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The Periodic Midlife/Longlife Update E-newsletter
July 2006
The Periodic Midlife/Longlife Update E-newsletter is devoted to sharing information and enhancing excellence in ongoing faith and holistic formation for maturing adults from midlife through end of life.
Bill Prather, Founder and Director of Partners In Pastoral Care seeks to provide members with an ongoing flow of practical information that leaders/models can use directly with adults of all ages. Training is also offered through the educational arm of Partners in Pastoral Care.
All opinions expressed herein are those of the author. Permission is granted to reproduce this issue in whole or in part as long as its source is identified.
1. Arts Resources 2. Book Overview 3. Only a Decade Away from Midlife at 50 4. Widowhood Affects All Ages (From the book, Single Adults, by George Barna)
1.The ability of the arts to improve the quality of life for Midlife/Longlifers is widely documented. As part of an Art for Life Project, the North Dakota Council on the Arts has sought to further explore the effect of the arts in elders by capturing quantitative evidence. They worked with a geriatric physician, a nurse, a professor of folklore and a statistician in developing an assessment tool to measure the effects of a program on the negative feelings that often characterize life in such institutions as nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and daycare programs.
Survey responses showed that after eight months of arts activities, participants felt significantly less bored, lonely and helpless. When asked, “Do you have things to look forward to each day?” residents were initially likely to reply “not at all” or “rarely.” Their average score for the questions was only 43 on the 100-point developmental scale. After participating in arts activates, the average score of the residents rose to 77 points, meaning that they “sometimes” or “very often” looked forward to something each day. Furthermore, significant developmental increases were seen in the average response to such questions as, “Do you think you can learn new skills?” and “Do you have companions with whom you can share activities?”
The project also helped distract residents, whose average age was 86, from their physical pain, and stimulated their cognitive faculties. The traditional arts used in the program were especially useful in triggering memories while still encouraging participants to make meaningful decisions in their own work.
You might challenge your thinking as to how a weekly or monthly “Longlife Arts Project” could be implemented in your ministry to those oldest adults of your group.
Too often, we who operate in the church culture tend to underestimate the tremendous potential that people of advanced age still have. Give opportunity for that potential to bloom and experience the dynamics of God at work healing the brokenhearted, crushed in spirit, and bruised in body.
For more information about the Art for Life Project mentioned above, contact Jan Webb at (701) 328-7590; e-mail: comserv@state.nd.us; website: www.state.nd.us/arts.
Another great resource is through the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, available online at www.nasaa-arts.org.
Of course, always wonderful and full of information is The National Center for Creative Aging: www.creativeaging.org.
I am always available to speak with you or meet with you at your campus to share ideas, do assessments, evaluations, encourage and speak about ministry to the Midlife/Longlife generations.
2.Senior Adult Ministry in the 21st Century, Dr. David P. Gallagher, Group Publishing, Loveland, CO, 2002, 149 pages.
Dr. Gallagher has written a very practical, “nuts and bolts” kind of book that gives a fine blueprint for the formation and maintenance of a comprehensive senior adult ministry on the individual church level. Dr. Gallagher is the pastor of Palm West Community Church in Sun City, AZ, a congregation made up primarily of senior adults.
The book is divided into five large chapters, each with several or more major sub-sections. These five chapters are:
1) Getting to Know Senior Adults
2) Getting Started in Senior Adult Ministry
3) Involving Senior Adults in Ministry
4) Reaching out to Senior Adults, and
5) The Serious Side of Senior Adult Ministry
Dr. Gallagher likes to organize his thoughts in the form of lists. Some examples of his list-mentality include: 15 characteristics of active senior adults; 9 benefits of establishing a senior adult ministry; 5 things to consider before starting a senior adult ministry; 7 musts for involving seniors, and the like. While his list-mentality does give organization, and I think this is what he is striving for, it also implies that the business of a successful senior adult ministry can be “packaged” and “sold” to the individual church in a rather lock-step fashion. The approach does not seem to take into consideration the variability of a church or parish, nor its individual character. This missing dimension in the book is unfortunate.
The second issue I have with the book is that it reflects all too nicely the population of seniors in Dr. Gallagher’s Arizona retirement community church. Seniors who can move to Sun City, AZ, may not accurately represent the full cohort of all senior adults.
The “kind” of senior adult who retires to Sun City tends to be financially well-off, physically healthy, and not involved in direct caregiving. They are also geographically mobile and are more “free thinking” than the norm of the senior cohort. These things are obviously not denigrating in themselves; it’s simply that Dr. Gallagher seems to be making generalizations about all senior adults based on his readily available, and very well-known, pastoral sample. In doing this, he inadvertently seems to omit those seniors who don’t fit his stereotypical sample.
In past years we seemed to overgeneralize senior adults in ageist terms; i.e., “they” needed services, “they” were somewhat feeble, “they” were forgetful, etc. This obviously did a major disservice to senior adults as a group. What Dr. Gallagher and others seem to have done, perhaps in an effort to “right” the ageist prejudicial “wrongs” of the past, is to define senior adults in too bright a light. This is what Dr. Robert Butler called the YAVIS syndrome: We like people who are: Youthful, Active/attractive, Vital, Intelligent, and Successful/social. Such an “anti-ageist” portrayal does a similar disservice to senior adults as ageism does. Indeed, it may be a new form of ageism, a form of which we must be wary lest it distort our perspective and cause us to create programs in our congregations that reflect an inaccurate view of aging. Perhaps most disturbing to me is the conspicuous absence from Dr. Gallagher’s book of any real reference to a true deepening of spirituality that is at the very core of our efforts to enrich senior adult ministry.
I still would recommend this book to you, with my above caveats, because I believe Dr. Gallagher’s insights and experience shine through. He is obviously very creative and has an organizational mind. His tips and lists can help us all construct a successful framework of an active Midlife/Longlife ministry.
Has it been difficult to move off center into a dynamic Midlife/Longlife ministry where you minister? Call or write me and let’s talk.
3.It’s in the decade of our forties when the story of our true adult spiritual development begins in earnest. What came before our forties is merely a necessary prelude to the preparation for the fantastic journey of interior growth and psycho-spiritual alignment of our personality. Our quest for God, our interior spiritual development, is lifelong; it advances our quest for personality authenticity.
Developmentally, our forties can be a most turbulent decade. Up to this point, the central energies of our lives have been dedicated primarily to learning how the world works, all the while trying to figure out how we fit into it. Generally, by the end of our thirties and into our early forties, we have figured this out, at least to a functional degree. Our forties are when we quite intentionally, and perhaps unwillingly, start looking inward, trying to figure out how we operate and how we fit into our own self. Our forties can be a confusing time, even downright confounding; some of us never do find any clarity and our lives move to midlife crisis.
The process of self-understanding provides the developmental “stuff” of the forties. We enter our forties feeling perhaps more confidant than we ever did before, even cocky. We leave our forties wondering how we could ever feel so complacent as to be so puffed-up. In the interim, we hopefully learn the central lesson of the decade, that we are not only fallible, but we are also broken. Of course, this revelation unfolds so slowly that some never really understand that our whole psychological foundation is shifting, as if a tectonic plate of the earth’s crust were moving right under us with our knowledge.
The U.S. Department of Labor designates the age of 40 as the year when we become "older workers." The basis for their horrifying description is that when a person reaches 40 they have lost any vestige of youth. According to them, turning 40 automatically makes workers underprivileged and entitled to protection because they can now be discriminated against in the labor market for their unfortunate, newly-acquired deficit.
The four themes of spiritual development in our forties that serve as the underpinning of our spiritual “work” are:
· Looking Ahead vs. Looking Behind
· Living Agelessly vs. Living as a Youth
· Assimilating Contradictions vs. Demanding Consistency
· Evolving an “Other” Focus vs. Remaining “Self” Focused
There are a multitude of opportunities available for Mildlife/Longlife leaders and pastors to influence this decade of adults. In my opinion, we will be doing what God has asked us to do in the Bible: mentoring. We here at Partners in Pastoral Care have numerous workshops surrounding the mentoring concept across the entire generational spectrum.
4. According to George Barna in his book Single Adults, there are more widowed people in the U.S. than the entire population of some nations, such as Belgium, Ireland and Norway (p. 7).
Percentage of adults 18+ who are widowed in the U.S. (p. 9):
1980 – 8%
1990 – 8%
1999 – 7%
“The incidence of widowhood jumps once people reach 65 years of age, rising from less than one in ten among people 55-64 years old to a whopping one-third of those who reach the traditional retirement age” (p. 12).
Age
% Widowed (p.13)
35-44
1
45-54
3
55-64
9
65+
31
Other statistics of those widowed: 17% of adults who are 65-69; 26% of those 70-74; and 46% of people 75 or older (p. 17).
Four out of five adults who are single due to the death of their spouse are female (p. 17).
Forty-five percent of all women 65 or older are widowed, compared to just 14% of men 65 or older.
Seventy percent of all widowed adults live alone (p. 18).
“In the next 30 years the U.S. will experience a doubling of the population age 65 or older. Implication: a dramatic increase in the number of widowed adults who Midlife/Longlife leaders and pastors will be shepherding.”
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