Ministering to Older Adults

The Building Blocks

Donald Koepke, Donald Koepke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317994404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Learn how to focus your ministry's programs and services on the elderlyBy 2030, 20% of the people living in the United States will be age 65 or older, with unique spiritual needs that can affect their physical and mental well-being. Ministering to Older Adults answers the critical need for a ministry that doesn't center primarily on youth and families in its outreach, instead presenting a step-by-step guide to developing a ministry for the aged that is focused on the needs and resources of each congregation. This program has been used effectively with nearly 50 congregations, both large and small, to create a focused older adult ministry. No two congregations are alike. The resources, perspectives, and skills of each congregation are different, as are the needs of its members. Ministering to Older Adults provides a framework for use by planning groups within communities of any religious tradition. The book presents a process that includes essential questions that allow planning groups to develop answers that fit the needs, cultural, history, and structure of their individual congregations. Ministering to Older Adults is divided into three sections:

• The Fundamentalsdefining your audience, your mission, and the skills and existing programs that can be brought to the planning process
  
• Programming Possibilitiesspiritual needs based on the aging process, continued learning for older adults, opportunities to serve and be served, providing quality pastoral care, and community building
  
• Putting it All Togetherdeciding on a direction, using desired outcomes for evaluation, establishing target dates, and ongoing evaluation

Ministering to Older Adults also includes forms and charts to help in the planning process. The book is an invaluable resource for clergy, ministry committees and planning groups, and staff persons responsible for older adult ministries.

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PART ONE: THE FUNDAMENTALS

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Step One:

Who Are the Elderly?

Robert Carlson, MDiv

SUMMARY. An essential element in planning is knowing one’s target group. Today, the description of the elderly in America has changed from a portrait of a frail person preparing to die to an active person who remains involved in life and community. Using statistics, the elderly are accurately described in terms of four categories: the Active, the Transitional, the Frail, and the Caregivers. Methods of discovering the elderly within a faith group are explored. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-8G0-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com.> © 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Elderly, active, transitional, frail, caregivers, survey, focus groups

Who are the elderly? The answer could be very much like that of the legendary story out of ancient India of the four visually impaired researchers on the nature of the elephant. They concluded that the creature was like a tree, a wall, a rope, and a snake (Gaynor, 1999). The problem was not the visual impairment of the researchers but their failure to consider the whole picture. We see a similar failure in many popular notions of aging. For some, they are a bunch of rich old people living it up at the expense of the general economy. For others, they are a pitiful collection of depressed souls who have outlived their usefulness and are waiting to “pass on” in nursing home beds. For a few others, they represent a rich source of knowledge and experience waiting to be tapped. For others, they are a nuisance on the highways and a bother for their slowness in supermarket lines. For still others, they are the preservers of valued traditions and family stories.

As one of the elderly, I confess that I often get trapped in one perspective or another. In speaking to a family support group in a nursing home recently, I felt overwhelmed by the burden the residents were to their concerned families. Many of the patients were like my wife’s aunt. She had known me for half a century but later, I was only a kind stranger who held her hand as we said the Lord’s Prayer together. The fact that only five percent of the elderly are in nursing homes seemed hard to believe. I found myself living within a second perspective when my wife and I celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary with a river tour of Europe. We discovered that most of our shipmates were at least as old as we were and that we all did very well in climbing up to explore hilltop castles and in swing dancing in the ship’s lounge after dinner. I experienced a third perspective a few weeks ago when I was invited to take part in a luncheon for thirty members of a congregation all over eighty years of age. Some of these octogenarians were there with walkers and wheelchairs, present only through the help of family members and parishioners, but most could make it on their own. Several were the same people whom I met earlier ushering at the door of the church and setting up the altar for communion. Who are the elderly? They are all of the above and more.

There have been many attempts over the years to delineate “stages of aging,” often seeking to relate such stages to chronological age. A German glass beaker from the early sixteen hundreds pictured “stages of man” by decades from birth through the nineties and revealed the popular prejudices of the day. For the thirties, it simply said “A Man” but from there it was all downhill, ending with a picture of a decrepit 90-year-old and the words, “The Laughing Stock of Children.” In the United States, being “old” most often has been tied to the social security norm of sixty-five, a norm which may be going up as we adjust retirement age to the availability of social security funds. Older people themselves disagree about when it is they are “old.” A study released in 2002 by the National Council on the Aging (Cutler, 2002, 17) found that fifty-one per cent of persons aged sixty-five to seventy-four considered themselves young (9 per cent) or middle aged (42 per cent), and only sixty-eight per cent of those over seventy-five considered themselves old or very old. Perhaps these results stem from the negative image of the elderly which prevails in our American society and causes us to resist thinking of ourselves as old. The one thing we can say with certainty, however, is that we cannot fit people into categories by their age. Some workers may be prepared to leave their desks or work benches at sixty-five or younger, but others resist doing so well up into their seventies and even their nineties. Some eighty-year-olds are homebound, while others spend their days delivering Meals on Wheels and helping their neighbors.

There are also considerable differences among the elderly as to the problems they and their peers are confronting. The same study of American Perceptions of Aging in the 21st Century, previously cited, inquired how serious older people regard the problems of health, crime, money and loneliness (Cutler, 2002, 5). Forty-two per cent reported health as a “serious” or “somewhat serious” problem. Crime was seen on the same levels by thirty-six per cent, money by thirty-six per cent and loneliness by twenty-one per cent. Surprisingly, when asked about how the same problems affected other older people, the percentages more than doubled. Despite these problems, the survey discovered that fifty per cent of their subjects sixty-five to seventy-four considered the present time “the best years of my life.” Thirty-eight per cent of those from sixty-five to seventy-four said the same thing about their lives. Appendix A is a handout describing some of the statistics surrounding aging in the United States.

Remembering that we cannot describe older people by their chronological age, it is important to note that older people differ from one another and thus have different needs as well as gifts to offer. For convenience sake we can divide the elderly into four general categories: the active, transitional, and frail elderly as well as caregivers (which overlaps both the active and the transitional categories). Because of the sheer physical limitations of our bodies, any of us who live long enough will one day be in the frail category. At the usual retirement age, most of us, like my friends on the river tour, will be active, continuing to move about much as we did before retirement but enjoying more discretionary time to give to recreation or volunteer work. All four categories are growing in the United States because we are living longer, largely through advances in health care through medical breakthroughs and the accessibility of treatment because of Medicare and Medicaid.

THE ACTIVE ELDERLY

In terms of both needs and gifts, the active elderly are often indistinguishable from their middle-aged counterparts. They need a sense of belonging and meaning. They need spiritual nourishment. They need to be doing things which make a difference in their community and world. Because their time of life usually requires the transition from full time employment to retirement, they often need time and place to reflect on the losses that come with that transition and on ways to find replacements for the meaning and status that work gave to their lives. One congregation I know of has a group called “The Seekers” which meets weekly and attracts a variety of active elders to confront the issues of transition from work to retirement. While AARP has an excellent program on preparation for retirement, religious people also need to deal with the transition in its spiritual dimension.

The potential gifts of active older people to church and community cannot be overestimated. Too often the church taps its active seniors only for stuffing envelopes and setting up chairs for parish dinners, without regard to the wisdom and years of experience the seniors have. One congregation I know has recruited a seventy-three-year-old retired social worker to receive training in spiritual direction and to translate her years of doing therapy into being a spiritual guide for younger members. Fred, an eighty-year-old retired accountant, spends two days a week helping churches and nonprofit organizations in the community to computerize their financial records. Jane, a retired nurse practitioner, serves her small church as a volunteer parish nurse.

Clergy of a parish need to be involved in dealing with the gifts and needs of the active elderly in order to help make connections between needs and people and to enable lay people to exercise their ministries. A book by the late Paul Maves, Older Volunteers in Church and Community, contains a wealth of information on working with older volunteers. Maves points out that it is crucial for clergy and other leaders to know how to recruit, train, support, and, when necessary, dismiss volunteers.

The Transitional Elderly

Elderly in this stage of aging are beginning to feel the limits put on them by their aging bodies. They have at least one ADL (activities of daily life) limit. Their mobility may be decreased and they may even need help in getting to worship and other church functions. They may be reluctant to expose their limits and their need for assistance. They may come to our attention only when someone observes that they don’t come to our meetings as often as they used to come. However, their needs to be in community and to serve persist, as well as possible need for transportation and home visits.

Elders in transition require a good deal of tactful attention. Their spiritual needs may include some thoughtful reflection on where they are in life, the so-called “life review” with a pastor or sensitive lay friend. Their needs for community may require the offer of a car pool and assurance that meeting places are accessible for persons using walkers or wheelchairs. Their need to be useful may be limited to services they can provide at home or elsewhere with transportation help.

The danger of the transitional stage of aging is that these parishioners may begin “getting lost” from the church and may get out of the habit of Sunday worship. One of the most useful services an active senior volunteer can provide is that of keeping track of older parishioners to help minimize the danger of their being lost due to their growing physical limits.

The Frail Elderly

Since the fastest growing segment of our population in the United States is that of people over eighty years o...