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Does Your Church Have Too Many Old People?

First, I’d suggest the alternative: You should really feel concerned if you don’t see many people 40 and up!

After all, the leaders are called elders for a reason (cf. Acts 20:17; 1 Tim. 5:17-19). While that term isn’t necessarily bound to a certain number of candles on a birthday cake, the least you have to say is that it isn’t negative toward the higher numbers!

In fact, Scripture (as opposed to our culture) is pretty much univocally positive toward advanced age (see the second sermon linked above). To have walked with the Lord for a great many years is a good thing, it’s a blessed thing, it’s a valuable thing. In a healthy congregation, younger people will seek out and value their seniors in the Lord.

And if there are few or none to seek out, that isn’t a good sign, other things being equal. It really, really isn’t.

It could mean that this is a ministry that doesn’t wear well. It could mean that this is a ministry for the moment, not for the ages. It could mean that the leadership is every bit as tunnel-visioned as the Golden Agers mentioned above. It could mean that seasoned saints who’ve been a few blocks with the Lord have weighed it, and found it wanting.

The fact that mature folks are not drawn to a ministry is not a selling point to a biblically-minded man or woman. If you walked into a church in a multi-ethnic neighborhood and found a large group of one skin-hue, you’d wonder. You should also wonder if a congregation has few or no seniors.

Ironic aside: I’ve no doubt that many yoots who would be (rightly) utterly repelled by any congregation they suspected of racism have no problem at all with one characterized by ageism.

What’s more, a church lacking the very folks Paul focuses on first in Titus 2 lacks vital resources.

Young men won’t have accomplished, seasoned models to look up to, won’t have those resources to draw on or be cautioned or matured by (to dangle a preposition). Young women won’t have those mature ladies to help them navigate the rocks and corals of their own passions or cultural blinders.

Better to set out across the desert without water, than to try to navigate the world without mature, older believers in an assembly.

Look at it biblically, and matured saints aren’t a red light, a warning sign or an obstacle. They’re a gold mine.