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.

The return of the multi-generational household

The following paragraph indicates an interesting trend in family households, which may also be increasing in New Zealand.

The number of Americans living in two-adult-generation households grew from 28 million in 1980 to 49 million in 2008, with 25% of Baby Boomers expecting to live with their parents again; and the recession has accelerated the trend. Supporting both parents and children takes a major emotional and financial toll, with the average yearly cost of supporting an aging parent at $5,534 and the yearly cost of supporting adult children at $7,660. But 76% of those helping a relative say they enjoy it, and 54% have bonded with their loved one more than they anticipated.

The first sentence is a bit unclear, but basically we're talking here about a member of the grandparent generation moving back in with one of their children and that child's family. Or the three-generational group moving into a different house together.

We were blessed when our children were growing up to have my mother living with us. She had her own living area upstairs, her own bathroom and a small kitchen. The enormous benefits this gave to our children are too many to count. It was also great to have a built-in babysitter (!)

However, this won't work in every situation, and it can be an awful burden for some. Still, my intuition is that it's healthier for the older person to live with their family. Even older people living in their own homes are healthier than older people living in rest homes. People who go into rest homes seem to deteriorate faster than those who don't.

It turns out my intuition is backed up in the report the paragraph at the top of this post relates to. One of the findings was:

Older adults who live alone are less healthy and they more often feel sad or depressed than their counterparts who live with a spouse or with others. These correlations stand up even after controlling for demographic factors such as gender, race, age, income and education.

The report is called: The Return of the Multi-Generational Household. It is presented by the PewResearch Centre, and came out in March 2010.

Photo by Dianna, on Flickr.com

One Generation from Extinction

Mark Griffiths and Simon Parry are conducting a series of workshops/conferences in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland in early February, on churches reaching out to kids, telling them about Jesus, so that the next generation doesn't grow up without Christ.

You can find out full details here, with venues, information about the two speakers and much more.

I have to quibble about the title of this conference, (which, in spite of my quibbles I would still recommend) and about the title of Mark Griffith's book. Apart from the ambiguity - is he talking about children becoming extinct (unlikely) or children growing up without Christ (possible but also unlikely) - it seems to denote some lack of trust in God's ability to keep on keeping on with his church. If the church survived persecutions, plagues, indifference, the Dark Ages, and much more over the last 2000 years, then it seems likely it will survive the 21st century. Catchy title, certainly, but does it convey what they want it to convey?

Intergenerational

It's the 16-year-old that has relationships with 66 year olds and 6 year olds who is more likely to stay involved in a faith community after [he or] she graduates.

Kara Powell writes on the Out of Ur blog that it's now been statistically shown that children and teenagers who are continually segregated off from 'adult church' during their growing years aren't likely to get attached to the church as they become young adults. They tend to slide away and lose their contact altogether.

Powell writes that: In the 1940s and post World War II, there was a real burst in parachurch organizations focused on ministry to teenagers and young adults, such as Young Life, InterVarsity, and Youth for Christ. In many ways, they led the way for the church in realizing that we need to focus on specialized discipleship and teaching for teenagers.

In spite of great results, the result was age-related segregation. And with many young people only going to youth group and not to church, there's no link to the adult church community.

Powell sees the future as intergenerational youth ministry.

I'm not entirely sure what intergenerational youth ministry actually is; wouldn't the better phrase be intergenerational ministry? Not to forget the youth, but to integrate them.

iGens and self-esteem

"Emerging adults (those between 18 and 30) form a generation that is largely insensitive to the potency of God's holiness, and are therefore insensitive to the magnificence of his grace, the shocking nature of his love, and that gratitude forms the core of the Christian life. Some today complain about these matters. But I doubt very much that ramping up moral exhortations and warning about an endless hell are the proper places to begin with emerging adults.

"The typical emerging adult, if I can capture the trend in one expression, is a "self in a castle." That is to say, the "self" is protected from the onslaughts of those who will attack it. I suspect that this is something unique in history. Never has a generation been more in tune with the self and more protective of the self. How did we get here? What led to the self-in-a-castle condition among this generation, whom I call the iGens?"

So writes Scot McKnight in an article entitled The Gospel for iGens in the Leadership Journal online. Scot cites two particular instances of influences which while aiming to be good, actually appeared to have done damage: Mr Rogers, the popular children's storyteller, and Sesame Street.

Mr Rogers...gave to the current generation a free-standing consciousness that daily says, "I am okay."
Sesame Street...focused on "We are all okay." "...even if current iGens did not directly watch Sesame Street, the themes of the show express a movement that gets at the central attribute of iGens....self-esteem."

Author Jean Twenge concurs: the American educational system and other cultural forces have so focused on self-esteem that they are producing a generation of potential narcissists. This sentence summarizes her assessment of iGens: "The individual has always come first, and feeling good about yourself has always been a primary virtue."

Twenge wrote a book: Generation Me - Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable than Ever Before.

McKnight points out: Note what [Twenge]'s not saying: iGens are not selfish or spoiled. Instead, they are intoxicated with the impact of 40 years of education that has focused singularly on self-esteem as the entitlement of each and every person for nothing more than being alive. As Twenge puts it, "GenMe is not self-absorbed; we're self-important."

This is an excellent article which aims to show how to reach these young people "who have the healthiest, most robust egos in the history of the West." Read the rest here, since this applies not just to American children, but all those influenced by the American culture.

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

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.

Technology and the Generation Gap

"Technology is fast becoming the latest driving force behind what is often called the 'generation gap,'" reports The Barna Group in its latest update. "Technology is shaping different experiences and expectations among generations."

My comment: I think when Barna talks about generations here, he isn't meaning parents and children, but successive groups of young people who may not be far apart in age. (My comments continue in italics below.)

While all generations benefit from the advances in technology, Barna found that "each successive generation is adopting and using technology at a significantly greater pace than their predecessors." The reliance on digital tools is exponentially greater among those under age 25. Another characteristic of the younger generations is what Barna calls "gadget lust" — 22 percent say they consider owning the latest technology to be a very high priority in life, compared to 9 percent of those over the age of 25.

Amongst the conclusions the researchers made are:

• Every age segment is becoming dependent on the Internet. (And that presumably includes seniors - over 60s)
  
• The nation's youngest adults (called Mosaics) are light-years ahead in their personal integration of these technologies. Supposedly the Barna group coined the term Mosaics; I'm not sure that it's used widely outside their perspective.
  
• All Americans (we could replace 'Americans' with 'New Zealanders') are increasingly dependent on new digital technologies to acquire entertainment, products, content, information and stimulation. All might be rather overstating the case; there are presumably a lot of people who don't have access to all technology.
  
• Churches have to work hard to keep pace with the way people access and use content, while also instructing churchgoers on the potency of electronic tools and techniques. Only a minority of churchgoing Mosaics and Busters are accessing their congregation's podcasts and Web sites. The reasons for this will be many and various: check out Lynne Baab's book, Reaching Out in a Networked World for more on this subject.
  
• Many of the same age-old questions about human development and human flourishing are taking on a new dimension. How does technology help or hinder communication and relationships between generations? How does it impact social skills, reading skills, writing skills, etc.? How will it affect tomorrow's workforce? [Barna] - And we might ask, how will affect the way people preach, or don't preach, in the future?

Thanks to the Pastors' Weekly Briefing for the original material.

The Online Generation

Don't know much about the Online Generation? Take a quarter hour out of your valuable time and check out the blog: Reaching the Online Generation.

If you're not much of a techno, you may find some of the language unfamiliar (even my geek of a son, to my surprise, didn't know what Twitter was), but persevere. In the middle of the Blackberries, Facebooks, MySpaces, online communities, there's a good deal of plain sense and a heart to reach people who won't be reached by the older methods of face-to-face, preaching, tracts and more.

If you or your church doesn't have a web presence of some sort, is it missing out on a way to preach the Gospel?

A note from RTOG: Who is God?' was one of the top three sentences googled in 2007, according to Google Zeitgeist. According to Alexa, the top two religious websites are Muslim, with BibleGateway coming in at a close third. The Online Generation is spiritual. They are seeking. And the church is the last place they would go to find spiritual fulfillment. This site is dedicated to those walking with The Online Generation and living lives of obedience to all the commands of Jesus Christ.

Here's Who Is list as published by Google Zeitgeist 2007:

1. who is god
2. who is who
3. who is lookup
4. who is jesus
5. who is it
6. who is buckethead
7. who is calling
8. who is keppler
9. who is this
10. who is satan

You have to smile at Satan's ranking....!

Transitioning....?

Gordon MacDonald writes a semi-fictional account of what it's like to be in a church in the process of change....

Who Stole My Church? : What to Do When the Church You Love Tries to Enter the 21st Century, by Gordon MacDonald.

MacDonald (Ordering Your Private World) charts new territory in church growth books by turning what could have been a long list of dos and don'ts into a highly readable, even novelistic, approach to the subject. With himself as narrator, MacDonald creates a cast of church members in their 50s, 60s and 70s who meet each week to discuss where their church has been, is now and should go in the future. All I know is that someone stole my church and I'd like to get it back, says one. MacDonald delves into the feelings of the older generation as they watch new leadership take over, see changes in music and use of technology, and begin to wonder how they will fit in. He challenges their understanding of what the church is, then looks at the early church and the modern church and the many cultural influences that transform Christian spirituality. MacDonald is especially strong when he includes young people's perspectives or brings research to bear on how people view and act on change. This is a challenging, innovative approach to a delicate subject. It's sure to benefit church leaders and members of all ages who dream of a reinvented church.