THE CHURCH & THE ELDERLY

The report released earlier this week about the poor state of care for the elderly in the NHS is merely a symptom of our wider cultural attitude to getting old and towards the old. These are attitudes that we also need to face in the church, because we can all too easily find we are simply aping the culture, rather than acting in a biblically consistent way.

A few years back I put together a paper on euthanasia, and thought I would extract and adapt a few sections from that in light of these issues. As I see it there are three particular cultural problems we need to face up to – not only so that the care offered in hospitals might improve, but so that the church might be what she should be.

1. We are market-driven

We live in a society driven by capitalist principles. While offering an efficient economic model, essential to these principles is the notion of productivity. If something is not productive our cultural conditioning is to downsize it. The old and the sick (and embryos) are not productive, and so our cultural conditioning is to regard them as without value.

This logic is undoubtedly often at work in our churches. Our mission emphasis, with its focus on growth, expansion and taking new territory, is vulnerable to being subordinated to market principles rather than to the pattern of scripture. It is too easy to focus on the fact that, “What we really need is a few more strong families and couples.” Why? Because it is these people who are productive! They bring resources of finance, experience, and energy to the table. This attitude is entirely understandable. If we are to plant new churches or grow existing ones we need productive people to make it happen. But there is surely a challenge in the attitude of Christ and the teaching of the epistles that would encourage us to honour the weak over the strong. In the first shall be last ethics of the kingdom is there not a challenge to deliberately reach out to the old and sick rather than the young and productive? As Bonhoeffer expressed it, “[There is a] false assumption that life consists only in its usefulness to society. It is not perceived that life, created and preserved by God, possesses an inherent right which is wholly independent of its social utility.”


2. We have a cult of youth

There is a striking irony that at a time when the population of the UK is ageing and for the first time in our history there are more over-60s in the population than under-16s we have a cult of youth. Rather than being “a crown of honour” (Pr. 16:31) grey hair is considered something to be dyed away. The market – and the church – seems to be driven by the whims of the young rather than the wisdom of the old.

Our increased longevity and the increase in the time and money available to pursue leisure activities has led to a remarkable cultural shift in how we understand ageing. Arguably the identifiable stages in our development – adolescence, middle-age, old-age – have shifted upwards by ten to twenty years. Education continues longer and later than in previous generations. Marriage and the birth of children is more typically an activity of those in their thirties than those in their twenties. Adolescent behaviours persist into people’s thirties (dress style, leisure activities, etc.) and those in their sixties prefer to be described as middle-aged rather than old. The overwhelming cultural tone is that old age is something to fear, or be ashamed of, rather than honoured and embraced.


3. We consider the old as unattractive

The old appear unattractive because they are not productive and because we have a cult of youth. Old age represents all the things that people do not want to be.

We must also recognise that the old are considered unattractive because they often are hard work. Relating to someone with Alzheimer’s is hard work. Old people can be a parody of themselves – they can be cranky and short-tempered, they can be fearful and conservative. The elderly can be as demanding to work with as small children or teenagers but without the prospect that one day they will grow out of it!

Because we value productivity and have a cult of youth the only older people who receive admiration are those who manage to stave off the impact of ageing. In church life words of admiration tend to be reserved for those in their seventies who are still travelling the world and completing the Telegraph crossword. (Although as a pastor I can find this group frustrating – they are too busy resisting old age and travelling the world to help with our old people’s work!)


Taken together, these three cultural factors mean that we are inclined to sideline old people who are unproductive, non-youthful, and unattractive. This is a problem in church life, and in wider society it creates a climate where we do not care for the elderly as we should and where euthanasia seems an increasingly acceptable idea.

We need to do better than this!