LANSING, MI (Lansing State Journal), December 16, 2007:
When Gladys Scott first came to Trinity AME Church in Lansing more than 25 years ago, she was looking for "a family," a community that could help her and her husband in raising their three children.
Now, as a young senior - she puts her age at "about 60" - she's looking for something different.
"When you're younger you just go through life and you don't look at it," she said. "Things are clearer now. You get grounded more in your spiritual belief as you get older because you can experience and see the importance of spiritual guidance."
Longtime member: Georgia Brown, a member of Trinity AME Church, attends Sunday services recently. According to experts, many congregations are aging.
"One of the frustrations I've had for decades now is the unwillingness or inability of religious institutions in this country to face up to the demographic reality," said Stephen Sapp, a professor of religious studies at the University of Miami.
Photo by ROBERT KILLIPS/ Lansing State Journal.
One of the places where Scott is finding that guidance is in the company of her peers. She's part of the church's Senior Saints Ministry, started about 2 1/2 months ago.
"We feel that sometimes, with the seniors, your issues are different," said ministry President Dianne Hicks, who said she is "in her 60s."
Our population is aging. People are living longer, often decades past retirement.
And, according to experts, most churches, synagogues, mosques and religious institutions in general, aren't prepared to meet the needs of their graying congregations.
"One of the frustrations I've had for decades now is the unwillingness or inability of religious institutions in this country to face up to the demographic reality," said Stephen Sapp, a professor of religious studies at the University of Miami who studies the role of religion and spirituality in aging.
"The seminaries of this country across the board, pick your denomination or faith, simply are not doing anything to prepare clergy for the congregations they're going to be serving."
At one level, ministering to aging congregations simply means making sure they can continue to participate in the religious life of the community.
And, on that front, many religious institutions locally already have some basic
programs in place, providing transportation, for example, offering listening aids for the hard of hearing and taping sermons for those whose health prevents them from attending services.
Finding their role
But care for aging congregations also means attending to their more explicitly spiritual needs.
For younger seniors, that is often an issue of helping them find meaning, vocation, a useful role to play in the years after retirement.
"Thirty years ago, people who retired would have quickly seen themselves as aged or elderly," said John Burow, a Delta Township Lutheran minister who teaches workshops on preparing spiritually for retirement.
"People who are retiring, now, whether it's at 55 or 66, often have an image of themselves that they're vital, they're energetic."
And the roles that our culture offers to seniors "are not sufficient for the 15 or 20 years of mental and physical vigor" that people now will often have left after retirement, he said.
"It's unworthy of a spiritual being to totally wrap their retirement around their Winnebago or their golf game," he added.
Kathy Hubbert, 67, spent a recent Saturday morning in the basement of Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Lansing, pondering retirement at one of Burow's workshops.
Hubbert, who lives in Lansing, worked as a nurse for more than 35 years. She didn't think much about retirement until she found it upon her a year and a half ago.
"It's hard to make that transition from a hard-working person to all of a sudden getting up late and thinking 'What's the purpose of today?' " she said.
That's a predicament that Kathy Lindahl, another workshop participant, is hoping to avoid.
Lindahl, 56, is the assistant vice president for finance and operations at Michigan State University. It's a "high pace" job, she said, a job she loves.
But despite the fact that she's still some years from retirement, "the pendulum is swinging the other direction," she said. "I have a passion for what I do, and part of the retirement piece is letting go of that and really defining your values."
The 'losses'
For the oldest of the old, the issues are different.
"Their needs are really about dealing with the losses that they've sustained, loss of health, loss of mobility, perhaps loss of loved ones, feeling a loss of youthfulness," said Rabbi Cary Kozberg, chair of the American Society on Aging's Forum on Religion, Spirituality and Aging and director of religious and spiritual life at Wexner Heritage Village in Columbus, Ohio.
"Many times their concerns are, for want of a better word, just keeping it together."
As people age, "a lot of helplessness will be there," said K.S. Sripada Raju, 78-year-old Okemos man who teaches religious education classes at the Bharatiya Temple of Lansing, which serves the area's Hindu and Jain communities.
"Disappointments will be there and then also a kind of loneliness. These are all things that come. How to deal with those kinds of situations? Faith in God."
Rabbi Michael Zimmerman, of Kehillat Israel, a Reconstructionist Jewish congregation in Lansing, said the members there "at this point are very much conscious of their own aging process" and the issues that accompany it.
In fact, he said that's the primary reason the congregation hired him in 2003. They had no rabbi for much of its history.
"At the most superficial level, it's who's going to do my funeral?" he said. "But beyond that, there are a host of issues around grief, death and dying, mourning practices, Jewish rituals around what happens in the 48 hours after death."
Facing mortality
It wasn't so much the surgery on her spine that got Jean Osman thinking about her own mortality.
It was telling the doctors what she wanted them to do if the surgery, which took place in October, didn't go well.
"I had in my mind the whole time what I wanted to do," said Osman, 63, a retired nurse who lives in Charlotte, "but when you're actually handing it over to the doctor and thinking, 'My life is on the line and this could happen,' you do think about spirituality and what's really important. You're getting faced with it."
The truism that people grow more religious as they age may or may not be true, Sapp said. There's controversy among researchers, though a lot of it comes down to how you define "religious."
"But what I would be willing to say is that as you get older - and especially older older, where you really can no longer deny your own mortality - questions of ultimate concern have to be addressed," he said.
The need to engage with those questions, said Omar Soubani, head religious adviser for the Islamic Society of Greater Lansing, might be one of the true distinctive points of older people's spirituality.
"The young usually are obsessed with many things, going here and there, exploring whatever they can explore," he said. "And, with so many activities, they feel that there is not much time for spirituality, unfortunately."
"People with age, usually they have more time and they think of the consequences much more," he said. "There is the maturity to know that whatever is in this life is temporary and not permanent. They would know that they are about to depart, and it's better to get ready for what is coming up."
Several area religious leaders said serving the needs of their aging congregations is a matter of concern. Many also said that, for the time being, they're ministering to seniors in much the way they always have.
Sapp, however, said that might not be enough, that churches can't simply continue to offer what the late Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler called "shuffleboard geriatrics," the fun and games and distractions.
"There needs to be more than that," he said, "for those people who want to address those questions of meaning."
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