What I Know Now About Older Christians

At 35, I probably thought I had a pretty good handle on life. I was working, had already experienced some successes in my career and avocation, was raising a family, serving in church, making decisions, solving problems, and generally moving through life with the confidence that comes from having enough experience to feel seasoned. What I didn’t understand was how young I still was.

There were people in the church around me who were 25 or 30 years older. I knew them. I respected many of them. I’m sure I appreciated their faithfulness. But guaranteed, I did not see them the way I should have. I just saw older Christians. What I should have seen were people who had already walked through things I had not yet encountered.

They had raised children into adulthood, buried parents, walked through financial strain, illness, job changes, church disappointments, difficult family seasons, unanswered prayers, and plans that did not turn out the way they expected. Some had lost spouses. Some had lived through things they probably never imagined they would face. And many of them were still there—still faithful, still serving, still praying, still showing up. I don’t think I understood the value of that as much as I should have.

At 35, I was busy doing what people at that stage of life tend to do. There was always something to build, lead, fix, organize, accomplish, or figure out. I had enough experience to know some things, but not enough to realize how much I still had to learn. Looking back, I wish I had asked more questions. I wish I had sat down with more of those older Christians and simply asked, “What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were my age?”

I suspect I would have learned things that no book, conference, sermon, or class could have taught me quite the same way. There are some things you only learn by living long enough. You learn that not every problem is a crisis. You learn that people are complicated, churches are complicated, and families are complicated. You learn that you can be right and still handle something badly. You can make a good plan and watch it fail. You can make a mistake and discover that life keeps moving. You also learn that some things you once thought were terribly important really weren’t, while some things you barely noticed mattered a great deal.

Over the years, I’ve had opportunities to serve in a lot of different ways—teaching, leading music, working with singers, serving as a deacon, overseeing AVL, handling administrative responsibilities, and spending a number of years traveling and ministering in churches around the country. None of that makes me unusual, but it does mean I’ve had the chance to see church life from a lot of angles. Looking back, I can also see how often I was focused on the people beside me rather than the people a generation ahead of me.

The truth is, most of my learning came from people my own age. That was the crowd I naturally spent time with and, in many cases, led. There is nothing unusual about that. We tend to run with people in the same season of life. But looking back, I wonder how much I missed by not spending more time with people who were a generation ahead of me.

It has been wisely said: be mentored by someone older than you and mentor someone younger than you. Do both at the same time. I try to practice that now. I didn’t nearly as much then.

Now I find myself at, and in some cases beyond, the age of those people I once thought of simply as “older,” and that changes the view. I think more now about how much experience sits quietly in a church every Sunday. There are people who have spent decades teaching, raising families, serving, leading, administering, mentoring others, or simply doing the ordinary work of being faithful. Many have spent years in ministry, traveled, led, or served behind the scenes where hardly anyone noticed.

There is a lot there, and the challenge for those of us who are older is not to demand that younger people recognize it. I certainly didn’t. Maybe our responsibility is simply to make what we have learned available in a way that is practical, kind, and useful.

Sometimes mentoring is as simple as noticing someone younger who is learning something you have done for years and offering to help. If someone is figuring out sound, music, technology, leadership, administration, or some other practical part of church life, stand beside them for a while. Show them what you know when it is useful, then let them do it. Mentoring is not taking over, and it is not making someone younger do things exactly the way we did them.

This applies to much more than church responsibilities. A younger man may need to talk to someone who has been married for 40 years. A young parent may need someone to reassure them that every difficult season with a child does not last forever. A younger leader may need someone to tell him that one bad meeting is not the end of the world. Sometimes a person simply needs an older Christian who will listen without immediately offering five solutions.

There is a tenderness that ought to come with age. We have made enough mistakes of our own to be patient with someone else’s. We have lived through enough hard seasons to know that panic rarely improves anything. We have been forgiven enough times to be gracious. At least that is what age ought to be producing in us.

The older I get, the more I think this may be one of the best ways we can serve the church. Not by holding on to every position we once had, insisting on being heard, or trying to stay at the center of everything, but by noticing the people coming behind us and helping where we can.

I wish I had understood that better when I was 35. There were older Christians all around me who had already walked roads I had not yet reached. I saw their age. I’m not sure I saw their value as clearly as I should have.

I do now.