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).
