Finishing Our Course with Joy: Guidance from God for Engaging with Our Aging

J. I. Packer died at age 93. Six years before that he wrote this book on ageing and the Christian life. He sympathisers with the ageing experience but also calls for both Christian and church to still be involved in ministry. While Packer defines his audience as Christian seniors who became Christians young and have been a believer for several decades, I think there was also a bit in here for church leaders to have a good think about where seniors can fit into the life of the church, as those who can help serve and not just be those who are being served.

Packer first pushes against some trends we see around us. Society considers ageing as a process of decline, but rather (leaning on Shakespeare's King Lear), maybe we should consider ageing like fruit, as a form of ripeness. It is something that has grown over time. Perseverance in a task over time must produce wisdom and character through experience.

Societies allure of retirement has also entered the Christian mindset. There is the temptation of once you have left full-time work, you don't have to do anything else is:

wrongheaded in the extreme. I think it is ironically deceptive, calculated in effect to produce the precise opposite of the fullness of elderly life that it purports to promote. What is wrong with it? For the moment I leave aside its lack of Christian content and focus on the fact that it prescribes idleness, self-indulgence, and irresponsibility as the goal of one’s declining years. This, over time, will generate a burdensome sense that one’s life is no longer significant, but has become, quite simply, useless.

This issue isn't entirely on the individuals' shoulders, churches too may inadvertently give this impression as they arrange their ministries:

the common expectation, undiscussed but unchallenged, is that retirees will not continue the Christian learning and leading that were big in their lives while they were at work. The most that the church will expect of them now is that they will continue to support from the sidelines, as it were, the modes of ministry in which others engage. 

and: 

Still taking their cue from the world around, modern Western churches organize occupations, trips, parties, and so forth for their seniors and make pastoral provision for the shut-ins, but they no longer look to these folks as they do to the rest of the congregation to find, feed, and use their spiritual gifts. In this they behave as though spiritual gifts and ministry skills wither with age. But they don’t; what happens, rather, is that they atrophy with disuse.

Instead, seniors can still have great ministry opportunities in our fallen world. One main point Packer goes to is the idea of hope. Our modern world lacks hope, well, not really long-lasting hope. We need more hope than just getting over some illness or financial setback, but lasting, eternal hope. Hope that looks beyond this world is something that is strange to our world. We, humans, need better hope than something temporary, and the senior Christian has just this hope and example in their life for others to see and hear.

The belief in a new body with Jesus will give us hope beyond this world, as we have the confidences that it is true because Jesus is the forerunner. The seriousness of judgement day and knowing we can be forgiven because of Jesus can give us joy - even as the ageing process takes hold. 

The older Christian isn't to just take it easy, for life doesn't go that direction. Paul's thorn in the flesh is physical and painful, and yet he still does and encourages people not to relax and take things easy, but instead to minister to those around them.

At the end of this short book, Packer suggests some things that older folk could be a part of in a church, I place this here for future reference:

As a carer for the needy; a friend and encourager of the lonely and depressed; a companion of the walking wounded, those weakened by bitterness, anger, and hurts that continue to bleed; a helper of sufferers from dementia, Alzheimer’s, and all conditions that rob us of the ability to look after ourselves; or as a counselor of those facing marriage, the baptism and upbringing of children, and the strains and crises of family life—each of us who is willing will be found to have a great deal to give for some mode of sympathetic-senior ministry that can in practice be invaluable.

This was a nice short book, with some good critique along with some good suggestions on how seniors can continue to use their gifts for the body of believers and beyond.