Old age outrage

One of the areas of ministry - or lack of it - that has come increasingly to my attention during my time in National Mission is the way in which many elderly people are regarded as surplus to requirements in the average congregation. This isn't true of all churches - some of whom do very well in regard to older people - but it is true of many churches were the focus is almost entirely on children, youth, young families....

Here's a quote from an essay entitled, Fitness and Outrage, by Sherwin B. Nuland, who is himself now 80 years of age:

“Too many of the elderly do not have the family or the communal attachments necessary to feel valued; too many are widowed or otherwise alone; too many live in surroundings where they are essentially without the companionship necessary to stimulate a mind in danger of deteriorating. Too many are so poor or unable to obtain social services that they cannot remain in their own homes, and are certainly without the wherewithal to live in an upscale retirement community or assisted-living facility. Too many have passed their entire lives without the level of education and general knowledge necessary to take advantage of what is available to their peers raised in circumstances of greater awareness. For the vast majority of such men and women, so often socially and even physically more or less isolated, modern gerontology and its discoveries might as well not exist.”

A Mission-shaped Church for Older People?

We often talk about older people on this blog, the increasing numbers of them, they way they are the mainstay of many smaller churches, the way their skills and abilities are often unrecognized. However, it's still taken me three years or so to catch up with this book: A Mission-shaped Church for Older People? - Practical Suggestions for Local Churches by Michael Collyer, Claire Dalpra, Alison Johnson and James Woodward.

The book is published by Church Army and the Leveson Centre, a group that focuses on the study of Aging, Spirituality and Social Policy. It is readily accessible resource that should be invaluable for anyone who wants to think about the issues, problems and opportunities posed by an ageing population, and then to take action.

In his Foreword Dr John Sentamu says ‘The way the book is set out will be warmly welcomed by busy and hard-pressed church leaders. In the first part, three modules (thirteen sessions including an introduction) are explained and planned - the leader has simply to familiarise themselves with the content and provide supportive material for each session. The second part contains a whole range of helpful related material which should be placed in the hands of anyone who ministers among older people: the range is quite extraordinary.

You can find a good review of the book from the Church of England newspaper, and can buy a copy on the Leveson Centre site. You can also download a copy from the same address.

It's never too late...

Old people and the digital age? For some the two just don't go together. Put a computer in front of an old person and they have no idea how anything works. Or so the theory goes.

But there's another approach, one that Marty Bullis talks about in a brief article on the Leadership Journal online.

Marty works as a chaplain in a Presbyterian nursing home, and wherever he goes, he takes his laptop with him. Using pictures familiar to people who have Alzheimer's, he's been able to improve some of their ability to remember; using hymns in large print, he's been able to get some people to sing along; and he's even got some of the old men 'driving' on the computer with simulated driving games.

An innovative approach to chaplaincy.

Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simoes

We're getting older...

An article in the Guardian on the 20th July, points out an increasing trend in the ageing of the world's population.

A few extracts from it:

A new report by the US Census Bureau called An Aging World: 2008, shows that within 10 years older people will outnumber children for the first time. It forecasts that over the next 30 years the number of over-65s is expected to almost double, from 506 million in 2008 to 1.3 billion – a leap from 7% of the world's population to 14%. Already, the number of people in the world 65 and over is increasing at an average of 870,000 each month.

This is its ninth report drawing together data from around the globe since the Census Bureau first focused on the trend in 1987.

Its latest projections warn governments and international bodies the tipping point will present widespread challenges at every level of human organisation, starting with the structure of the family, which will be transformed as people live longer. That will in turn bring new burdens on carers and social services providers, while patterns of work and retirement will similarly have huge implications for health services and pensions systems.

One way of measurement is the older dependency ratio, or ODR, which acts as an indicator of the balance between working-age people and the older population that must be supported by them. The ODR is the number of people aged 65 and over for every 100 people aged 20 to 64. It varies widely, from just six in Kenya and seven in Bangladesh, to 33 in Italy and also Japan. The UK has an ODR of 26, and the US has 21.

Life expectancy after retirement has already reached 21 years for French men and 26 years for French women.

Church: get ready for the elderly!

Getting it off your chest

While the information in the report discusssed below pertains to Great Britain, most of it is very relevant to the New Zealand scene.
The report is called: Men and Mental Health – get it off your chest. It has some interesting and occasionally surprising things to say about men’s mental health.
One of its recommendations, for instance, is that health professionals should take gender into account when discussing treatment options with men. In other words, men have tended to be treated as less important in the mental health scene for a number of reasons which are discussed during the report.
Amongst these are a tendency for services are often ‘feminised.’
Many men ‘act out’ when having mental health issues, which often leads them to be criminalised because of their anti-social behaviour. The report reminds us that professionals need to recognise that ‘aggressive and violent behaviour is a potential indicator of mental distress.’
Men feel more comfortable discussing their issues in men-only groups, and if men are unemployed for too long they are likely candidates for depression. While partners or spouses may understand the man’s mental health, other family members often deride it.
There is also some discussion of mental health and gays, blacks and other minorities, and the elderly. Altogether this report makes essential reading.

For more information about men's groups, check out this article from the Sunday Star-Times, April 2009

The death of an old person...

"The death of an old person is like the burning of a library." So wrote Alex Haley, the author of Roots, and other stories of African origins. ( Or, if he didn't write it, he 'borrowed' it from his African past, as the words are often thought to be an African proverb. )

It's quoted in an article on caring for old people - I make no apology for this being nine years old (nothing on the Net ever grows old!) - called Aging and Ageism: Can You Have One Without the Other? by Karen Henderson.

The author looks at our attitudes to old people: Everyone gets old. None of us should be surprised or angry; it's a fact of life. But what's also a fact of life is this: we don't treat older people as people. We treat them as a commodity to be used, abused and disposed of as we see fit. We somehow learn to raise our children; we try to give our pets a good life. Why can't we extend the same efforts to our older people?

The article isn't long, but it has plenty of good things to say about older/elderly people (they're always people who are older than me, by the way!) and the way we think about them, and act towards them. It's probably addressed to the inbetween generation - those who have elderly parents and growing children - but it's applicable to anyone, anywhere.

Photo courtesy of Flickr.com

Love those old people

Matt Chandler, who isn't an old person, led a church of 100 through substantial change - and now has a congregation numbering some 6000. There's a short interview with him here on the rev.org site. What I appreciated were these two paragraphs, though he has some other very good things to say too.

There were a lot of older people in the church, and here's what I did not do: I did not walk into that place and beat up old saints and demand that our way was our way and they could just deal with it. I'm mortified at how often it plays out that way. And I don't know what young guys think they're doing; I don't know how they think they're pleasing God by beating up people who have been nothing but faithful to Him.

So first I started taking all these old guys out—to coffee, lunch, and dinner—and the message I communicated over and over again was the same: We need you, we need you, we need you. I immediately started putting 20 year-olds together with older folks. "Hey, this guy can show you how to live life; he can teach you about the Bible, he will have you into his home…" There's a hunger among twenty-somethings for that type of mentorship. And at that point the old saints don't care about peripheral things any more. They're not arguing about music and style and whether I'm wearing jeans or not any more.

Old people and mental health

In a national study of older peoples' mental health services in Britain - Equality in Later Life - the following paragraph stands out:
As a result of the ageing population, the number of people with dementia in the UK is set to increase significantly. At present, there are approximately 700,000 people with dementia and it is estimated that there will be over a million people with dementia by 2025. The financial cost of dementia to the UK each year is over £17 billion and is set to increase.
While younger people in Britain have been increasingly assisted in terms of mental health issues, older people have received the short end of the stick. In fact, the framework for mental health only addresses the mental health needs of working people up to the age of 65. Part of the issue is cost: it's estimated that eliminating age discrimination in adult health services in England could require an additional £2 billion, against a current spend of £8.4 billion.
The situation is unlikely to be dissimilar in New Zealand. Here is another area in which churches could begin to think beyond their current approaches to older people, and become innovative.

The Saga Generation

In line with some of my recent comments about older people in the church, I thought the following new(ish) booklet from Grove Books was of interest. It came out in August last year.
The title is, Reaching the Saga Generation, and for those who, like me, hadn't caught up with the term, 'saga', it apparently means older people, those from 55 years and upwards.

The blurb is as follows:
With the baby boomer generation of post-war Britain came the first post-modern values and new attitudes. Forty years on, these ‘first teenagers’ are becoming known as the ‘Saga generation.’

Ironically, they are being largely forgotten by many churches in the desire to reach the new younger generations. This study suggests it is time look again at this group and radically proclaim ‘This church needs more older people!’

In an article entitle, What Church for the Saga Generation? - Cultural Shifts in Younger Old, Michael Collyer gives us some more information on defining 'age.'

Defining old age is no longer an easy task, as the age range can span half a century, from 50 to 105.
....it is helpful to consider three distinctive cohort groups which I set out below.

•Pre-Seniors – 55-65 age group working, active and independent
•Seniors – 65-80 age group retired, active, mostly independent
•Elderly frail – 80 years and over mostly dependent and living alone

The SAGA generation includes both pre-seniors and seniors. The divide between this group and the now elderly frail before them is not merely a generational one; there are significant cultural differences...The causes of these differences are many and varied.

Collyer also notes:
The number of people aged 65 and over has increased by 50 per cent since 1960, from 6 million then to 9 million now and is set to grow rapidly to reach 12.5 million by 2020 as the baby boomers reach retirement.

So there you have it. Watch out for those seniors. They're taking over the world.

Ageing population

As a follow-up to my post on Monday about the elderly in our communities and congregations, I note the following projected stats:
We are in a time of rapid population ageing. In New Zealand, by 2030, for the group aged 65 to 74, numbers will double from 276,000 in 2006, to 559,000. By 2030, it is estimated that the numbers of those over 85 will almost treble, from 58,000 today to 150,0001 Treasury (2006) has also calculated that the ratio of the young to the old is transposing, and after 2020 we will have more people over age 64 than under age 15.
As I said the other day, this is no time to be ignoring children and young people. It is, however, a time to be thinking about how we are going to minister to increasing numbers of people who are over 60?

Embracing the Elderly

A brief piece in the latest NZ Management says ‘Employers Should Embrace the Ageing Workforce.’ It must be an idea that's found its time, because putting this phrase in Google brings up a number of references to it around the country, including this one.

Wouldn’t it be good to see a similar heading in SPANZ or some church magazine saying: ‘Churches Should Embrace their Ageing Parishioners?’ My gut feeling is that 'Ageing Parishioners' are left to fend for themselves spiritually and emotionally, and that the big focus in most churches is on children and, even more so, young people.

Of course we should be concerned for these two groups; they're the future. But older people are not the past - they're still the present, and they bring with them, in many cases, great stores of treasures, most of it neglected by your average church.

Many churches barely acknowledge the older people, or else they leave other older people to look after them, as though only the elderly can care for the elderly. As someone in late middle-age (not quite retired, in other words), I am just as concerned as ever about the state of my faith, about how to think theologically about all the issues that beset our modern world, about how to face the fact that death creeps closer with every day, that health isn't as stable as it used to be, and a number of other matters.

I don't feel old inside. Inside I still have a sense of being about thirty (though with a bit more experience under my belt), and it's only the fact that the body doesn't agree that makes me aware of being older. My suspicion is that people much older than me don't feel old inside either. But we can be made to feel old by being put to one side or ignored or treated as though we have no past, no history.

Boomers are an increasingly large percentage of the population. And, it seems to me, an untapped resource - and mission field.

Looking after the elderly

The Canadian Rural Church Network newsletter reminds us that:
A major thrust for rural churches in the immediate future is to provide adequate pastoral care for Senior Citizens (65 years plus).
Alberta's Cabinet Minister for Seniors and Community Support announced recently that the number of seniors in the Province is expected to increase by approximately 40% in the next 10 years, and to double by 2026. Similar statistics can be repeated in other regions.
Because of the Baby Boom Bulge, longer life-expectancy, and the tendency for seniors to retire from urban areas in search of cheaper costs of living, I expect similar statistics can be noted across the country.
At present, churches seem content to visit the sick, comfort the grieving and lead worship services at seniors' lodges and nursing homes. But there are very few pastoral care committees and fewer clergy and lay people learning how to address the spiritual needs of Seniors.
Gerontologists tell us that there are three stages of 'old' in our society: the young old (65-74 years), the old old (75-84 years) and the oldest old (85+). People in each of these stages face specific issues.

The issues are the same in New Zealand - and not just in rural areas. Churches have focused on youth for so long they've forgotten that older people continue to have spiritual needs, and in fact face a time of great change, what with the illnesses of old age, increasing lack of mobility, loss of faculties, losing longstanding friends to death, and many other important (and often debilitating) aspects of this stage of life.

The most recent CRCN newsletter (no 28) focuses on ministering to older people, and offers ways to think about working in this area.