From dust to dust, we turn
“So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.”
•••••
Maybe it’s because I’m rapidly approaching 40 or just have more awareness than I used to, but life’s clock sounds as if it is ticking louder. I don’t feel young anymore. The perennial questions abound concerning past decisions, missed opportunities, and achievements that likely aren’t as hollow as they feel.
My older friends tell me this is standard fare and, like many in the 9/11 generation, I pick up on our culture’s growing melancholy way too easily. But it is also true my generation didn't get the world we were promised. The “end of history” was traded in by the adults for self-destruction. The innocence and past hopes my generation has deep nostalgia for are gone. Forever.
Last Fall and shortly after James Dobson died, I wrote about the aging generation of evangelical leaders who wrecked my generation and asked what we should do with their legacies. Hovering in the background of that was another dynamic I didn’t cover: the unwillingness to let go of the vast power they had accumulated.
One reason I skipped over that is because this problem is not unique to the evangelical fold. The old linger across American society, stealing prime years from younger generations and restricting their ability to use their gifts and energy. Members of Congress are literally dying of old age in office. The two most recent presidential candidates were 81 and 77 and both have mental acuity issues, while the U.S. median age is roughly 39. In countless companies, Gen Xers and Millennials are waiting years for well-deserved promotions as Baby Boomers refuse to pass the torch.
The New Yorker summed up our burgeoning gerontocracy in 2023 with this very on the nose cover. Little seems to have changed since.
Churches here in the American South are not immune to this trend. Many in my generation left a church after being harmed, but even more stopped going after moving to a new city and realizing that finding a new church wasn't worth the effort. Reasons for this disillusionment abound; however, for some it was because the older generation at their last church didn't take them seriously. That lack of love and concern for younger people grows right out of the aging, upper echelons of American evangelical consumer culture, of which Dobson was just one part.
Hold these macro dynamics up to the rapid technological and communicative changes being forced upon us and it’s no surprise we are where we are. The Baby Boomer generation is of a different time, past their prime leadership years, and hold a brittle certainty and suite of answers —and wealth— that increasingly don’t meet the needs and lived reality of the rest of us. Even many of today’s institutions, from government agencies to the local church on a street corner, are still operating as if we live in the Baby Boomers’ world. Much like the world I grew up in, that world too is now gone.
Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z have new ideas and new solutions for at least some of the resulting problems, but we largely don’t have the power or positioning to test them out. Everything is broken, in part because the traditional avenues for change and progress are blockaded by the elderly.
These are, of course, overly broad strokes. There are plenty of Baby Boomers who are not selfish. I’m blessed to have older friends who have gracefully passed torches. I know from experience my generation usually has more questions than answers. Yet the core problem remains: it is well past time for the torch to be passed in most aspects of American life, and in many ways the opposite appears to be happening instead.
Teasing out a weird contradiction
The issue of generational divide has come up in my writings before. Here are a few excerpts from an article I wrote two years ago that touches on how this often plays out in churches here:
“Broadly speaking, the Baby Boomers who are in charge of many churches seem to have little interest in preparing future generations to lead. The Spirit’s work in younger generations is rejected and we’re expected to do as we’re told, no more and no less. Put another way: younger Christians are essentially taught that faith will be done for us by older people, not by us. The result is that many younger people are forced into spiritually-forming and discipling ourselves, both amongst each other and by using outside resources that give deeper theological and historical insights…
…a lot of us share a common experience of having been left to fend for ourselves in an ‘intergenerational’ church…Even in churches not facing a major crisis, there is often a sense that things are on autopilot. Small problems being ignored escalate into larger ones. Promises made are not kept. There’s neither excitement for the Good News nor concern at the slow exodus of people heading out the doors. Institutional behavior does not reflect reality or what the church is supposed to be.”
These are symptoms of whatever the problem is. I’ve struggled to find good language to describe the why as there seems to be an inherent contradiction: older leaders seem to have a strange sense of urgency while also disregarding their own mortality. This is not the only problem.; people are too complicated for that. But we need to recognize that the emergence of our broken gerontocracy stems in part from a failure of the older generation to, in the words of the Psalmist, “count our days that we may gain a wise heart.”
The last ten years have brought this contradiction into sharp relief. Older Republicans and their evangelical voters alike threw their weight into the MAGA movement because “only Trump can fix it.” Ten years on and the sense of urgency feels even more extreme. It is easiest to see in the rhetoric about how America is always on the verge of utter ruin, despite core objectives now being achieved, such as controlling the Supreme Court and overturning Roe vs. Wade.
As I already hinted above, this Boomer urgency can play out inside the church world, only in the opposite direction to prevent change, to the point of creating a climate of ressentiment and trying to wind the clock back to even more harmful times. In more overt culture-warring swaths of evangelicalism this is now moving at breakneck pace, from a resurgence of Southern Baptist leaders desperately trying to ban women from pastoral positons (even though women already are functionally banned) to hyper-reformed pastors openly declaring a push to see to it that women lose the right to vote. As I write this here in Tennessee, an effort is underway by the Republican-Evangelical blob to destroy the last U.S. House district held by a Democrat, a district that happens to be majority Black.
There seems to be a belief that all of this has to be done now, or it will never happen. This despite living in a democratic society that is just as much about open media and persuasion as it is institutions. The gerontocracy described above seems very interested in using the former (open media) for their own gain and seems to have no interest in the latter (persuasion). The result is that, outside the circles many evangelical leaders run in, public trust and goodwill toward evangelicals has all but evaporated. This subculture is getting what they want, but only after setting their witness on fire. It will take generations to heal that reputational damage, if it can be healed at all.
The real contradiction emerges though in a seeming disregard for mortality. Even after all the above, there seems to be little to no recognition that a new generation of leaders in this vein is required to carry on the work. The torches are not being passed. Politically, this is just as much a problem on the Democrats’ side of the aisle, albeit with different results. Republicans are alienating younger generations at an astounding speed, while senior Democrats are actively preventing younger leaders from taking on problems that impact them far more than they impact the elderly. Again, the end result is that everything is broken.
What about churches? Lifeway Research, a staunchly evangelical group, pointed out a few years ago:
“While there is stability among Protestant pastors, the average age of religious leaders as a whole is increasing. The 2020 Faith Communities Today (FACT) study of all U.S. religious groups found an increase in the average age of clergy, climbing from 50 in 2000 to 57 in 2020. Additionally, those who attend religious services are twice as likely as the average American to be 65 and older (33% v. 17%).
The FACT report noted a correlation between the graying of the pulpit and the pews. The older the pastor, the heavier the concentration of senior citizens in their church. Pastors under 45 lead congregations where 27% are 65 and older. Senior citizen pastors, on the other hand, have churches where older adults make up 40% of the congregation.”
A few months before this, Church Answers noted in an article glaringly entitled The Disappearance of the 30-Something and 40-Something Pastor:
“A typical pastor today is approaching retirement age. Frankly, there are not enough younger pastors to replace a large group of retiring Baby Boomer pastors.
The perspective of some churches with older, retiring pastors is exacerbating the problem. Once they begin to search for a pastor, they will look for an idealized version of a 30-something Baby Boomer pastor from a bygone era. Obviously, this pastor does not exist. The few candidates available will look and lead very differently. As a result, churches will struggle to fill positions as willing candidates get frustrated with search teams.”
This data backs up what I was feeling when I wrote a few years ago that “Broadly speaking, the Baby Boomers who are in charge of many churches seem to have little interest in preparing future generations to lead.” It’s something I still feel today. Most of the former pastors I know who have left ministry altogether are in their 30s, 40s, and early 50s. Their reasons vary, and obviously this is anecdotal, but two common threads are the unwillingness of older leaders to allow for even minor change and a refusal to prepare them to receive the torch. They genuinely wanted to learn from older pastors and other well-known, aging evangelical voices. At some point they gave up after discovering there was no plan to the pass torch, just a desire to control.
All of this is compounded even further in the upper echelons of evangelical consumer culture. From that article I wrote about James Dobson last Fall:
“More white evangelical men in the Dobsonian vein will die of old age in the coming years. MacArthur is already gone. John Piper and Doug Wilson are in their 70s. Other lesser known figures are even older or marginally younger, from big platform names to aging pastors and elders in churches of all sizes…White evangelical denominations and churches are aging, shrinking in size, and slowly diminishing in influence just like most forms of Christianity in the United States. Their seminaries and parachurch organizations are in decline. At the time of this posting, even Focus on The Family has announced ‘a $2 million ministry shortfall.’”
It’s almost as if some Boomer leaders believe they will live forever, or at least think that death is still far, far away. Regardless of when their time comes, this brings us to at least one way of reconciling the contradiction of Boomer leaders having an extreme sense or urgency while disregarding their own mortality: these men built an Empire, and they are now watching it teeter and collapse in real time. They focused so long on trying to force into existence the world they wanted, and in some ways succeeded in. But this was often done with no regard for witness and future consequences. Real relationships were not formed with younger people, as such, today’s Baby Boomer leaders struggle to understand the actual problems following generations face.
Perhaps it is no surprise that many older evangelical leaders, and Baby Boomers politically and more generally, have become even more hardened with age. Instead of softening into being wise, quiet, and jovial voices who newer leaders and younger people can come to for advice, they have veered into ever harsher and more fundamentalist positions, even nationalism, or a paralyzed centrism. Ironically, they exhibit almost perfectly the extreme certainty many of us felt at some point in our early 20s, with people even younger than me increasingly sounding more cautious and reasonable.
Closing Thoughts
In some ways, I think we can understand the unwillingness to budge that highlights so much of Boomer leadership. There is real knowledge that comes from being alive longer and experiencing more of life’s spectrum. The inevitability of death is not pleasant to dwell on. Even many of us who regularly find ourselves in a healthier church on Sundays are constantly told the other six days of the week that the most important things ever are happening in our lifetime. This election. That war as opposed to the other one. The mistake of that leader. And the world really has changed a lot since 9/11 and even more so after COVID-19, often not for the better. The older generation has not come through any of this unscathed. They too have been hurt and let down but he times live in.
My point is that we are all being primed to fall into this contradictory trap so many Boomer leaders find themselves in. The only difference between people my age and such leaders is that some of us have better literacy when it comes to the new forms of communications that abound today, and we’ve never wielded the kind of wealth and power they do. Absent those differences, it’s not hard for me to imagine myself behaving in similar ways if I were in their shoes.
This does not mean we should wash away the damage that has been done, the damage that is still being done. Having much to contribute while aging does not entitle one to remain in charge forever. Everything eventually comes to an end, including our lives. Longer years can bring us knowledge, but longer years are neither guaranteed to provide wisdom nor do they leave us in a position that only we can fix it. Handling our inevitable return to dust poorly can cause us to behave as if our days are not in fact numbered.
Our subconscious seems to know better though. As time marches on, the anxiety, anger, and frustrations mount as we come to understand —sometimes too late— that the world was never going to turn out the way we wanted it to. All those years trying to control what we can’t were for naught.
So how do we count our days wisely? I’m not entirely sure, but the Psalmist has some words of wisdom I find helpful, even comforting:
So teach us to count our days, that we may gain a wise heart.
Turn, O Lord! How long? Have compassion on your servants! Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us and as many years as we have seen evil.
Let your work be manifest to your servants and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us and prosper for us the work of our hands—O prosper the work of our hands!
We begin by accepting the love and compassion of God, who reminds us the world we have today is not the world as it was meant to be. We humans can make progress, and we should, but we must also remember that much remains outside of our control. We offer that up to the Lord while we do what we can and wait on Him.
When we try to do that, we can begin to see that there is much to be encouraged by. Some are already doing what they can in this time between the times. New and younger churches are being planted outside of traditional evangelical Boomer networks. Some are even attracting aging Boomers who are exhausted with the way things are. Younger people are running for elected office despite being told by older folks it’s not their turn yet. Others of us in high-energy spaces are already passing torches after realizing our most youthful years are coming to a close.
The inevitable departure of the Boomer generation approaches through it all. One way or another, by their repentance or deaths, this time of such intense frustration will end. New frustrations will rise in their place, but at least they will be new and leave us feeling less stuck. There are many lessons worth taking from these difficult times, but perhaps today the question we should all be asking ourselves, regardless of age, is are we counting our days wisely?
For we are all made of stardust, and one day to the dust we will return.
About Me
I explore faith, church culture, and formation in the American South from my hometown of Memphis, TN. I’m an institutionalist who believes the means are just as important as the ends. Everything on this site is an expression of my faith and love for the Church.
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