Building Adult Ministries, Leadership for Adults Over 50

Young at Heart is a group of senior citizens in Northampton, Mass., led by their director, Bob Cilman. They perform contemporary songs by bands like Sonic Youth, the Ramones, and Coldplay. They regale audiences with songs that are honest, intelligent, and at times even deep, taking a 90-minute nonstop show from theater stages to prison yards, moving listeners from laughter to tears and back to laughter. We’re offering you a link so you can enjoy for yourself the Today Show’s Bob Dotson’s American Story.

Dixie and I went to see an afternoon showing, wondering if we’d be the only ones in the theater. We had to sit on the third row from the front! The place was packed with patrons ranging from young children to adults with walkers. We rate all our movies on a scale of one to ten, ten being the best. We gave Young at Heart a solid fifteen and decided right there to move to Northhampton so we could join the group ourselves!

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As we go through middlescence, our children go through adolescence, our parents head into convalescence, and the "sandwich generation" often turns into a "hoagie." What goes for the home also goes for the church. God has given us the ideal design for handling the challenge in which we often find ourselves when caring for our older loved ones, both within the nuclear family as well as in the church family.

I’m suggesting an array of ministry possibilities that embody Christ’s love for aging families, while at the same time providing a model of how the biblical mandate can be lived out through congregational responses. While these are drawn from the ministry of First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton, California, I’m not intimating that EV Free of Fullerton is a model church in this regard. Instead I offer Webster’s reminder that the word model is a “small imitation of the real thing”! Christ is our ultimate model for ministry (Is. 61; Lk 4:16-22), not the church. Yet there is much we can learn from one another by continuing to do church according to Christ’s model.

Continue reading "Congregational Model for Caregiving"…