I am embedded in faith and it’s embedded in me; it’s in my bones, in my being; I regularly ask God: “Lord, what do you want me to do today?”
—Sarah, age seventy-eight
Love is God’s way of giving life; love is God’s way of being in charge; love is the big thing; love never ends; love is the lens though which I look at life.
—Betsy, age seventy-nine
Spirituality is less about getting it right; it’s more about the community of the church, about Jesus as a source of strength, as a forever presence around us that becomes mostly thanksgiving and doing together.
—Sally, age eighty-four
As the elders interviewed were navigating a new era of aging, faith and faith communities emerged as major factors in their lives. Nearly all of the fifty-three interviewees referenced the Christian faith as they spoke of their values, relationships, and activities. Most of the interviewees spoke directly about their faith and their congregations as contributors to their decision-making, well-being, and hope for the future. At age ninety-two, Burt credited his faith community’s support as a major factor in his will to live as he battled leukemia, skin cancer, prostate cancer, and pneumonia. Like Burt, many of the elders spoke of their congregations as “spiritual and social oases.”
The elders interviewed represent what gerontologists have discovered about religion and older adults. Their studies reveal that seniors significantly influence and, in turn, are profoundly shaped by American religion. Approximately 42 percent of church members in the United States are sixty-five and older. More seniors attend worship than any other age group. They make up huge numbers of congregational volunteers. They give a significant portion of their churches’ offerings. In a 2009 Pew Study, 66 percent of persons sixty-five and older indicated that religion was important to them and 34 percent indicated that their faith and its practice had grown in importance during their older adulthood. For seniors, faith is a prime factor in their identity, and their faith practices are sources of meaning and hope. Their faith communities are networks of sustained, trustworthy relationships. Spirituality and religion are important to a large majority of seniors who are deeply bonded to lives of faith in mutually beneficial exchanges of presence and action. The elders in this study were no exception.
| For seniors, faith is a prime factor in their identity, and their faith practices are sources of meaning and hope. |
So, what aspects of the Christian faith and their faith communities are impacting these elders? More importantly, how might these factors of faith constructively inform individual elders and elderhood?
Elders and Communities of Faith
Most of the fifty-three interviewees spoke of their church as a safe and supportive community. For some, their faith communities were their primary relationships, providing the family they don’t have. This is Tony’s experience at age seventy-two. Tony was sent away from home by his father when he was eight. He slept on the streets and made a living working in the fields, panhandling, and dealing drugs. Tony was married and divorced early; one of his ex-wives is a heroin addict. Tony has been cut off from his family, and almost no one comes to visit him at the low-cost care facility that is his home. Tony’s most important relationship is with the person from church who faithfully comes to visit him, brings him malted milks, and takes him to baseball games. Tony speaks of the visitor from the church as his best friend. Now, at his advanced age, Tony has a close friend for the first time in his life—someone he can trust, someone he can count on, and someone who respects and takes delight in him.
The church also provides primary relationships for Dale at age ninety-seven. Dale sees his congregation as his “accompanying community,” the people who drive him to shop and to his appointments while listening to his whimsical, humorous writing. Dale says of his congregation and his adopted daughter: “These are all the people I need in my life. They are not many, but they are essential, and they are enough.”
For most of the interviewees, their faith communities do not provide their closest, primary relationships but rather generate important secondary relationships—the friendships, the support, and the places of belonging that anchor and enrich their lives. Betty and her husband, Dan, view their faith community as the “prime force,” the “focusing community” that provides their “social base.” Betty says, “Our congregation combines our most significant friendships with a sense of purpose through the mission work we do together; our faith community is the social and spiritual center of our lives.” Similarly, Betsy and her husband attended a Bible study together with four other couples for twenty-five years. This group of couples became their social and spiritual home. Now with her husband gone, Betsy identifies “these spiritual and social companions as a mainstay of my life.”
For nearly all of the interviewees, faith communities functioned in some way as a combination of spiritual oasis and social wellspring.
Elders in the Christian Tradition
In addition to faith communities providing trusted relationships and generative places of belonging, the narrative of the Christian faith informed and shaped the interviewees’ views of themselves and their place in the world. Their beliefs in God’s presence and action provided the frameworks for their lives, sustained them in crises, and anchored their hopes for the future. Some of their faith tenets were explicit, but most of their convictions regarding their current season of life lay beneath the surface of their activities, in their beliefs and values. Their lives were consciously and unconsciously, explicitly and implicitly informed by the Christian God story as recorded in Scripture and reflected in their Christian traditions.
Elders and Scripture
Much of Scripture’s view of humans and the human situation was reflected in the stories of the interviewees. In the Old Testament, humans bear imago Dei, the image of God, meaning humans are created by God in God’s image, enlivened by God’s breath, blessed, and given the responsibility of co-managing the creation. Humans have their identity, their value, their place in the scheme of things not on the basis of their age or their looks or their abilities. Rather, human identity and value are established by the action of the designer of the universe who posits dignity in every person. As Betsy, one of the elders says, “Love is God’s way of giving life.” Human dignity is not earned, and neither is it generated by status, attractiveness, or age; it is given by God’s loving, creative action. Elders are included. And most of these elders know it “in their bones.”
Teaching and Modeling the God Story
This human dignity and wholeness afforded elders in the Old Testament takes shape and is given expression in Israel, with its Mid-eastern desert culture, during the agricultural age. In Israel, elders were to be honored and cared for, in part because they played a major role in the family’s preparation of the next generation for faith and life. Thus, one of the Ten Commandments stipulates: “Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long upon the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Exod 20:12). This is the first commandment with a promise.
| Human dignity is not earned, and neither is it generated by status, attractiveness, or age; it is given by God’s loving, creative action. |
Elder parents and grandparents, and with them all elders, are to be respected and honored in part because they assist in preparing the next generations for society’s spiritual and ethical responsibilities. While elders may not be able to do all the hard work of providing food, shelter, and clothing, they are valued because they are able and expected to pass on the stories of faith and life, stories that establish the identity and values of their children, their children’s children, and ultimately the tribe and nation. Moreover, they are to be role models and mentors of faith, values, and behavior. These roles are expressed in Moses’s words in Deuteronomy 6:1–9 (emphasis added):
Now this is the commandment—the statues and the ordinances—that the Lord your God charged me to teach you to observe in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy, so that you and your children and your children’s children may fear the Lord your God all the days of your life, and keep all his decrees and his commandments that I am commanding you, so that your days may be long. Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe them diligently, so that it may go well with you, and so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, has promised you.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
In the Old Testament, old age and fullness of years were understood as affording the experience, knowledge, skill, and time to teach and model the God story, which included the faith- and life-enhancing narratives, values, and ways of life. Elders were to pass on their faith and life experiences, their broad exposure to life’s mystery and messiness, and their lifelong interaction with God through prayer and study, all of which uniquely qualified them for their roles as teachers and mentors.
One of the elders interviewed provides this kind of faith-and-values mentoring among her family and at her church. Earlier (p. 17), we introduced Sherry, age eighty-one, who has written her mother’s biography, making her mother’s story of principled integrity and active faith available to her children and grandchildren. Sherry has also written about the sudden deaths of her mother, father, and husband in order to, as she puts it, “generate a more open conversation about death and dying from the perspective of the faith tradition’s realistic hope.” Sherry expands her mentoring activities by getting into conversations with the young people at her church about faith’s questions—most especially about the faith questions these young people are asking.
Elders Essential and Valued
Throughout the Old Testament, there are statements and stories regarding the peculiar responsibilities and capacities of the aged for these essential societal roles.
Remember the days of old;
consider the years long past;
ask your father, and he will inform you;
your elders, and they will tell you.
(Deut 32:7)
The righteous flourish like the palm tree,
and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
They are planted in the house of the Lord;
they flourish in the courts of our God.
In old age they still produce fruit;
they are always green and full of sap,
showing that the Lord is upright.
(Ps 92:12–15)
So even to old age and gray hairs,
O God, do not forsake me,
until I proclaim your might
to all the generations to come.
(Ps 71:18)
The glory of youths is their strength,
but the beauty of the aged is their gray hair.
(Prov 20:29)
You shall rise before the aged and defer to the old; and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord. (Lev 19:32)
I said, “Let days speak,
and many years teach wisdom.”
(Job 32:7)
Is wisdom with the aged,
and understanding in length of days?
(Job 12:12)
In their Old Testament roles as leaders, teachers, and mentors, elders often are said to have the capacity and qualification of wisdom. So, what is the wisdom that these elders in Scripture possess and are to transmit? An assortment of Old Testament characters and events lift up and flesh out wisdom as a significant component in individual, familial, and national well-being. Among these characters and events, older adults exemplifying wisdom stand out as they lead at critical moments in Israel’s history.
Abraham and Sarah
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous. . . . I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you. . . . And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien.” (Gen 17:1–8)
While some of Abraham and Sarah’s earlier life is described in Genesis, God’s covenantal promise comes to Abraham at age ninety-nine and to Sarah, who is but ten...
