Spiritual Gerontology

I am a lousy evangelist.

Which is puzzling to me. I have always liked talking about God and spiritual life to people who are not believers. I trained under two different evangelists with solid reputations–Roy Naden and Harry Robinson. My church attracts non-Christians.

Still, by any objective (i.e. numeric) measure, I’m a lousy evangelist. Sometimes it eats at me. When I attend Adventist clergy meetings, I am constantly reminded that Jesus commissioned us to go into all the world making disciples, teaching and baptizing. Baptisms are the easiest part of this process to count. And by that measure, I’m a failure as a minister.

But in my own head, I’m starting to push back. Counting baptisms is an appropriate measure of one’s effectiveness as an evangelist. However, ministry is more than evangelism.

Among my friends are an obstetrician, a hospice doctor, an ER doc or two, an allergist, an anesthesiologist and a surgeon. It has never occurred to me to criticize the hospice or ER guys or the surgeon or allergist because they are ineffective in increasing the population. Maybe the ER guys have attended a birth or two “by accident.” The hospice doctor probably did deliveries in his “other life” when he was a family practice doc in a small town. Still, if you added together all the deliveries done by my physician friends who are not obstetricians, their numbers would not match the total of the single OB. (The surgeon, a woman, called my wife, an OB nurse, for advice when her cat was giving birth.)

On the other hand, I did not call my OB friend for advice when my son had a sudden onset of pain in his groin hours before he was to get on a plane to Asia. I do not consult the obstetrician when I want help understanding the needs of parishioners who are dealing with their parent’s Alzheimer’s or their children’s asthma.

In short, I value the special effectiveness of the different specialities in medicine. It would be a sad world that had specialists only for birth.

It’s the same in ministry. “Perinatal care”–evangelism and the instruction and assimilation of new believers–is an indispensable specialty in the church. So is sports medicine, psychiatry and gerontology–the care of people who have damaged themselves through misapplied zeal, those who struggle with mental health and spirituality and those facing the unique spiritual challenges of maturing.

It is highly unusual for someone to be both a highly effective evangelist and a highly effective pastor for life-long, middle-aged male believers–especially if those male believers are educated.

I’m a gerontologist. The most notable impact of my ministry is among middle-aged males–men who have been alienated from church for years, sometimes decades. This ministry does not lead to baptisms. Most of these men were baptized as young people. Most were never removed from the church rolls. They were just gone. Now they are back.

Not bad.