CHRISTIANITY IN PROGRESS
3 Valuable Ways Elderly Christians Can Serve Their Congregations Old age has its challenges. The way we serve may have to change, but God has some special assignments uniquely suited to elderly Christians.
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od gave us temporary bodies. It’s pretty easy to ignore that truth for the first couple of decades of our lives, but eventually the aging process catches up with all of us. That process can be a depressing one. Sure, these might be temporary bodies, but they’re our temporary bodies. Watching them slowly become less efficient and less effective is hard. As we get older, everyday tasks start taking more time to finish. Injuries take longer to heal. Aches and pains come without warning and refuse to leave. Eyes and ears see and hear less than they used to. The gap between what we want to do and what we can do begins to widen. The world feels like it’s changing faster than we can keep up with it. Even in a congregation full of God’s people, there comes a point when it’s easy for elderly members to feel like a burden, unable to contribute the way they used to. Maybe you’ve felt that. Maybe you’ve wondered, as you’ve gotten older, if you really have anything left to contribute at all.
All members have a role to play
That was never a question in Paul’s mind. He wrote that the Church, the spiritual Body of Christ, is “joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according
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to the effective working by which every part does its share” (Ephesians 4:16). “Every part.” There are no qualifications in that verse. Paul didn’t write that “every part does its share—unless it has nothing to contribute.” The very fact that you are in the Body of Christ means you do have something to contribute—that God Himself decided you have something to contribute. “But now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased” (1 Corinthians 12:18). Anticipating that some members would feel unequal to the task, Paul added, “Those members of the body which seem to be weaker are necessary” (verse 22), explaining that God placed us where He did “that there should be no schism [or division] in the body, but that the members should have the same care for one another. And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it” (verses 25-26). So, there it is. You have a role to play in the Body of Christ. What does that role look like?
How elderly Christians can serve It would be impossible to write an exhaustive list of all the ways elderly Church members can serve
January/February 2021
