Building bridges

1. The people and the place

It’s getting on to the end of October and the colours of the trees on the hillsides are too far past their autumnal prime to be called spectacular, but they are still lovely and the days are sunny. It’s tempting to see this as a metaphor for the group of Mennonite Brethren seniors who gather Oct. 20–23 for the third biannual 55+ retreat of the Canadian MB Conference.

About 110 of us (most of whom, I note, are actually in the 65+ range), from B.C. to the Maritimes, have found our way to Hôtel Mont Gabriel, a charming, rambling resort in the heart of the Laurentians, 45 minutes north of Montreal.

Earlier retreats, held in Alberta in 2001 and 2003, attracted about 160 and 200 people respectively. Registrations from local churches have not come in as hoped, but the Quebec location has caused a shift in representation. Previously, B.C. and Manitoba had the most participants, but this time there are 45 Ontarians.

I’m 55 and I’m glad to be here. One reason is the place, the other is the people. I’ll be able to find the information I need on aging from books or the web when required. But it’s people, especially those older than I am, who model answers to the really important questions. How does one handle regrets, find new roles, cope with suffering, continue to learn? How does one get ready for death?

2. The wisdom tradition

Sadness over “workshops not taken” might be another metaphor for this stage of life. There are seven offered Friday morning (on topics like loneliness, service opportunities, “aging with spirit,” DR Congo and spiritual formation), but only two can be chosen! And all of them, I hear later, are excellent.

One that proves particularly interesting is “The province of Quebec: lessons and challenges of building bridges with Canada’s own ‘unreached people’ ” with Éric Wingender, president of École de Théologie Évangelique de Montréal (ETEM).

Wingender was converted at 15 and soon after, joined the MB church in Ste. Thérèse. He was moved by the way adults related to him, for until then, his interactions with older people had been antagonistic. “I will ever be grateful for the MB church,” he says.

But he is frank about the problems and setbacks that evangelical churches in Quebec, including the MBs, have faced. In spite of some 200,000 who responded in the province’s evangelical revival of 1970–85, it was an “in and out” movement. Numbers have plateaued at about 30,000.

Wingender uses the case of the Corinthian church and the “wisdom tradition” of Proverbs to frame his analysis. The Corinthian church – a mix of people from Greek pagan and Jewish backgrounds – had a great start (Acts 18) but it was soon marked by partisan politics, moral shamelessness, class warfare and unseemly behaviour in meetings. The pagans didn’t have the “reflexes” built up over generations, he says, as the core of Jewish Christians did. The vision of Proverbs, he says, is that “God’s gift to humanity is culture’s ability to gather and transmit knowledge about life.”

Quebec’s culture evolved from a “low key Catholicism” (1650–1850) to “high gear Catholicism,” which was centred on ritual and created a dichotomy between sacred and secular (1850–1950). Then came the Quiet Revolution, with its rejection of the Church (and 300 years of history, now named “the deep darkness”) and its embrace of the North American lifestyle.

Those coming into evangelical churches in Quebec were deeply affected by their cultural dislocation. They encountered a rigid environment with its own version of the secular/sacred divide. What happened in Quebec, Wingender suggests, was mission with too little concern for contextualization, and lacking solid pastoral resources and a grounded core.

What can be learned? The lessons include, among others, that a culture in a “state of flux” needs its wisdom tradition, and it needs transmission of that wisdom. It needs, furthermore, “a walking alongside.”

“My conversion was a Damascus conversion, dramatic, even mystical,” he says, “but maybe today we need the Emmaus model.”

3. Life is a river

On Friday evening, retreat speaker Pierre Gilbert, professor at MB Biblical Seminary, Winnipeg, takes us through the book of Ecclesiastes. There must be something about this “odd book” that gets to the heart of seniors’ frustrations and fears, for it’s not the first time it’s been examined at a 55+ retreat. It was the basis of a workshop on depression in 2003.

Gilbert views the book as a two-fold movement in which the Preacher “deconstructs life under the sun” and “reconstructs life under God.” The book, he says, is “designed to trap us.” It pushes at the incoherence of life “as it appears” (the ultimate absurdity, of course, being death, for “we desire to live forever, and we will die!”) until it breaks us.

But the Preacher inserts an alternative: life under God. This is a broader, coherent perspective, which joyfully accepts reality and will not be paralyzed by fear.

Gilbert paints a picture of life as a river and then he coaxes our eyes away from what’s going downstream, toward God, its source. “Keep looking at the source,” he says. “God is in our future.”

4. Meals, stories, music

The meals are very significant at this retreat. One, because they are such a delight to eat (beautifully prepared and presented, graciously served at finely set tables) and second, because of the bonds that form as we eat together.

We have paid for our stay, yes, but we are receiving hospitality just the same (from unseen chefs and helpers in the kitchen, from these white-shirted waiters) and there is something wonderful that flourishes when “the culture of the table,” as it has been called, is given attention.

People said they loved the fellowship and conversations with old and new friends best, retreat organizer Sharon Johnson tells me later. “Perhaps the way French Canadians love to linger over meals created the ideal setting for us to do exactly that.”

Like the meals, stories and songs also weave through the event and bring people together. Three couples share post-retirement adventures – adventures like cooking for 125 youth, applying 50 gallons of white paint, teaching in China and Russia. Walter and Anne Willms spend several months every year in a village in Siberia, helping a group of young farmers. We also hear conversion stories.

And, in every session, led by the indefatigable Holda Fast-Redekop, we sing. There’s the option too to sing in an afternoon workshop, “Music, a bridge to healing.” Hank Janzen and Harold Wiens, professors at the University of Alberta, describe research they have done on the benefits of voice therapy for various kinds of healing, as in Parkinson’s patients, for example.

Wiens tells of his parents, who experienced the Revolution and anarchy under Machno in Russia. Singing was “therapy,” he says, that helped them overcome these memories; it was “the engine that brought people out of sadness.”

This reminds me of a morning workshop in which we talked about the role of suffering in spiritual formation. After looking at a list of 20 “strategies” to cope with illness, one man who has suffered enormous loss said, “I’d add singing.”

Will the memory of these meals, stories and songs be a gift, I wonder, that we will act upon as we go home? Do seniors have a particular responsibility, perhaps, to foster the wisdom of eating together, to keep stories alive, to sing?

5. Bus tours and a banquet

Saturday, there are two tours into Montreal. One is a city tour with a sights-and-history focus, led by a humourous 81-year-old guide. The other, billed a prayer tour, takes in many of the same sights, with Glenn Smith of Montreal’s Christian Direction adding commentary about the spiritual needs of this city of 3.4 million people. Several church planters with Rendez-Vous Montreal, the Quebec MB conference’s key city initiative, join our tour at various points to tell us about their work.

What we’ve seen and heard on the tours becomes personal and more specific at the banquet that evening. It’s a long, full, lively event. Many of Montreal’s immigrants now come from French West Africa and our guests are members of the International Christian Church, led by pastor Jean Calvin Kitata, who grew up in DR Congo. They sing for us, and in one unforgettable song, have their audience lifting arms high and swaying with them, like reeds moving in the river of life.

6. Katie Funk Wiebe, on aging

It’s a privilege to spend the hour driving into Montreal, and then back again, renewing my friendship with Katie Funk Wiebe of Wichita, Kan.

This woman has influenced the Mennonite Brethren Church over many years on matters of practical theology like grief and women’s role in the church. In recent decades, she has been teaching us about aging, with four books on the topic.

Her workshop at this retreat addressed the question: “How do we combat the attitude that aging is a problem, almost a sin, and not part of God’s plan?”

That attitude is common in culture and also exists within the MB church. Workshop participants gave examples. The minutes of one church recorded “concern about the aging of the church”; in another church it was said, “if the old people and the organ were gone, there’d be no problems.”

Although older people often feel pushed onto the church shelf, the abandonment is going both ways. Some 55+ people say they’ve done their work in the church, and leave for travelling or a “snowbird” life in warmer climates. These people need to be challenged to stay, says Katie, and drawn into continuing contribution.

There’s an elder movement, or elder culture, well afoot in society, she continues, but the church doesn’t seem to be catching on. She declares, “A church should spend as much money on older adult ministry as it does on youth ministry.” This means more than simply visitation to the oldest, but ministry to the entire range (“young old,” “middle old,” “old old”) of older adults, to mobilize them into ministry.

Katie cautions, however, that as good as volunteering is, older adults also face the challenge to “abide in Christ,” – to be, that is, not just do. They need to learn “the intrinsic worth of their own being in the sight of God.”

“They are still made in the image of God,” she states, “and deserve the respect of self and others.”

7. Building bridges

The 55+ retreat ends with a moving liturgical service. We hear Scriptures of great comfort and conviction, such as Romans 8 with its ringing “I am convinced that [nothing] . . . will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Pierre Gilbert’s last message assures us, from 1 John 4:13, that when we’re “stripped of the illusion that we’re the centre of the world (for the world goes on), we are indeed in the centre of God’s heart.”

We pass the peace, we pray, we sing to the Lord. We eat our last meal together: the Lord’s Supper.

I had looked forward to the retreat because of the people I would meet, and also because of the place. Organizer Sharon Johnson “stuck her neck out, in terms of location,” emcee Peter Enns of Abbotsford told us. To the usual brew of a 55+ retreat, she wanted us to connect, at least in some way, with our French-speaking brothers and sisters.

That happened. But the “people” and “place” pieces have informed each other in another way as well. The witness of the Quebec church to us during these days has addressed what Pierre Gilbert called “the historical character of our existence” as “designed by God.” It has subtly affirmed the role and responsibility of the senior generation. As the lessons of the initial evangelical success and then its painful setbacks in Quebec show, there is a God-given responsibility for the steady transmission of gained wisdom, to build a “religious reflex,” if you will, that provides stability for the church.

“We are the first generation of Christians in Quebec,” Gilles Dextraze, a former Bell Canada project manager who took early retirement and now assists Rendez-Vous Montreal, told us. “We still need you as older brothers and sisters to accompany us.”

Would that every church could say and believe this! Would that older adults could believe it too, and keep building godly bridges to succeeding generations.

Walter Unger, workshop leader “I believe the main task of the church is to teach and believe that we are to be transformed into the image of Christ – to become ‘little Christs’.”

Arn and Anne Baerg, who shared volunteer experiences “It takes time and money to [do volunteer adventures] but really, it doesn’t cost a thing. We’re spending our kids’ money!”

Hank Janzen (l) and Harold Wiens, workshop leaders, singing “I’ve discovered the way of gladness.”

Eric Wingender, workshop leader “God’s gift to humanity is culture’s ability to gather and transmit knowledge about life.”

Soula Isch, devotional speaker Reflecting on Psalm 34, “But God – this makes all the difference in our lives.”

Ed and Margaret Boldt, who shared volunteer experiences “We went [to China] with a great deal of trepidation but we have never had experiences like we had there.”

Katie Funk Wiebe, workshop leader “The call of God does not end at age 65.”

Holda Fast-Redekop, worship leader “I’ve been amazed how everything we’ve heard and sung has fit together.”

Pierre Gilbert, main speaker “When we’re stripped of the illusion that we’re the centre of the world (for the world goes on), we are indeed in the centre of God’s heart.”

Dora Dueck is associate editor of the MB Herald.