MALCOLM JOHNSON
‘Third agers are the Church’s core workforce’

Older people are the Church. This is the reality of congregations across the United Reformed Church and indeed for all the UK protestant Churches. Church members, elders and those who carry out the myriad tasks that maintain active Christian communities, are predominantly people in the third age of life, beyond full-time, paid employment. These people enable all aspects of the local church to be welcoming places of worship – they serve reliably on rotas as stewards, they provide coffee, they supply food for celebrations and funerals, they arrange flowers, they maintain property, they are pastoral visitors, editors of church magazines, and so many other things. In outreach work to homeless people, dementia circles, charity work, day centres, toddler groups, and a wide range of social gospel ventures, third agers are the core workforce. And, to complete the circle, ordained ministers are a rapidly ageing group, with many services of worship being led by older non-stipendiary and retired ministers.

Yet, for more than 20 years, Churches have prioritised and invested heavily in work with children and families. ‘Children are the future of the church.’ In a literal sense, this is true. But in reality, the children presently so welcome in our churches are unlikely to form the future generation of church members. It is the adult members who will ensure that the church is alive as a worshipping and serving community into the future. They/we need to be nurtured to ensure we are the best we can be…

Malcolm Johnson is Visiting Professor in Gerontology and End of Life Care for the University of Bath

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JANET HOPEWELL
‘It depends on experience’

Where do you sit on the see-saw? How do you see the ageing process? Do you identify with King David, who died ‘at a good old age, having enjoyed long life, wealth and honour’? Are you blessed in your later years with a sense of serene equilibrium, at peace with the past and ready to embrace the future? Or do you feel, with the writer of Psalm 90, that ‘the span of our days is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away’?

We are all living – and working – longer. Some now say old age begins in your 80s. Certainly most of us know centenarians. Congregations, demographically, are no different from the rest of our ageing population. None of us can be immune from the physical and often mental deterioration of ageing. Biology has not designed us to last for ever. Yet, each of has a life story that renders us greater than the sum of our parts, however crumbling, even after we have gone. How often have you heard it said, after a funeral: ‘We didn’t know that!’ about the deceased? I remember a particularly inscrutable lady, who, out of choice, never left her room in the care home where I was chaplain. When she died, we discovered she had been a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War…

Janet Hopewell is the United Reformed Church Southern Synod’s Chaplain and Advocate for the Elderly