What have our churches got for growing old?
In this new series on resurrection, Terry Young says we need to recover the excitement of our journey from fragility to glory
In a sense, I feel I’ve lived my life backwards. I nearly died from malaria in Dubai when I was three and spent a lot of time in hospital a couple of years later when I got my first set of legs.
By contrast, I haven’t been to the GP for a few years now, although appointments at the limb centre have always been a regular part of my life, especially when I was growing up. I like to think this has given me a realistic view of what can be done by medics and what you have to do for yourself.
On the other hand, as I move through my 60s, I’m increasingly surrounded by those waiting anxiously for the results of their latest test or the next consultation. My best friend from university has already died, and many at church much younger than me are living with the increasing frailty of a parent or of the lingering loss that goes with it.
The Christian soundtrack to which these lives are being lived is largely detached from this whirl of chronic pain and collapse. Each time a new name pops up on our prayer list, we are encouraged to intercede for healing and restoration to health, while our teaching is either distilled doctrine or an emotional uplift, depending on where we worship, or what we watch and read.
Is this God’s plan for us?
It’s tempting to look for a culprit, but I’m not sure that there is a single factor that has led to this state of affairs. For instance, the number of people reaching extreme old age in society, and therefore in church, is at an all-time high. The early church would not have recognised extreme old age as the norm it is today. A few very old people appear in the Gospels, but life expectancy was much shorter and at times was shortened further under persecution. So, whatever we may be getting wrong as churches, a big part of our challenge is that we are facing something new, and at unprecedented scale.
Moreover, the challenge of extreme old age has crept up on us surprisingly suddenly. In the 70 years after World War II, life expectancy in the UK rose by nearly 17 years (Aaron O’Neill, 2020). However, as we live longer a greater proportion of our days are spent with reduced capacity and sometimes in pain. It’s a mixed blessing, but a very modern scene.
In the face of such complex change, maybe it’s not so surprising that our churches are struggling to adapt. The problem may have been exacerbated by our emphasis on training young people for the ministry, pouring ever more youth into an ageing mix.
Although the apostles wrote in a culture of much shorter lifespans, they were more alert to the excitement of new life breaking out of old. Let’s listen to Paul addressing his friends in Corinth:
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.
We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body.
So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. (2 Corinthians 4:7-11)
We will want to return to this passage, but for now we can see that Paul is describing something that we recognise all around us, as our resilience and the resilience of those we know gets chipped away. What we don’t always see is that something paradoxical is happening and that the power burning in the clay jars is about to break through in blinding glory. This is the opposite of what we are trained to expect of our final decades: instead of fading faculties and lost beauty, Paul encourages us to nurture the glory that can only break through as the fabric it is wrapped in flakes away.
I’m not appealing for a return to a pie in the sky when you die sort of faith, that we are passing through a vale of tears until, in some future existence, God wipes them all away. What I’m arguing is that we have lost our birthright, and with it the excitement of our journey from fragility to glory.
To recover this excitement, we’ll have to unpick what scripture says about bodies. Our fixation with healing has become a hammer that deals with every nail and at times it has screwed up our understanding of how temporary our bodies really are. However fit and healthy we keep ourselves, our bodies have a sell-by date.
This isn’t to take a negative view of bodies: Paul’s letters to the Corinthians are particularly focused on bodies, including their capacity for pleasure, a capacity we will need again, one day.
We’ll also want to take in the very long story that starts in a desert and ends in eternity, the story of God’s plans to live with people. The Bible puts more space into the design of the Tabernacle, that tent at the centre of God’s wandering people, than it does into the creation narrative. Solomon preserves key elements of this pattern when he tries to build something more substantial, and in Revelation, we catch glimpses of what the pattern was meant to represent one day.
If all that sounds a bit theoretical, then I hope by the time you get to the end, you’ll have matched some of this teaching with what you’re going through personally, or with someone you love.
Image | Philippe Leone | Unsplash
This is a five part series focusing on the resurrection:
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Terry Young is a missionary kid who read science and engineering. After a PhD in lasers, he worked in R&D before becoming a professor, when he taught project management, information systems and e-business, while leading research in healthcare. He set up Datchet Consulting to have fun with both faith and work and worshipped at Baptist churches in Slough for 19 years before moving to the New Forest.
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Baptist Times, 23/11/2023