In the next several posts, I’m going to be highlighting the first-hand experiences of four professionals in Denver. Each of them shared at our annual fundraiser and celebration of vocation, entitle “Making All Things New: Finding Our Place in God’s Mission.” We asked them what they sense is broken in their industries, and how they sense God was using them in his plan to ultimately “make all things new.” Joel was a 5280 Fellow in 2018.

As a computer programmer, I see how technology encroaches on our lives every day. We design online experiences that encourage you to use apps and websites as much as possible – to the point where people are becoming inseparable from their devices.

The consequences of this technology are gradually emerging, from people struggling to sleep because of extended exposure to the blue light of a computer screen to social media causing discontentedness and isolation even though we’re more “connected” than ever before. When choosing a career, I pursued web development because I felt the user experience was being designed in ways that were not spiritually, mentally, or even physically healthy.

I often ask myself: Is there still time to change these damaging effects? How can I use my observations to help people understand the role technology plays in their lives?

I am developing an app that began as my Fellows project, that informs users how the apps they use have been designed to affect them. It informs you when endless scrolling screens cause you to linger on a site or when location tracking allows your phone to spy on your life. We need this awareness to recognize how and why our technology has become omnipresent in our lives.

By empowering users to understand the way they interact with sites like Facebook or Instagram, I hope to reform the way we interact with technology. And, Lord willing, remind us how to enjoy our lives and make meaningful connections with and without technology.

Through my work as a computer programmer, Christ is making all things new.

Will you join us? You can become a monthly donor today.

Law Work

Making All Things New – Alan Chan, Corporate Lawyer

June 6, 2019

In my work as in-house counsel for a large technology firm, I see the brokenness of business culture every day. Working a publicly-traded Fortune 500 company means the pressure to produce wealth and a significant return on investment drives every aspect of our business operations.

Our corporation is beholden to our sales numbers and the expectations of external shareholders. The consequences of missing one quarter’s expected returns can be far-reaching and powerful. As a result, short-term thinking keeps us from seeing the long-term impact of our actions. People, processes, and corporate culture fall by the wayside in pursuit of quarterly goals.

This has a dramatic effect on employees’ lives, especially our frontline sales people, who may feel they are only as valuable as their ability to grow the business. They live with the tension that if they don’t reach their quotas they’ll be let go.

Because I am a leader in the legal department I don’t control sales practices, but I do shape the dynamic our team creates within the company. We strive not to become a bottleneck when asked to review contracts and show compassion for the real pressures the sales teams face. We manage stress well within our department and show forbearance for those whose work we support. As a leader, I encourage my staff to practice Sabbath and fully use their vacation time, two habits that are unheard of among corporate lawyers.

Participating in the 5280 Fellowship has sharpened my understanding of how faith informs my work and equipped me to steward my leadership as my influence within the company grows. I cannot eliminate the pressures of corporate life, but trust God to make our company a healthier, more humane place. Through my work as a lawyer, Christ is making all things new.

Will you join us by investing in vocation? You can become a monthly donor today.

Retirement Vocation Work

What should I do if I can’t afford to retire – and still need to work?

May 29, 2019

Though I generally received positive feedback from my March 2019 story for Christianity Today “Saving Retirement,” I also received some pretty significant pushback. One reader, Rodney, wrote in:

“Your article ‘Saving Retirement’ in the March issue was a good summary of the situation facing retirees today. However, most of the examples of retirees doing something purposeful after retirement were people who had held leading positions in their field of work with presumably large salaries. The article definitely needed to portray what some ‘ordinary workers’ have gone on to do.”

Theology editor Caleb Lindgren wrote, “We agreed with Rodney that there is a much broader picture of post-work life that needs to be acknowledged. Do Christian understandings of work and aging accommodate those who can’t afford to retire?”

The brunt of the critique was that the article was class-biased. Since I’m rather sensitive to this subject, having written “God of the Second Shift,” a look at the class bias in the faith and work movement, I was rather miffed to read this! Especially since an earlier draft of “Saving Retirement” cut out a story about Joanne, a “retired” woman who chose to work at Eistein Bagels each morning rather than join her husband for golf – simply because she enjoyed the relationships of the workplace.

But after swallowing my pride for a moment, I came to the conclusion that the question is a good one: “What should I do if I can’t afford to retire – and still need to work?”

The Financial Crunch Facing Older Americans

In my book, An Uncommon Guide to Retirement: Finding God’s Purpose for the Next Season of Life, I note that if the dominant paradigm for retirement today is a never-ending vacation, the fastest growing group of retirees are those who know they can’t afford it.

The economic problems facing most Americans at retirement are mounting. A recent Wall Street Journal article featuring Ted Benna, the “Father of the 401(k),” noted that 25% of Americans have no money saved for retirement at all.

If the great American dream is “financial freedom” in a blissful retirement, the great American frustration is that such a dream is out of reach for the majority.

A mix of factors is creating a perfect storm for Baby Boomers entering retirement:

Baby boomers are one of the largest generations in American history.
A growing number of Americans struggle financially during their working life, and struggle to save enough for retirement in the first place.
Pension plans – from corporations to state governments – are underfunded and some (like the state of Illinois) are facing insolvency.
Health care costs are rising.
Americans are living longer than ever, thus outstripping their savings.

The question is, what should you do if you – like millions of Americans – find yourself having to work well past official retirement age?

Working in Retirement

Christian faith offers a corrective to contemporary views of work in retirement. On one side of the cultural spectrum, work in retirement is seen as a curse.

This story about work is prevalent today in the financial industry. In 2018, E-Trade, a financial services company, ran a 2018 SuperBowl commercial featuring people working into their 80s. “Dropping sick beats, they call me DJ Nana,” says an 85-year-old granny at a turntable in a dance club. The refrain is sung to the Day-O (the Banana Boat song): “I’m 85 and I want to go home.” An elderly man picks up a fire hose – and is propelled across the room. A small, white-haired woman is dropping UPS packages, clumsily. The punch line: “Over 1/3 of Americans have no retirement savings. This is getting old.” The tag line: “Don’t get mad. Get E-Trade.”

This commercial points to a disturbing economic reality for America, as well as the stewing resentment of the I can’t afford the vacation camp. But it also suggests that if you work in retirement, you’ve failed. It’s as if the financial prophets of Wall Street are saying, “Who sinned, that you are working so late in life? You or your financial advisor?”

In stark contrast, ancient Christians and Hebrews believed work is inherently good and a way we reflect the image of God. In Genesis, God’s creative activity is called work (“By the seventh day God finished the work he had been doing”), which he blesses and calls good (1:31, 2:2). Poems and songs in Hebrew history celebrate God’s creation and his work: “How many are your works, LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” (Psalm 104:24).

When God creates humanity, he too gives them work to do as a way of reflecting his own character. Gardening (manual labor) and naming the animals (intellectual labor) were part of an original, unstained world (Gen. 2:15,19). “We are made in the image of a Maker,” wrote dramatist and essayist Dorothy Sayers. Work is intrinsic to our nature and essential to a full human life.

The Bible calls Christians to never tire of doing good (Galatians 6:9), because “the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many,” (Mark 10:45). Though work changes over a lifetime, there’s nothing to suggest this posture ceases at age 62, 65, or 70.

Working in retirement in modern America, however, is filled with practical challenges. Here are five:

1. You’ll have to make a counter-cultural decision to work in retirement.

If 19% of people over age 65 are were working at least part-time in 2017, that means 81% didn’t. Bucking the trend of increased golfing or television watching is not easy (the average retiree spends 4 hours per day watching television!). If your friends travel three months a year, and you limit your travel to three weeks a year, it will feel strange. It might also feel strange filling out job applications to work for people half your age.

2. Society doesn’t often provide flexible arrangements to work in retirement.

Sociologists like Matilda White Riley have developed the idea of “structural lag.” She says that social institutions – like corporations or policies – are resistant to change and lag behind cultural trends. One example is that when older adults look for meaningful work, instead they often find systems built for a complete cessation of work at retirement.

For example, many companies lack the flexible work arrangements for experienced, older professionals, whether that be part-time work or more time off during the year. A survey from the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies (TCRS) found that 47% of workers envision a phased transition into retirement, but only 5% of employers offer a formal phased retirement program.

3. Ageism is a reality.

“I quickly found that with being older, people don’t call me for an interview,” said Sarajul Islam, a 60-year-old man living in the U.K. “When contacted personally or over the phone, a few recruiters have directly said, ‘We don’t call back old people.’”

Often older adults are passed up for jobs or opportunities because of false assumptions about age. Though outlawed in most countries, tacit ageism is still active in many companies and cultures.

4. Health and family issues impact work more frequently in retirement.

Many find that staying healthy in retirement is one of the most important factors in being able to work. Nearly 40% of workers retire for unexpected health reasons. Personal health issues affect your ability to work in retirement – and can quash plans to work into retirement if not addressed.

5. Social class and income will deeply impact your view of work in retirement.

And this point directly addressed the concerns of our working-class friends who often have a very different view of retirement.

There are two very different visions for work, depending on which of the two very different Americas you inhabit. If you have a college degree and worked in the professions, the challenge in retirement will be resisting the temptation to splurge on grandkids, over travel, or otherwise live for yourself. But you’re far more likely to work in retirement – even though you may not have to financially. You probably enjoyed your career, and wouldn’t mind doing it part-time well into retirement.

But if you’re a part of America’s working class, working in retirement may feel very different. Doug Muder grew up in farm country, Illinois. As a kid he remembered his dad working in a factory that made cattle feed. He “came home stinking of fish oil,” Muder recalls. It was a good job in that it paid the bills, but his dad had a very different relationship to his work than Muder did as a journalist. Muder offers an important insight on work in retirement:

“Here’s what sums it up to me: When professionals retire, we keep dabbling. The retired newspaper editor in my hometown still writes. When the professor retires, he’ll keep reading journals and going to talks. But in the thirty years since my Dad took early retirement, he has never brought home some fish oil and mixed up a batch of cattle feed in the garage. When you retire from Wal-Mart, you don’t set up a bar-code scanner in the basement, just to stay busy. You do that stuff for money, and when they stop paying you, you never, ever do it again.”

Working class Americans experience more barriers than their college-educated peers when attempting to re-engage work in retirement. For example,

Physical labor is much harder to do at 65 or 70, making re-entering the workforce especially difficult for those in the trades or manual labor.
Wages are likely to be lower for working-class Americans, providing less incentive to work.
If you didn’t enjoy your work or you’d need significant education to find a new job after retirement, the road back to work may have more obstacles.

Fully acknowledging these challenges, if you find yourself having to work – either full-time or part-time – later in life, might Christianity reframe our conversation around work in retirement?

Is Working Part-Time in Retirement “Significant?”

In the aforementioned critique, Amy Zietlow, pastor of Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Decatuar, Illinois, told the story of Bob, one of her congregants who retired at age 58 from a career working at a local power plant. Because his work was physically taxing, he was counting down the days to retirement. Yet he knew that financially, he couldn’t completely stop working. So he got a job at a local Home Depot. He now works from 5am-10am at a loading dock.

Zietlow followed this story with a critique of the article:

I found it interesting in the article, the sense of even if you do seek part-time employment or an encore profession vocation, that that should be one of significance. So, I started thinking about the folks in the pews here in Decatur and realizing I think Bob would even tell you, he’s a pretty funny guy, like ‘look my work at Home Depot is not significant.’ You know, it does draw on some of his skills some of his background in terms of his expertise in life, but he would say this is a necessity, and not necessarily something he would say he feels called to do in the sense of other people who find ways to do maybe more what they might consider more significant work. However, having that part-time employment allows him to do other significant things, so it’s more of a means to an end.

Bob doesn’t necessarily want to be working, but needs to work to maintain his standard of living. But I’d ask Bob – and Zietlow – this question: is working at Home Depot part-time less significant than working during your career?

Zietlow goes on to say, “And I find for folks like Bob—and we have many kind of recently retired late 60s, mid-60s folks in our congregation—it both frees up time for them to serve more at church and be more actively involved in sort of the day-to-day maintenance and care for the church—which isn’t necessarily exciting, but is really necessary in terms of just cleaning, and yard work, and general maintenance for the church.” But is general maintenance for a church building more important to God than general maintenance at Home Depot?

Here’s the big picture: Only Christianity crowns the daily work of laborers – even done out of necessity – with intrinsic worth and dignity. The truth is that meaning does not come from “meaningful work,” but from the God who endows every moment with a sense of meaning when it’s offered back to God in worship and love. Even when our lives are painful.

Today a growing number of boomers are making a shift from a Let’s vacation mentality to a life of service; from purposelessness to thoughtful re-engagement; from consumption to “wisdom and blessing;” from free floating days to committed work for the well-being of their neighbors over a lifetime. And the Christian church could encourage many who have to work well into the retirement years to re-engage both well-paid and poorly-paid jobs as “elders” who see the needs of their neighbors in whatever they do and respond with love, humility, and wisdom (Matthew 25).

As millions of men and women find themselves in a tight spot financially as they enter retirement, Christian leaders can whole-heartedly help the men and women who are not living the retirement “dream” to go back to work and live a better, deeper dream, borne not of self-actualization but self-surrender.

This article adapted several sections of An Uncommon Guide to Retirement (Moody, 2019).

Business Economy Finance Retirement Work

A Manifesto for Financial Advisors

May 22, 2019

Financial advisors play a critical role in the future of America.

They are stewards of a sacred trust, helping clients to save money for when they can no longer work, live a life of generosity, invest in businesses that align with God’s purposes for the world, spend wisely, and re-discover their calling to work and serve their neighbors over a lifetime.

If you’re a financial advisor, or you know one, what might it look like integrate Christian truth into this entire field, a $27 trillion-dollar industry that is shaping the destinies of millions?[i] (Click here to access a free downloadable pdf of this “Manifesto for Financial Advisors.”)

Here’s a place to begin.

1.Christian financial advisors help clients save money for when they can no longer work.

Saving is wise (Proverbs 21:20). Financial advisors have the privilege of encouraging people to prepare for the day when they cannot work due to old age or health. They also have the honor of helping clients still have enough to share with others (Proverbs 13:22; 1 Timothy 6:17-19).

But Christian financial advisors resolutely resist the narrative about saving for retirement built on utopian dreams of travel, never-ending vacation, and a care-free lifestyle. They recognize that sin and the Fall have affected all people, both wealthy and poor, and that there is no such dream of heaven on earth until Christ comes again. They also boldly call into question fear-based motives for saving in retirement, pointing people to trust God alone for their daily bread.

Also, since retirement (the cessation of work for a lifetime) is essentially a foreign concept to the Bible, Christian financial advisors work diligently to help people save for the day when they can no longer work due to health concerns, not for the day when they don’t want to work.

To work is to be human.

Financials advisors help their clients save money for retirement in order to provide for themselves in old age or illness, their family, and their community.

2. Christian financial advisors encourage clients to live a life of generosity.

God’s call to generous giving could not be clearer (Matthew 6:19-21; 10:42; Luke 21:1-4; 2 Corinthians 8:12-15; 1 John 3:16-18; Proverbs 11:24-25). Generous living most closely reflects God’s grace toward his people (2 Corinthians 8:9).

Christian financial advisors counsel clients toward sacrificial giving toward the mission of the church, the well-being of the poor, and the critical social, economic, and cultural needs of our day. They explore creative ways to facilitate their clients giving their cash, assets, time, skills, relationships, and influence. They lead by example.

Even though Christian financial advisors often don’t have a financial incentive to encourage generosity amongst their clients, they do so anyway because God first gave generously to them (John 3:16).

3. Christian financial advisors counsel their clients to invest in businesses that align with God’s purposes for the world.

Christian financial advisors believe that God owns everything (Psalm 24:1), including both their client’s money and also the money that is invested in companies through stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.

They are leaders in the space of socially responsible investing (some Christians also call this values-based investing, or biblically responsible investing). They believe God’s purpose for business is to provide for the needs of world by serving customers and creating meaningful work, while giving glory to God.[ii] Profit, therefore, is a means to an end, not the end of business. They believe investments are intended to help businesses grow and bless their communities. Christian financial advisors also believe business has been tainted by the Fall, and today corporations, like individuals, are bent toward greed and injustice (Micah 6:8-10). There are no “neutral” investments.

Inasmuch as they are able, Christian financial advisors seek out investments for their clients that align with their client’s values and God’s good purposes for business. They take leadership in providing ample returns for their clients and multiplied societal blessing through their client’s investments.[iii]

4. Christian financial advisors counsel their clients to spend wisely.

God has given us money to be enjoyed and spent wisely. But Christian financial advisors also recognize that “godliness with contentment is great gain,” and Christian history is filled with vows of poverty and commitment to simple living for the sake of more deeply enjoying the riches of Christ (1 Timothy 6:6, 17-19). Frugality is not a curse but a means to experiencing the abundance of God’s love, care, and heavenly riches.

Christian financial advisors are uniquely able to speak to our cultural moment and the current “retirement crisis” because they believe God himself, not the pleasures of this world, is our greatest joy. They believe in a deeper wealth than what money can offer.[iv]

Christian financial advisors counsel their clients to avoid debt, live within their means, defer gratification, and discover non-consumeristic ways to enjoy life and God’s good world.

5. Christian financial advisors counsel their clients to consider the different seasons of work over a lifetime.

Christian financial advisors see God’s pattern of six days of work and one day of rest as a blessing that lasts for a lifetime.

Rather than preparing clients to completely cease from work at retirement, they encourage sabbaticals and seasons of rest to renew a sense of calling for the next phase of life.

Therefore, they are instigators of a deeply counter-cultural movement. They begin to help clients save money for both sabbaticals and for when their clients can no longer work. They ask pointed questions to help their clients see a deeper purpose to life than entertainment or pleasure. Christian financial advisors, then, become sages, mentors, theologians, and philosophers who help their clients prepare for the next season of work, whether they are 60, 70, or 80 years old.[v]

Christian financial advisors are the innovators who call for a new movement of work, sabbatical, and re-engagement based on God’s design for work over a lifetime (Leviticus 25).[vi] They openly challenge the Let’s vacation paradigm of retirement, and honor the men and women who work later in life as the dignified elders of our churches, communities, and society.

They are the first to point out the valuable, brilliant, and creative work of men and women stewarding their skills, knowledge, and abilities into the sunset of their lives.

For a free downloadable version of this manifesto, visit https://www.uncommonretirement.com/financial-advisors.

[i] Nick Thornton, “Here’s What the $27 Trillion US Retirement Industry Looks Like,” Think Advisor, 2 January 2018, Accessed on August 10, 2018: https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2018/01/02/heres-what-the-27-trillion-us-retirement-industry/?slreturn=20180714204623.

[ii] Jeff Haanen, “Theology for Business (Video),” Denver Institute for Faith & Work, Accessed on August 1, 2018: https://denverinstitute.org/video-the-purpose-of-business-today/.

[iii] Organizations like the Christian Investment Forum and faith-friendly mutual funds like Eventide Funds actively explore how to pursue competitive returns for their shareholders while upholding Christian values. For examples of philosophies of Christian faith and investing, watch the video “Investing 360 – The Story of Eventide Funds”: https://vimeo.com/223488058 or read “Integrating Faith Into the Way We Invest,” by Tim Macready, CIO of Christian Super, an Australian Pension Fund: https://denverinstitute.org/integrating-faith-way-invest/.

[iv] For an excellent treatment on faith, money, and retirement, see: Chad S. Hamilton, Deep Wealth (Denver: PFI Publishing, 2015).

[v] I recognize this is almost unheard of today. But my thesis in this book is that this rhythm of work and rest is more biblical than the contemporary idea of retirement and it more closely aligns with God’s intent for us to work, in different capacities, over a lifetime.

[vi] Rob West, the CEO of Kingdom Advisors, a Christian ministry to financial professionals, says, “One of the roles of the advisor is to not only help the client to answer the question, ‘How much is enough financially?’ – in terms of our financial finish line so we can maximize giving – but also, ‘What are you going to do in the retirement season?’ Even if we stop our vocation, what are we going to do to be of service to the Lord full-time for God’s glory?” Both Rob West and Ron Blue, the founder of Ron Blue Co. believe both wise financial decisions and a lifetime of work, which changes in different seasons, are biblical.

Retirement Work

5 Ways to Leave a Legacy Through Mentoring in Retirement

May 13, 2019

Mentoring in retirement sounds like a wonderful idea. “Invest in the next generation. Share your life experience. Feel a renewed sense of purpose.” But in reality, far too often mentoring feels awkward for both mentor and mentee.

To the mentee, it can often feel like a mono-directional exchange of information, the older imparting “wisdom” to the younger during weekly or monthly appointments. Interactions are often confined to stiff formality and contrived “coffee chats” in which a mentor is supposed to (halo glowing) grace the young Padawan with Yoda-like insight. Anxiety bubbles under the surface for the mentee: will I be heard in this meet, or just get “should upon” for the next hour?

To the mentor, the high expectations surrounding mentoring can create a sense of pressure and a feeling of inadequacy that deters people from mentoring in the first place. Doubts creep in. Do I really have something to share with the next generation? Would they want to listen?

There are few things so human and so cross-cultural as the older grandparent, parent, boss or teacher sharing insight and life experience with the grandchild, child, employee or student. But I’ve found the entry point into a mentoring relationship makes all the difference. The best mentoring relationships often look more like intergenerational friendship.

Skilled mentors often share five characteristics.

1. Skilled mentors find genuine delight in the next generation and develop friendship based on common interests.

It might be baseball, city government, or philosophy. But rather than starting a mentoring relationship with a “you need this” mentality, talented mentors often develop the relationship because they’re actually curious about the young person, want to learn alongside them, and they share a common interest. This kind of humility cracks open the door for learning to be mutual and shared, rather than one way. This mutuality builds the trust necessary for not just skill transfer but spiritual formation to take place.

2. Skilled mentors bless and affirm a younger generation.

Rather than pointing out deficiencies, elders who become effective mentors are first people of wisdom and blessing.

For example, in Clint Eastwood’s colorful film Gran Torino, Walt Kowalski, a hardened, cursing, and angry Korean War veteran, ends up mentoring Thao, a Hmong teenager in Detroit who tried to steal Walt’s car. Out of shame for his offense, Thao’s family makes him do yard work for Kowalski for two weeks.

During those two weeks as Thao does chores for Kowalski, Kowalski enters Thao’s world by eating food with his family, showing him his garage full of tools, and by encouraging him to date “Miss Yum Yum,” a Hmong teenager that Thao struggles to even make eye contact with. Kowalski affirms the confidence-less Thao and even lets Thoa borrow his precious 1972 Gran Torino to bring his girlfriend to the movies.

Thao – like so many mentees – didn’t first need advice. Rather, he needed to know he was valuable and had something unique to offer the world. He needed an elder to affirm his identity and point out his unique talents and value.

3. Skilled mentors share their stories and are genuinely vulnerable with their mentees.

The truth is, young people want to hear more about your mistakes than your successes. Having done hundreds of panel presentations for my work, I’ve found that vulnerability always goes way further than expertise. Advice is fine – when asked for. But hearing honest stories allows mentees to learn from a mentor’s mistakes, and, hopefully, not repeat them.

4. Skilled mentors are patient and commit to long-term relationships.

Michael Lindsay, the president of Gordon College, says about mentoring, “What does matter [for the success of young adults] is the formative influence of an adult who speaks into your life and who has sustaining relationship that you carry with you.” If each of us thinks of the people who’ve deeply influenced our lives, these are generally people we’ve known not for weeks or months, but for years. And they’ve endured our silliness, our sin, our mistakes – and are still there for us.

5. Skilled mentors ask more questions than they give answers.

Jesus himself was master of the penetrating question. Questions like “What do you want me to do for you?” made Jesus’ disciples stare into their own souls, and ask what they truly desired. Of course, Jesus gave answers too. But genuine spiritual formation requires introspection, reflection, and prayer that is often the fruit of the right question at the right time.

Shaping the Next Generation

Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam says about the growing social divides in America, “If America’s religious communities were to become seized of the immorality of the opportunity gap, mentoring is one of the ways in which they could make an immediate impact.”

What if the 87% of Baby Boomers who believe in God decided that a central way they were going to spend their retirement was by mentoring young people through their local church? What if America’s retirees traded comfort for purpose, and swapped retirement villages for communities of intergenerational friendship?

What if retirement became a source of renewed purpose for older Americans who decided to share their lives especially with young adults who needed their affirmation, delight, vulnerability, and patience?

“It is more blessed to give than to receive,” said Jesus (Acts 20:35). But Jesus also says that it’s not knowledge but action that brings the blessing.

“Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them” (John 13:17).

This article is an adapted excerpt from my book An Uncommon Guide to Retirement: Finding God’s Purpose for the Next Season of Life.

Retirement Vocation Work

Today is Launch Day! An Uncommon Guide to Retirement: Finding God’s Purpose for the Next Season of Life

May 7, 2019

Dear Friends,

Today is the official launch day for my first trade book An Uncommon Guide to Retirement: Finding God’s Purpose for the Next Season of Life.

We have an opportunity in this moment to push on our culture’s view of retirement, and give our friends, parents, family members, neighbors, and co-workers a more beautiful vision of work, rest, eldership, and a life a sacrificial love based in the hope of the gospel.

In the coming weeks, I’ll post on this blog excerpts from the book. Can I ask you a big favor? Would you consider taking about 3 minutes and posting a review of the book on Amazon.com today?

Here are a few themes you might consider mentioning. An Uncommon Guide for Retirement helps readers:

Discern God’s call for their retirement years;
Challenge cultural assumptions about retirement;
Adopt a healthy vision for Sabbath rest, work and meaningful contribution for a lifetime;
Embrace a biblical view of time and a deeper understanding of what human longevity means for the retirement years;
Live out practical insight for retirement living on topics like learning, family systems, mentoring, and health.

Thanks for allowing me to to learn from you. If you’d like more information on the book, group discounts or the free study guide, make sure to visit UncommonRetirement.com. And feel free to leave comments on this blog!

Thanks again,
Jeff

Business Culture Economy Theology Work World

Dreading Monday (Comment Magazine)

April 4, 2019

The spiritual crisis underneath our jobs.

Reviewing:

Working The New Press, 2004. 640pp.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory Simon & Schuster, 2018. 368pp.

The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change Currency, 2018. 416pp.

“I had no concept of the horrible dread I would feel getting up in the morning to spend all day sitting in an office trying to waste time.”

Rachel grew up in a poor family yet graduated from a prestigious British university with a physics degree. Yet soon after graduation, student debt forced her to take a job as a “catastrophe risk analyst” at a big insurance company.

Rachel recalls the day she hit an existential tipping point at her new job:

The final straw came after months of complaining, when I met my friend Mindy for a drink after a week of peak bullshit. I had just been asked to color coordinate a mind map to show, “the nice-to-haves, must-haves, and would-like-to-have-in-the-futures.” (No, I have no ideas what that means, either.)

She ranted at me, and I ranted at her. I made a long, impassioned speech that ended with me shouting, “I cannot wait for the sea levels to rise and the apocalypse to come because I would rather be out hunting fish and cannibals with a spear I’d fashioned out of a fucking pole than doing this fucking bullocks! . . . We both laughed for a long time, and then I started crying. I quit the next day.

Rachel ended her tear-strewn reflection with a response to those who would call her experience of work just a “Millennial problem.” “So, yes, I am the queen crystal of Generation Snowflake melting in the heat of a pleasantly air-conditioned office,” she said, remembering her grandmother’s words to toughen up. “But good Lord, the working world is crap.”

Nearly five decades earlier, Nora Watson, a twenty-eight-year-old staff writer for an institution publishing health care literature, shared her own lament for her new career.

Jobs are not big enough for people. . . . A job like mine, if you really put your spirit into it, you would sabotage immediately. You don’t dare. So you absent your spirit from it. My mind has become so divorced from my job except, except as a source of income, it’s really absurd.

Much has changed about the global workforce in fifty years, yet there are two feelings, felt deeply by millions of Rachels and Nora Watsons across the world, that have endured the test time: the feeling that the modern workplace is an assault on our human dignity, and that work ought to have some broader purpose than just a paycheque, but seems forever beyond our grasp.

In an age of abundance, we are better fed, housed, and cared for than at any time in world history. Yet three books on work—two new and one old—show that our core longing for our jobs is not fundamentally economic, social, or political in nature.

It’s spiritual.

Purpose, Pain, and PR Researchers

In August 2013, American anthropologist David Graeber published an essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” After more than a million website views in seventeen different languages, stories came tumbling into Graeber’s inbox. A corporate lawyer who believes, “I contribute nothing to this world and am utterly miserable all the time.” An advertiser, whose job, by his own admission, “is a combination of manufacturing demand and then exaggerating the usefulness of products sold to fix it.” Judy, an HR assistant, whose job never requires more than one hour a day. “The other seven hours were spent playing 2048 or watching YouTube.”

Graeber had a hunch that many jobs don’t “really do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists.” His book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory tells the stories of hordes of men and women who believe their very own jobs are just that—bullshit. Rachel, quoted above, is one of those people.

Lest we think Graeber is just cursing to sell books, he offers a technical definition: “A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

Graeber even has a taxonomy to describe these largely white-collar workers: “flunkies” exist only to make others look important; “goons” are those whose work is to aggressively propagate their employer’s agenda; “duct tapers” exist to fix some kind of glitch in a large bureaucracy; “box tickers” do jobs that allow their companies to say they’re doing something that it is not, in fact, doing; and finally, “taskmasters” are those whose work consists purely of assigning more work to others.

And lest we think these are isolated incidences, one poll in Holland found that 40 percent of Dutch workers believe their jobs have no reason to exist. Graeber dedicates nearly a third of the book to describing these jobs as acts of “spiritual violence.”

Ellen Ruppel Shell, a journalist for The Atlantic and Boston University professor, takes a different approach in The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change. Shell zooms out to tell us the broad story of work in our time, told through the eyes of educators, technologists, manufacturers, and laundromat operators. The overarching story is one of middle-class jobs slipping away as the working class languishes, and the new global aristocracy holds ever more power.

There are plenty of jobs left, but they’re mainly bad ones. In 2016 the American unemployment rate sank to below 5 percent. “But many Americans had a reason to feel less gleeful. Fully 58 percent of the job growth was in occupations with a wage of $7.69 to $13.83 an hour, while 60 percent of jobs in the midrange—$13.84 to $21.13 per hour—had vanished.”

Shell’s odyssey for a solution to the growing divide—which extends far beyond the size of a paycheque—takes the reader from Finnish classrooms to small manufacturers in places like the Navy Yard of New York’s Lower East Side. Makershops, employee-owned co-ops, and universal basic income are all proposed as the balm for the wounds of a digital age.

Shell calls her readers to embrace the worker’s own ability to construct meaning for themselves. The source of that meaning floats somewhere between creativity, agency, relationship, and economic dignity. “Rather than credit employers with giving us the ‘gift’ of ‘meaningful’ work, let’s agree that the meaning we gain from our work is no gift, but very much a product of our own efforts,” Shell writes. In this story, it us up to each worker to make meaning for herself.

A half century ago, another journalist, Studs Terkel, took up his tape recorder to listen to the American worker in his book Working. A collection of oral history, Working records the knotted, unfiltered voices of farmers, switchboard operators, spot-welders, hair stylists, proofreaders, and industrial designers. (Nora Watson, quoted above, is one of Terkel’s interviewees.)

Terkel gives voice to near universal human experiences at work.

We bemoan jobs we feel we can’t control. (“Who you gonna sock? You can’t sock General Motors . . . you can’t sock a system,” says Mike LeFevre, a steelworker.)
We feel like our jobs make us into machines. (A receptionist says, “A monkey can do what I do.” A bank teller confesses, “I’m caged.” A fashion model bemoans, “I’m an object.”)
And we often feel the need to defend our dignity in the face of “daily humiliations.” (Peggy Terry, a waitress, hears from a customer, “You don’t have to smile; I’m gonna give you a tip anyway.” She replies, “Keep it. I wasn’t smiling for a tip.”)

Terkel ends his introduction to the book with the insightful Tom Patrick, a banker turned fireman. “I worked in a bank. You know, it’s just paper. It’s not real. Nine to five and it’s just shit. You’re lookin’ at numbers,” Patrick remembers, as if to remind the ages that the phenomenon of bullshit jobs is nothing new. “But [as a fireman] I can look back and say ‘I helped put out a fire. I helped save somebody.’ It shows something I did on this earth.’”

Patrick hints at the sense of participating in a larger story through one’s work—a story that has, like a dream, been largely forgotten by a secular society.

Falling to Pieces

Spiritual atrophy is spreading amid many of the world’s workers. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic makes the case that work has become a religion for the college educated, and, as with all idols, is making its adherents miserable. Charles Duhigg of the New York Times seesthe same sickness plaguing his fellow Harvard-educated elites. Yet researchers like Princeton’s Angus Deaton and Anne Case believe that “deaths of despair” among white, middle-aged Americans—who are largely working class—are a part of the same “moral and spiritual crisis.”

Secular society is indeed beginning to crack.

Richard Rohr once said, “When people lose a meaningful storyline for their lives, they disintegrate both personally and culturally.” We rarely connect the spiritual and the cultural, but reading Working, The Job, and Bullshit Jobs side by side makes this connection hard to miss.

Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs may fall short in supporting many of its claims (I do actually know quite a few PR professionals and corporate lawyers who do good, important work), but it rises to the surface a vast and very real phenomenon: most people don’t like their work, and they spend the majority of their time doing something they’d rather not. And to those experiencing such a crisis of meaning, it feels something like spiritual death. And the spiritual consequences quickly become cultural. Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute shows that loneliness is tearing America apart. And even though GDP has grown at a healthy 3.5 percent, evidence of social collapse is all around us.

“Only if a man works can he live,” wrote American theologian Landon Gilkey in 1966 about Japanese internment camps in World War II. “But only if the work he does seems productive and meaningful can he bear the life that his work makes possible.” The story of work in our secular age is increasingly about finding ways to make meaning in our lives and careers from activities that feel abjectly meaningless.

The Job is written with warmth and optimism. But what’s missing is also what’s telling. Ruppel doesn’t even consider religion or belief in God as a valid motivation for work, but instead forces people into a secular box that calls people to create meaning for themselves, apart from any religious sources. (She briefly mentions the idea of vocation in connection with Yale researcher Amy Wrzesniewski’s research in job, career, and calling, but the context is about calling as “passion”—not a response to the voice of God.)

Again, if our cultural problem is intrinsically moral and spiritual, can we expect a healthy labour market when the labourers in that market are feeling the effects of a deep spiritual sickness?

Terkel’s Working is perhaps the most honest book of the bunch. It suggests no solutions and allows humans to express their deep humanity. Yet it also shows us injustice, despair, envy, shame, and pride. To where should a secular world look for hope?

From Soul to System

The Anglican priest George Herbert (1593–1633) believed that the elixir for our work was found in Christian teachings of vocation: “Teach me, my God and King / In all things Thee to see, / And what I do in anything / To do it as for Thee.” Christianity teaches that work is not first a social phenomenon, a policy problem, or an economic activity. It is first a response to God, an act of obedience that makes manifest our freedom and reflects God’s love.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky adds in his classic The Brothers Karamazov, “So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.”

From the perspective of secular society, this instinct is often overlooked, but at other times we subsume it into a larger humanistic narrative of being the captain of our own souls. Yet from the perspective of Christianity, worshipping yourself, your company, your family, or your workplace identity creates chaos. It is idolatry. The only way to heal society is to first heal the soul.

The challenge with both Bullshit Jobs and The Job is that they suggest political policies to fix spiritual and moral problems. The two are related of course; policies are certainly worthwhile and important, and corporate structures can certainly make living dignified, meaningful lives either harder or easier. But cultural issues facing workers can’t be considered in isolation from our deepest beliefs about God, ourselves, others, and our place in the world.

Christianity sees the need for redemption for both individuals and powerful systems. It crowns workers considered lowly by society with unsurpassable worth and dignity. Hotel janitors, landscapers, HR consultants, and even goons, flunkies, duct-tapers, box-tickers, and taskmasters have deep value. They may have bullshit jobs. But there are no bullshit people.

Yet Christianity also casts a wide net of responsibility on the powerful, and calls for reform. Policy makers, entertainers, CEOs, nonprofit leaders, and unions—indeed workers themselves—are called to reorient systems toward what’s good for employees, customers, and communities as persons. To whom much is given, much will be required (Luke 12:48).

A recipe for healing cannot be found in policies alone, but must move from souls quickened by divine love to reforming systems designed for human flourishing. This is what Christianity can offer our global conversation about work.

The enduring value of all three of these books is that they clearly show a world that’s dreading Monday. Each of these books is worth an honest reading to hear the unedited (and often profanity-laced) anguish of so many of those whom God so dearly loves (John 3:16). Yet they also make clear a call for Christians and their neighbours to look squarely at the systems—and morally questionable jobs so many despise—in need of reform.

Christian faith offers a secular world a picture of a God who was crucified on the roughhewn beams of his own work, and offers hope to all people at all times and in all situations.

Even to those melting in the sweltering heat of pleasantly air-conditioned offices.

This essay first appeared in Comment Magazine.

Culture Work

Why We Should Redeem Retirement (ERLC)

April 3, 2019

“What am I going to do with my retirement?”

The anxious question came from Anne Bell, a recently retired researcher at the University of Northern Colorado. As a staff volunteer for the 5280 Fellowship, a young leaders program in Denver, Anne decided to give her first year of retirement to young professionals struggling with questions about calling. Bright and soft-spoken, wearing dark-rimmed glasses and carrying her teacher’s bag, today Anne came to the office with her own questions about calling.

As our staff team discussed our weekly reading, Anne looked out on the snow-capped mountains from our seventh-story office. “What do you think, Anne?” I asked. She paused. Her voice began to quiver. “I just don’t know what I’m called to,” she confessed. “I need to know what’s next.”

The world is undergoing a massive demographic shift. Nearly 80 million Baby Boomers will retire in the next 20 years, at a rateof nearly 10,000 per day. By 2035, Americans of retirement age will exceed the number of people under age 18 for the first time in U.S. history. Globally, the number of people age 60 and over is projected to double to more than two billion by 2050.

But today a growing number of Baby Boomers like Anne Bell – both Christians and their neighbors – are discontent with current cultural assumptions about retirement, and are asking better questions about work, calling, and purpose later in life.

Today, the dominant paradigm of retirement is about vacation – how to afford it, and then how to make the most of it. A Google search for the word “retirement” shows articles, ads, and tips on how to save enough money for it, and a host of books on how to enjoy it. Retirement gifts follow suit: a coffee mug that reads “Goodbye Tension, Hello Pension.” A kitchen wall-hanging with the acronym R.E.T.I.R.E says Relax, Entertain, Travel, Indulge, Read, Enjoy. The wine glass that reads, “I can wine all I want. I’m retired.”

Yet cracks are showing in the hull of the never-ending vacation view of retirement. More Boomers are questioning whether living in a Corona commercial can satisfy the heart’s longing for purpose over a lifetime – even if they could afford it. Mitch Anthony, author of The New Retirementality writes, “Retirement is an illusion because those who can afford the illusion are disillusioned by it, and those who cannot afford the illusion are haunted by it.

Some church leaders have responded by saying retirement isn’t “biblical,” (which is of course true, since retirement is a modern construct. The closest the Bible comes is Number 8:25.) “Lord, spare me the curse of retirement!” says John Piper, the former pastor of Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis and best-selling author. The late Ralph Winter, founder of the U.S. Center for World Mission, said, “Most men don’t die of old age, they die of retirement…Where in the Bible do they see [retirement]? Did Moses retire? Did Paul retire? Peter? John? Do military officers retire in the middle of a war?”

Yet the problem here is that most people can’t imagine working 30, 40, or even 50 years without more than two weeks off. Work is often painful. Mind-numbing tasks, humiliating bosses, a lack of autonomy, crammed schedules, co-worker conflict, new technology, oppressive hours. The author of Ecclesiastes writes: “So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind,” (2:17). Work can be creative service. It can also be toilsome pain.

Might the gospel lead the world’s aging population to a new way forward, which both questions the “dream vacation” view of retirement and a life of unbroken work?

Becoming elders, not elderly

A new generation of older Americans are seeing retirement as a chance to take a season of sabbatical rest in order to listen to God’s voice, rethink work, and commit to serving their families, neighbors, co-workers and communities as elders.

Bradford Hewitt retired in November 2018 from his role leading Thrivent Financial, a Fortune 500 not-for-profit financial services organization with a faith-based mission. “After being in an executive leadership role for 25 years, I’m planning for the next stage of service,” says Hewitt. “Before I start, I decided to do a sabbatical. The pace of being in leadership is intense. My idea of a sabbatical is just the opposite. I know I need to slow down and listen to God’s voice before I jump into something else.”

More Christians like Hewitt are spending early retirement in an intentional 3, 6, or 12 months of worship, feasting, silence, service, reflection, and learning in order recalibrate their hearts to hear the voice of the Caller.

Rather than buy into a culture that sees old age as a problem to be solved (think of “anti-aging cream”), a new generation of older Americans is also embracing aging as a “crown of dignity,” wrinkles and all (Proverbs 16:31).

Far from being an insult, the term “elder”was once associated with wisdom, character, and leadership ability, the assumed fruit of experience and age. “Stand up in the presence of the aged,” says Leviticus (19:32). The term elder (zaqen) is used in the Old Testament as an indication of one’s nobility. The elder taught wisdom at the city gate, the ancient place for public dialogue (Job 32:6–10).

Gordon Smith, president of Ambrose University in Calgary, believes two ideas – wisdom and blessing – are the biblical model for fruitful living in retirement. “To bless is simply to affirm the other, to take particular delight and joy in the other in a nonjudgmental manner,” he writes.

Smith tells the story of speaking at a family camp for Christian doctors and dentists. “These men seemed to have no other agenda than to enjoy the teens at the camp. And they had an immeasurable influence on my two [teenage] sons,” Smith remembers. “It seemed like they never used the word should, which all teens hate, and had no other plan than to bless my sons and the teens at the camp.”

The psalmist writes, “The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the LORD; they flourish in the courts of our God. They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green,”(92:12-14). Retirement may not be biblical. But becoming an elder filled with life, hope, memory, and wisdom for a coming generation certainly is.

This is an adapted excerpt from my book An Uncommon Guide to Retirement: Finding God’s Purpose for the Next Season of Life (Moody Publishers, May 2019) and was recently posted by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Vocation Work

Don’t Waste Your Retirement (The Gospel Coalition)

March 15, 2019

John Beeble recently retired from his job as construction executive in Denver, Colorado. Not wanting to fully retreat from working life, John started his own consulting company.

“There’s only one rule about my consulting company—no employees. I did that for 20 years,” he said, with a note of weariness in his voice. Yet he violated his rule less than a year into starting his firm. As clients multiplied, he needed an executive assistant to manage the demands on his time.

“I’m trying to discern what’s next in this phase of life,” said Beeble, feeling the tug between rest, family, and work. “I want to stay engaged, but not in the same way as during my career. Give me some time to figure this out.”

He’s not alone. Baby boomers are retiring at an average of 10,000 per day; over the next 20 years, an estimated 70 million boomers will stop working. Those over age 65 are the fastest-growing age demographic in the United States.

It’s not just America, either. The world is rapidly aging.

“From 2025 to 2050 the older [over age 65] population is projected to almost double to 1.6 billion globally,” the U.S. Census Bureau reported. In 2015, only 8.5 percent of the world was over 65; by 2050, that number is expected to reach 16.7 percent.

For most of them, retiring from work is not a financial option. Among those who can, many—both Christians and their neighbors—are expressing a growing sense of unease about the future.

Across the developed world, the dominant paradigm for retirement is about vacation—how to afford it and then how to make the most of it. A Google search for the word “retirement” shows articles, ads, and tips on how to save enough money for it and a host of books on how to enjoy it. Retirement gifts follow suit—a coffee mug that reads “Goodbye Tension, Hello Pension.” A kitchen wall-hanging with the acronym R.E.T.I.R.E says Relax, Entertain, Travel, Indulge, Read, Enjoy. A wine glass that reads, “I can wine all I want. I’m retired.”

Yet older Christians are sounding the alarm that retirement as a never-ending vacation promises more than it can ever deliver.

Reimagining Retirement

The closest the Bible comes to our modern idea of retirement is found Numbers 8:25: “And from the age of 50 years [the Levites] shall withdraw from the duty of the service and serve no more.”

Since hauling tabernacle furniture was hard physical labor, older Levites were commanded to instead “minister to their brothers in the tent of the meeting”—a hint that God doesn’t intend for our work to completely stop, but rather to morph and mature with age.

Though retirement may be foreign to Scripture, the Old Testament idea of becoming an elder is not. Far from being an insult, the term “elder” was associated with wisdom, character, and leadership ability—the assumed fruit of experience and age.

“Stand up in the presence of the aged,” says Leviticus (19:32). The term elder (zaqen) is always used in the Old Testament as an indication of one’s nobility. One example is the elder teaching wisdom at the city gate, the ancient place for public dialogue (Job 32:6–10).

Scripture is replete with elders playing a critical role in redemptive history. Sarah was 90 when she miraculously gave birth to Isaac. Moses was 80 and Aaron was 83 when they confronted Pharaoh. Anna, an 84-year-old widow who devoted herself to fasting, prayer, and worship, “gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Israel” (Luke 2:38). Far from being whisked off to desert golf courses or Caribbean cruises, elders were sought out for time-tested wisdom (Proverbs 31:23).

Gordon Smith, author of Courage and Calling, believes two ideas—wisdom and blessing—comprise the biblical model for fruitful living in retirement. “To bless is simply to affirm the other, to take particular delight and joy in the other in a nonjudgmental manner,” he writes. Elders are called lay down former titles and professional roles, yet take up a mantle of wisdom and affirmation for a coming generation.

From Retirement to Sabbatical

The issue in today’s culture is twofold: We don’t have clearly marked rites of passage into “eldership” (outside of the formal New Testament church office), and most men and women entering retirement feel the need for renewal—sometimes physically, most often spiritually.

Because of this, rather than completely ceasing from work, a growing number of older adults entering retirement are taking a sabbatical—an intentional 3, 6, or 12 months to rest, worship, remember, and listen for God’s voice in order to discern next steps. The idea is rooted in Leviticus 25, where God gives instructions for a sabbath year to allow the land to rest before resuming productivity.

“When we moved to a new state following my retirement, I decided to take a private sabbatical,” says Lowell Busenitz, a retired professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Oklahoma. “One goal of my sabbatical was to use it to get a clearer perspective on this phase of life in order to get my future launched in the right direction.” Busenitz used early retirement to take long walks in the Colorado sunshine, read, study the life of King David, visit family, and reflect how God has shaped his career and working life.

“While I do not want to continue the teaching and research with the same intensity as before, the Holy Spirit has brought home in me that I was to stay reasonably close to my roots in entrepreneurship,” Busenitz said. “Some directions remain a puzzle right now, but I am becoming increasingly okay with that.”

Staying Faithful

Some older Christians elect to live out their vocation right where they are.

Ellen Snyder, a retired lifelong hospital volunteer, continues to serve at a day center for the homeless. Verona Mullison, a retired Cru missionary, sees retirement as an opportunity to explore the sciences, which she’s loved since she was a child. Joanne Butler, 68, a cashier at an Einstein Bagels in southern Colorado, makes a countercultural choice to wake up each morning to coffee and cinnamon crunch bagels.

“Yeah, I’m supposed to be retired,” Butler said. “But I like talking to people. This is where I belong.”

After a sabbatical, Barry Rowan, the former CFO of Nextel and Vonage, decided to return to business.

“I came to see that the purpose of business is to bring about a better society as seen through the eyes of God,” Rowan said. After his sabbatical, his work was endowed with renewed peace and purpose. He saw his work as not just a way to make money, but a God-given opportunity to build businesses around “responsible value creation, creating an environment where employees can flourish, serving customers, and being good corporate citizens.” Now in his 60s, he is also seeking to mentor young Christian business leaders. “I don’t think I’ll ever fully retire,” Rowan said.

For many, retirement is a new season to “use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms” (1 Pet. 4:10), yet from a heart being ever renewed by the gospel (2 Cor. 4:16).

Perhaps the coming “gray dawn” of the global church will not produce an economic apocalypse, but rather a movement of older Americans who choose a truly uncommon path for retirement—one of a deeper rest, a deeper sense of peace, a deeper acceptance of the realities of aging, and a deeper sense of responsibility for the world God so loves (John 3:16).

“Give me some time to figure this out,” says retired executive John Beeble. Indeed, now is the time for pastors, scholars, and Christian leaders to paint a more beautiful picture of work, rest, vocation, and aging for the millions of older adults longing to hear God’s voice for the next season of life.

This article first appeared at The Gospel Coalition, and is an adapted excerpt from my forthcoming book An Uncommon Guide to Retirement: Finding God’s Purpose for the Next Season of Life.

Economy Work

Saving Retirement (Christianity Today, March 2019)

March 4, 2019

Growing old is not what it used to be. For millions of retirees, that may actually be good news.

Pat Poole felt a mix of relief and uncertainty once he decided to retire from his sales management job at Halliburton at the end of March. An Oklahoma Sooners football fan and an avid golfer, Poole looked forward to more leisure time after leaving the Houston-based global oil service company. But he also had questions. One morning, he put down the TV remote and asked his wife with complete sincerity, “What am I going to do?”

The world is undergoing a massive demographic shift. More than 70 million Baby Boomers will retire in the next 20 years in the United States alone. By 2035, Americans of retirement age will exceed the number of people under age 18 for the first time in US history. Globally, the number of people age 60 and over is projected to double to more than 2 billion by 2050.

But as retirement looms for Baby Boomers, a growing number of them—both Christians and their neighbors—are discontented with current cultural assumptions about it. They’re asking new questions about money, work, time, family, leisure, and a life of purpose.

As Americans live longer, “we do not know what we will be doing with all that time,” Joseph Coughlin, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AgeLab, told The Atlantic. Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, authors of 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, point out that for that people are living longer than ever before, and the average retiree can expect to live another 20-30 years.

What retirees consistently say they want to do with their time in retirement is spend it with family. But what happens when the realities of caring for needy adult children, looking after aging parents, and spending newfound hours every day with a spouse conflict with desires for rest and leisure? And how much leisure is too much? One study found that inactivity in retirement can increase chances of clinical depression by 40 percent.

Anne Bell, a recently retired researcher at the University of Northern Colorado, spent a year early in her retirement volunteering with the 5280 Fellowship, a leadership development program in Denver. Bright and soft spoken, Bell was speaking one day to a group of early-career professionals when she found herself wiping away a tear. “I’m really searching for what I’m called to,” she confessed. “I just want to know what’s next.”

Bell is one of millions of Baby Boomers, the majority of whom are Christians, who are asking new questions about a new society. Yet considering retirement is one of the most widespread experiences of an aging world, the Church has been almost silent on the topic.

Leaving Paradise

The idea of retirement as a never-ending vacation was popularized in the 1950s by developers and the financial services industry. Indeed, the financial services industry—with an estimated total value of $27 trillion—is deeply dependent on the idea. A Google search for the word “retirement” returns a host of retirement calculators and articles on 401ks and IRAs—and images of gray-haired couples blissfully holding hands, walking white-sanded beaches. The message: Save enough, and you too can have paradise.

It’s an ironic picture, given that at its founding in 1958 even the AARP—the world’s largest nonprofit devoted to advocating for seniors—was encouraging retirees “to serve, not to be served.”

But the vacation ideal of retirement has led to a number of unsatisfying options for older Christians across the developed world. First, the dream itself is showing cracks in the hull. “At first, I kind of enjoyed the novelty of it. I felt like I was playing hooky,” says Ben Whittaker, the 70-year-old widower in the 2015 film The Intern, written by fellow Boomer Nancy Meyers. “I used all the miles I’d saved and traveled the globe. The problem was, no matter where I went, the ‘nowhere-to-be’ thing hit me like a ton of bricks. … I know there’s a hole in my life, and I need to fill it. Soon.”

Margaret Mark, former head of research at the advertising agency Young & Rubicam, interviewed retired Americans (age 55 to 70) across socioeconomic spectrums. They reported a love for their newfound freedom and lauded the glories of no longer having a commute. Yet when asked about their overall happiness in retirement, doubts crept in. They reported a powerful sense of loneliness. Even though they had more time for family and friends, they missed the bonds they experienced at work, or “relationships with a purpose.”

In short, retirement as a never-ending vacation is, for many, much more appealing before they actually try it.

Millions more Americans are realizing they could not afford that vacation even if they wanted it, and are instead worried they may not be able to afford basic necessities. The average retirement assets of those aged 50-59 in 2013 were just $110,000, yet they would need $250,000 just to sustain $10,000 a year in retirement income. According to The Wall Street Journal, more than 40 percent of households headed by people ages 55-70 (about 15 million people) lack sufficient resources to maintain their standard of living in retirement. And as traditional pensions disappear for younger workers, one-third of American adults have no retirement savings at all.

As Mitch Anthony, author of The New Retirementality, put it:“Retirement is an illusion because those who can afford the illusion are disillusioned by it, and those who cannot afford the illusion are haunted by it.”

Quickly establishing itself as an alternative to the “let’s vacation” paradigm is a widespread movement toward “encore careers.” Promoted by leaders like Marc Freedman, president and CEO of Encore.org, the story is that retirement isn’t about leisure as much as social entrepreneurship and civic engagement. “Our enormous and rapidly growing older population—commonly portrayed as a burden to the nation and a drain on future generations—is a vast, untapped social resource,” writes Freedman in his book, Prime Time. “If we can engage these individuals in ways that fill urgent gaps in our society, the result would be a windfall for American civic life in the twenty-first century.”

In the past generation, many Christians have bought into the view of retirement as a time to change the world. Two decades ago, Nelson Malwitz was a 50-year-old corporate director at Sealed Air Corporation, the company that invented Bubble Wrap. Stuck in a mid-life crisis, he helped to start the finishing well movement, a gathering of early retirees in the late 1990s hoping to find significance in second-career overseas missions. Drawing from Bob Buford’s popular book Halftime, many older Americans hoped to go “from success to significance” after they retired from “secular work.”

There’s a lot to praise about the encore movement. It swaps a vision of consumption for service, acquiring for giving, and points out the obvious: Today we tell productive, bright, able citizens in their 60s to stop working and start collecting a pension—often during the prime of their career.

Yet some Christians are wary of promises of overabundant “significance” through encore careers. I asked Fred Smith, the recently-retired president of The Gathering, an annual conference for Christian philanthropists, what he thought about the idea of significance. “It’s like drinking salt water,” he said. “Looking for significance from external things is still competing for somebody else’s ‘OK.’ It just leaves you thirsty.” Ironically, the same exhausting treadmill of a career can follow the recently retired into more “meaningful work.”

The most prominent Christian voices on retirement today point out that retirement isn’t “biblical”—which is, of course, true, since retirement is a modern construct. “Lord, spare me the curse of retirement!” says John Piper, the former pastor of Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis and bestselling author. The late Ralph Winter, founder of the U.S. Center for World Mission, echoed Piper’s sentiment: “Most men don’t die of old age, they die of retirement. … Where in the Bible do they see [retirement]? Did Moses retire? Did Paul retire? Peter? John? Do military officers retire in the middle of a war?”

The closest the Bible comes to retirement is Numbers 8:25: “And from the age of fifty years they [the Levites] shall withdraw from the duty of the service and serve no more.” Hauling around the furniture of the tabernacle was hard physical labor. However, later in life, Levites were commanded to “minister to their brothers in the tent of the meeting”—a hint that God didn’t intend for our work to stop completely, but to morph and mature with age.

Yet the main problem with the “resist retirement” view is that most people cannot imagine working nonstop for 40, 50 or even 60 years. In Habits of the Heart, sociologistRobert Bellah interviewed executives, government employees, school teachers, and small-businesspeople on how they felt about retirement. He found they were “sick of working,” hated “the pressure,” had “paid their dues,” and “wanted to get out of the rat race.” The appeal of the vacation paradigm for aging Americans is an under-recognized spiritual (and often physical) exhaustion and pain that can accompany a lifetime of work (Ecclesiastes 2:17; Genesis 3:17-19).

So overwhelmingly, those who can retire, do.

Redeeming Retirement

Yet many Christians today are choosing a contrarian path, eschewing both the never-ending vacation and the life of unbroken work. In an age where structures for older Americans lag behind their aspirations for a meaningful life, the church is beginning to experiment with new paradigms for living a fully human life in retirement.

From Vacation to Sabbatical

“Linda and I decided to take a purposeful pause to listen for God’s voice, ” says Barry Rowan. In 2006, Rowan was the CFO of Nextel Partners, a wireless phone company. After years of high-pressure positions, he decided to take a sabbatical rather than to completely retire and cease from all work.

The word vacation derives from the Latine vacare, from which we get “to vacate, make empty, make void.” Many see retirement as a chance to “vacate” their lives, whether on the beaches of Mexico or the mountains of Colorado. But Rowan says, “I left my time off with a deeper level of surrender and a deeper appreciation that I had become less, and God had become more in me.”

Some are now seeing retirement as a social construct that allows them to take an intentional three, six, or 12 months of sabbatical rest to prepare the heart for a new season of fruitfulness (Leviticus 25). Rhythms of preparation, worship, feasting, learning, simplicity, remembrance, and service, are chosen over consumption, travel, or a premature jump into a new field.

Bradford Hewitt retired in November 2018 from his role leading Thrivent Financial, a faith-based Fortune 500 financial services organization. “After being in an executive leadership role for 25 years, I’m planning for the next stage of service,” Hewitt says. But before jumping into whatever may be next, Hewitt is pausing for discernment and taking a six-month sabbatical of prayer, solitude, rebuilding friendships and eating healthier. “The pace of being a CEO is intense. My idea of a sabbatical is just the opposite. I know I need to slow down and listen to God’s voice.”

From Success to Surrender

“I am convinced that part of the essence of vocational identity during this period of our lives [the senior years] is that we let go of power and control,” says Gordon Smith, author and president of Ambrose University in Calgary. “People listen to us because we are wise and because we bless, not because of our office or any formal structure of power.”

Releasing power allows older adults to freely give to the next generation, without the need to capture titles or wealth. “This season of life is like fly fishing,” said Fred Smith. “When I catch fish, I now don’t need to keep them. I delight in releasing them. Catch and release—this is what retirement means for me.” Ed Wekesser, a 67-year-old coach for Christian CEOs, also sees a deeper freedom in relinquishing power. I asked him what has changed about his developing sense of vocation in his 60s. “Ah, that’s simple,” he said. “It’s not about me anymore.” He says he’s now content to simply work for the success of others.

From “Old” to Eldership

Rather than buy into a culture that sees old age as a problem to be solved (think of “anti-aging cream”), a new generation of older Americans is embracing aging as a “crown of dignity,” wrinkles and all (Proverbs 16:31).

Far from being an insult, the term “elder”was once associated with wisdom, character, and leadership ability, the assumed fruit of experience and age. “Stand up in the presence of the aged,” says Leviticus (19:32). The term elder (zaqen) is used in the Old Testament as an indication of one’s nobility. The elder taught wisdom at the city gate, the ancient place for public dialogue (Job 32:6–10). Cicero, the great Roman statesman, once wrote, “The crowning grace of old age is influence.”

In that spirit, rather than retreat to retirement communities, more Boomers are seeing that retirement can be a season of unique influence. After a full career as a boutique hotelier, Chip Conley was tapped by the young founders of Airbnb to help grow the company into a hospitality giant. Though he didn’t know how to code and he was reporting to a CEO his son’s age, he embraced his role as a modern elder and blended curiosity with intergenerational friendship to shepherd the young company toward global growth.

Though flexible work arrangement for older Americans are often hard to come by, roles for mentoring are not. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, who has written eloquently about the growing opportunity gap in America, says, “If America’s religious communities were to become seized of the immorality of the opportunity gap, mentoring is one of the ways in which they could make an immediate impact.”

From Independence to Intergenerational Living

Greg Gast is the vice president of human resources at Hudson River HealthCare, Inc., in Peekskill, New York. Greg and his wife, Nancy, decided to make a bold move and experiment with sharing a house with their oldest daughter, her husband, and their three children. Greg and Nancy take the second floor of the 5,000-square-foot house, while their children and grandchildren take the basement, leaving the main floor as a common area.

Gast says there are distinct advantages to sharing a home: They share the same cable bill, lawnmower, and coffeepot. Sharing a mortgage also helps everyone’s budget. But there are also challenges: Privacy concerns and occasional interpersonal clashes rise to the surface. “We’ve gotten better at communication,” Gast says about their relationship with their daughter and son-in-law. “It’s greatly helped to define our boundaries.”

Intergenerational living is not always easy. But it presents an opportunity for the American church to express love and honor toward retiring parents, many of whom are facing unexpected financial challenges.

From World-Changers to Simple Servants

Susan Cole is a 56-year-old music educator who taught elementary students for more than two decades. But she suffered from fibromyalgia, and the long, high-energy days had taken their toll on her health. “It was a hard decision for me,” she said. “I felt like the job both tore me down and built me up.” She decided to continue working part-time as a piano teacher at a local music school.

Just after Cole’s retirement, her mother broke her femur and her son had a relapse with alcohol addiction. “My availability was totally a God thing,” she recalls. “He was calling me to both care for my students and my family in this season. I was needed here. But I don’t ever see myself giving up teaching.”

A new generation of Boomers are opting less for civic heroism or overseas mission assignments and instead choosing for a lifetime of humble service, in both paid and unpaid roles, right where they are.

A Scent of Resurrection

Dwight L. Moody once said, “Preparation for old age should not begin later than one’s teens. A life which is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled on retirement.” Though that’s true, a new generation of older Americans see retirement as a contemporary social construct that affords them the opportunity to re-explore their God-given purpose for a new season of life.

Gary VanderArk is a not-so-retired physician living in south Denver. In his late 70s, he continues to teach medical students at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Center, serve on nearly a dozen nonprofit boards, and bike almost 20 miles a day. VanderArk was also the founder of Doctors Care, a nonprofit that has helped thousands of Colorado’s medically underserved.

With his white hair, slender fingers, and frail voice, VanderArk may seem “old.” But when you speak with him, he seems almost carefree, like a child on Christmas morning. He acknowledges human frailty and death, yet keeps serving others as if death is of no concern to him. He keeps teaching and sitting on nonprofit boards not because of social duty, but instead out of sheer delight. He is quick to listen and slow to speak. His words hold genuine gravitas. He is like “the righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon . . . They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green” (Ps. 92:12–14).

Not all the questions about retirement have easy answers for the nearly 78 million Baby Boomers who are facing it. But many older Christians across the developed world are embracing not a vacation mentality, world-changer ethos, or grudging burden of working later in life. They are simply being ever renewed, and continue to serve God and neighbor as elders in their spheres of influence (2 Corinthians 4:16).

Retirement needs a new story. Or better yet, a very old story. J

This first appeared in the March 2019 issue of Christianity Today. It is an adapted excerpt from my forthcoming book An Uncommon Guide to Retirement: Finding God’s Purpose for the Next Season of Life (Moody, May 2019).