relevant and certainly not hip enough.
You might think this is a new thing, but it’s really only a variation on a theme. T. Austin-Sparks used words to describe this unfolding as it was in his day in the first half of the twentieth century.
“The peril or snare will be cunningly and ingeniously adapted to the ‘prey.’ What would capture some would make no appeal to others. The most spiritual will be presented with what appears to be most spiritual. Our particular temperament will be our peculiar danger. We shall have to, ever and always, be governed by principle, and not by feelings, preferences, arguments, or natural appeal. Intellectual palliatives, emotional ecstasies, activity-gratifications must be suspected or challenged. The one question must be paramount – Where does this lead? Does it essentially and intrinsically relate to the one supreme purpose of God?”
By T. Austin-Sparks from: The Danger of Coming Short
Thanks for sharing the T. Austin Sparks quote – it’s a good one. And thank you, April, for sharing your observations. The writer of Ecclesiastes noted that there was nothing new under the sun back when he first wrote those words. Now that perhaps 2,500-3,000 years have passed, they’re just as true, aren’t they?
It does seem in some key areas we are in a season of reaping some of the unhealthy seed that we (perhaps inadvertently, perhaps intentionally) sowed in the church.
While it’s true there is nothing new under the sun, there is one thing that is as ancient as day one – Satan is busy, using every trick he can muster, seeking to draw us away from the truth. Did he not tell Eve that she could eat the fruit and therefore be enlightened and that she surely would not die? Yeah. That big lie sounded so good, didn’t it, but mostly because she wanted to believe it.
Discernment is the benefit as we mature spiritually and without that one important skill, we are as ripe for the picking as was Eve. Without it we can easily be pulled away from the simplicity of Christ, the reality that He didn’t come to create a new religion – He came to free us.
But what does that really mean? We have a history of 2000 years of yet more religion, traditions, laws, rules, methods, rising and falling, gaining and losing followers. Humans tend to assign significance to a thing that has a history, just because it has been around for a long time, even if it was never fully right. We grant it worth for it’s tenacity.
Someone once gave me something to think about that I have never forgotten. She said, “What if Jesus walked into your house and you recognized Him immediately and as you conversed with Him you asked this question: ‘Lord, what church would you have me belong to?’ And what if He replied, ‘If you can ask me that, you have never known Me.’? How would you feel about that?”
It made me think of the five foolish virgins standing at the closed door begging, Lord, Lord – you know the rest.
I get it, I’m a weird duck and generally I always hope that a discussion will bring about a helpful conclusion. All I can say about this discussion is that a day finally does come so if the day has not yet come, is there not a potential for eyes to be opened and ears to hear? What if the call to ‘Come ye out’ is not about leaving Babylon?
Good points. Our church is intergenerational. When our founding pastor Brian McLaren (maybe you’ve read him?) left, we intentionally dismantled all of our “silos” for men/women, singles/married, younger/mid-life. It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well as far as keeping people engaged and having a real diversity of activities and strengths. The other thing that has helped us is a pastoral team consisting of 6 people who are very different, some more gifted in spiritual direction, some preaching, some leading us out into the community to serve.
We also do a lot of interfaith work, serving our community w/ local mosques & synagogues. This seems to appeal to all ages. All that said, when I hit fifty-plus, I was very hungry for a spiritual mentor and could not find one in our church. Had to look outside. Which is OK, but sad.