Becoming Sage - Michelle Van Loon

Have you aged out of the church you've attended for decades? Are you struggling with midlife spiritual growth? Don't miss today's Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman.

Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Today, the neglected spiritual growth of those in the second half of life. Author and speaker Michelle Van Loon joins us to discuss Becoming Sage. Oh, I like that title. It's quite intriguing, and the subtitle is Cultivating Meaning, Purpose, and Spirituality in Midlife. You'll hear more straight ahead from Michelle, and maybe you'll identify with some of the struggles she points out, and you'll see you're not as alone as you thought you were.

Go to fivelovelanguages.com to find out more about our guest and that featured resource. Again, it's titled Becoming Sage. Gary, I'd like to hear you talk about the second half and how you don't have to stop growing simply because you reach a certain age. What do you think about that? Well, you know, Chris, I think our culture has kind of pushed us to this idea that you work several years, and then you start tapering off, and then you start just doing things you enjoy doing the rest of your life.

It's got a self-centered lifestyle, actually. But those of us that know God believe that as long as we're alive, he has purposes for us, and we're in the process of growing. We're either getting better or getting worse, and I think God intends us to be getting more and more like Christ. So yeah, I'm excited about this conversation today and the title of the book that Michelle has written because I think a lot of us who are in the second half, some of us in the fourth quarter of the second half, can find some encouragement in our discussion today and in this book.

So looking forward to our discussion. Let's meet her. Michelle Van Loon. Since coming to faith in Christ at the tail end of the Jesus movement, Michelle's Jewish heritage, her spiritual hunger and storyteller sensibilities have shaped her faith and informed her writing. She's written several books. She's a regular contributor to Christianity Today's women's blog, In Touch magazine, and she's co-founder of the website for Midlife Women and Men, theperennialgen.com. She's married to Bill and is the mother of three, grandmother of two, unless that's changed. Again, our featured resource is the book Becoming Sage, Cultivating Meaning, Purpose, and Spirituality in Midlife.

Find out more at fivelovelanguages.com. Well, Michelle, welcome back to Building Relationships. Good to be back with you.

Thanks for having me. I'm tempted to follow up on Chris's question there or his illusion that maybe you have more than two grandchildren now. I wish. I wish I had two dozen, but I do have two wonderful ones. That's great. You know, for over a decade now, you've been writing and speaking about spiritual formation at midlife and then beyond.

Why do you feel so passionate about this topic? When I was in my early 40s, everything that kind of goes along with midlife issues seemed to happen to me at one time. I'm now 60. So this was about 20 years ago and my parents died. My kids left the nest. We relocated. My husband went through a job transition. We went through a church split.

All of those things happened simultaneously. And I was very disoriented and sad and confused. Plus, my body was changing because I was right in the midst of perimenopause. And when I went looking for resources, looking for help at church, looking for resources in terms of books and from the library, I found that a lot of what I knew about discipleship kind of was that it was aimed at either brand new Christians or forming the faith of children and teens. There wasn't a whole lot out there written for an evangelical audience that had to do with what happens to us as we age. You know, so the default setting on that was just that you just kind of keep doing what you've learned for the rest of your life and hopefully you'll get better at it and you will mature.

And so the assumption was that maturity happened as a default. And what I've learned from the research and the writing and the reading that I've done over those last, definitely over the last decade, but even in the years before that, were that the practices may stay the same, you know, worshipping, serving, praying, confessing. All of those basic spiritual practices are wonderfully foundational, but the questions and the challenges that come to us change as we get older.

And so we need to have different kinds of conversations with one another. You talk about the spiritual formation in midlife. Just what do you mean by that term in case our listeners aren't familiar with that spiritual formation? Really, it's just our path to maturity as believers in Jesus. You know, that is, as we see in First Corinthians 13, that amazing love chapter that is quoted at so many weddings, that when we were children, we talked and thought as children, paraphrasing here. And as we mature, what comes out of us, what goes into us, who we are, needs to change as well, that we are called to grow. And so the word formation just means that we are being formed in the image of Jesus and we are maturing as he's calling us to continue to grow upward and forward and deeper in him. And I think that's what all of us who are truly followers of Jesus want. We want to become more Christ-like.

I like the term you use. You say that midlife holds an invitation to become sage. Describe what you mean by that. That's a shorthand way of saying that we are living a life that we are expressing our experience, knowledge, insight, and self-mastery in ways that keep looking more and more like Jesus. And what's surprising about midlife and beyond is that this invitation to grow in wisdom and to live out of wisdom can be very well disguised in the disorienting shifts that characterize this life stage for us. So in Scripture, we see that one thing that set young Solomon apart from most other rulers was that he asked God for wisdom as a young man.

We celebrate that. That's a super impressive thing that he did. He could have asked for a giant pile of Oreos for breakfast or spiffy uniforms for his army or harem of wives.

He actually ended up kind of walking away from that. And in some ways, he grew more foolish as he aged in some of the choices he made. His choices disconnected him from the giver and source of the wisdom that he relied on. But that's not how wisdom is meant to work, that we're supposed to be growing in wisdom as we age. So that in the second half of life, we should be a greater resource to younger people because we would have learned more as we've walked the journey, right? Absolutely. Very well said. Very well said. Now, I'm really interested in the concept you call the quiet exodus.

I think you're talking about people leaving the church in midlife. Talk about that. Why is that true? And if so, why? It's true.

And then some. It's interesting because a lot of the writing and the research that's come out over the last 20 years has focused on church leavers who are millennials, those that are born between 1981 and 96. And some older members of Generation Z, which are the ones that follow them, those born from 96 to about 2015 or so. But researchers like George Parda's group have found that there is a quiet exodus from the church at nearly the same rate as our millennial children from people who are at midlife and beyond. Boomers like myself and members of Generation X, those that are a little bit younger than us big old baby boomers. And there's a lot of reasons for this exodus of older leavers.

And it is a quiet exodus. Some report that they have aged out of congregations that focus entirely on the faith lives of families with children under the age of 18. And if they are no longer in that active parenting role and in those years, they start to feel like there's no meaningful place for them to grow, learn or serve as they move into the tasks and challenges of the second half of their lives. Others report that it is increasingly difficult to maintain or deepen a connection with the local church in light of increased caregiving responsibilities for aging parents or young grandchildren. Others in this age group are dealing with health challenges and they find that if they're out of sight for too many Sunday mornings, they kind of drift out of the mind and the heart of church leaders and don't receive very much pastoral care.

And a lot of people in this group are also juggling workplace responsibilities as they tend to be at the peak of their careers during these years. And finally, many who were once involved in their churches also report burnout from church dysfunction or toxic congregational politics as a reason that they've stepped back from church involvement. The church has become for some a place of pain instead of the life giving community that they know it can and should be. For this group of people that you're talking about, those in midlife, you know, the second half, third, fourth quarter, the church has become a place of pain. And what I think a lot of people will say is, well, you know, those older people, they just don't like the music anymore or they're living in the past and they can't get over that.

So they've got to find some place where they're tended to. And I don't think that's what you're finding. So talk about that place of pain a little bit more.

What do you mean by that? A few years ago, I had a blog, I still have a blog, but I was very actively blogging and I put together a survey. I'm not a scientist, I didn't even really know exactly what I was asking. But the two key questions that I put out there as I was thinking through my own experience of midlife, spiritual growth and some of the struggles that I was facing. I asked people who were over 40 if they were more, less or just as involved in their local churches as they'd been a decade earlier. And then what I learned was the jackpot question.

I asked them to tell me why. And I was hoping for 50 or 75 responses. I got over 500 and I didn't even think I had 500 people reading my blog. I was surprised at the number of responses.

And I think part of it was because I asked the right question and I was anonymous and the people were allowed to be anonymous. In the end, it came out to be about evenly divided between the people who found church was a life giving and healthy place that allowed them to kind of grow and serve in mature and meaningful ways. The people who wrote that they had either downshifted their involvement or had drifted away, a few said that their faith had shifted and they were no longer pursuing Christ. But most of the other people had very long and sad stories in many cases of bad church politics, splits, dysfunction, chaos, confusion that had eaten up months and years of their lives. And they were discouraged that had become invisible because of caregiving duties, that they were no longer seen or honored or cared about by the people in their church because they weren't able to be physically present and active in the programs that the church was doing in the building.

Well, you know, that makes sense. And I think that probably any church that has a significant number of adults who are in midlife or beyond have seen both of those categories. We've seen people who get more involved and are serving as mentors and teachers and caring for others as we've seen others kind of walk out the back door. Talk about the significance and the unique realities surrounding what we commonly call discipleship that is following Christ in midlife. For those of us who are aging, it's important to recognize that spiritual growth is going to look very different at this stage of life as we're dealing with losses. The losses accumulate as we age and those losses can be deeply formational.

If we understand that God is at work in those losses in our lives, God has drawn near to us in those losses in our lives. And that some of the practices that we use to build our lives, some of the ambitions and the drives that are very powerful and important when we're in our 20s and 30s is we're looking for relationships, we're looking for vocational direction, we're kind of building our lives. Some of the very things that we use to build our lives in the first half actually can hamper our ongoing discipleship as we get older.

Ambition should be mellowing into a search for meaning and a desire to create legacy and part of what helps move us from building into creating meaning does come in the form sometimes of these losses and changes that come at midlife. And for a lot of people, I think just understanding that God is at work in the pruning process and that he can bring a different kind of fruitfulness in the second half can be very comforting. Those were words that I was longing for somebody to be able to explain and describe to me when I was in my own early stages of what is happening in my world and in my life and in my relationship with God. Because I think if we have developed the concept that if I really walk with God, everything will be smooth and good and right, then these things can be disillusioning to us, right?

Absolutely. I think part of it is sometimes that the easier slogans and the promises we love, we love the promises of God, but oftentimes when we look at those promises in context, for example, you know, where God says, I know the plans I have for you. We love those words from Jeremiah and give them to young adults, but they're in the context of exile and they're to a people that have drifted far from God. And sometimes being able to understand that those simple promises that kind of formed our faith come in the context of that God is calling us toward him in holiness and that a lot of times it makes us into pilgrims instead of people that are building a big fabulous McMansion.

If we can keep that perspective that through whatever we're walking, God wants to be bringing us more and more to the image of Christ and he does still have plans for us wherever we are. You know, I remember a gentleman who physically, he simply laid in bed all day long. That's all he could do. He couldn't move his arms, his legs.

He could move his neck back and forth, up and down. But he took those years as a time of prayer and people would send him prayer requests, you know, to share with him through his wife. He had a tremendous ministry, you know, in my life and other people's lives.

So even with our limitations or struggles, if we stay in touch with God, we can accomplish his purposes for our lives. Let's talk a little bit to church leaders. How can church leaders cultivate fresh growth and ongoing fruitfulness for people who are growing through the latter season of life?

Well, I have some sad news here, which is there is no program. You know, there is no sermon series or program like there is for, say, you know, how to begin your new life in Christ or some ways of how to raise a child. With this, it's more about keeping in mind that those who are pastoring are pastoring an intergenerational community, a family, more than an organization. And so being able to be sensitive to the needs and the concerns of older adults that are a part of a congregation, this can come in the form of regular meetings to kind of find out where people are at with a focus on doing some reading.

Besides my own book, there is now, thankfully, a number of other books that have come out that can be wonderful resources that can help reorient an entire church leadership team towards thinking about how to bless and encourage and celebrate older adults. Certainly, mentoring and serving in those kinds of capacities is a part of it, but it is not the whole enchilada. I think a lot of older adults also need food, teaching, programming that is targeted at where they are in terms of grief or end of life decisions or the ongoing challenges.

I keep coming back to caregiving, but that's because it ends up becoming a very big thing. Being able to bless and honor that ministry as a part and an outworking of the church is a very powerful shift that can incorporate people that may not be as physically present, but want to be connected to the church. I hear you saying, among other things, that one of the first steps is to try to identify what the needs are, what these folks are going through in their lives and where they have felt needs. Then we try to address those issues, right?

Absolutely. That is going to be different for different church communities. There may be some churches that may have good social programs for their older adults, going to do recreational activities or those kinds of things. Cultivating the kind of growth and the kind of prayer and conversation that's needed around things like loss and change, some of the physical challenges that come to older adults, as well as navigating changes in family from emptying nests to expanding families to some marriages that don't make it, and how to support those people, people that become widows, because it tends to be more women than the men that end up single at this stage of life. There are a number that are aging away from their family and need the support of their church community.

It's been interesting to me to hear the response of folks in the second half of life. When the church does seek out to reach and minister to their felt needs, they're so responsive. They're so grateful that the church is offering whatever it is that touches them where they are. I think this should motivate church leaders to discover those needs and to seek to reach out.

What about this idea also? What about working to help the younger adults, millennials and others, to get a vision for reaching out to and encouraging those who are in the second half? It goes both ways. The younger adult can learn from the older adult, but the younger adult can also encourage the older adult.

Absolutely. If the church has the vision of being an intergenerational family, some of that happens organically. But it is a culture shift for a lot of churches that are used to programming to try to grow the church through attracting young families, through doing ministry that is very age segregated. I'm talking about a particular kind of age segregation in one way, but actually the solution to that is to make sure that those boundaries are not so hard and fast that they become insurmountable divisions.

They keep us apart from each other. Well, Michelle, we're talking about really spiritual growth in the second half of life. Do you have biblical characters that you can point to that might help us with this whole area of spiritual growth? I used the life of David in a chapter to kind of talk through what he looked like at every kind of maturity stage of his life. Young David was a very different character than the man who we see at the end of his life. And we actually do see him hitting the wall and kind of coming apart at the peak of his life, you know, shortly after he became king. And we see in that that all of those wonderful expressions of youthful trust and creativity and ambition and cleverness, all the ways that he used to kind of preserve his life and grow and become ready to be king, that some of those things actually got in his way when he did become king. But we see there in some of those losses that the things that used to work for him sometimes had to be kind of pruned and dismantled and repentance had to come as well. But all of that then led to a leader who was humble and could continue in his mission and his ministry through the latter part of his life in a very meaningful way.

So I'm definitely summarizing for sure, but I used him as an example. Jesus tells us that the things that we think we're building our lives with that are strong and sturdy may not stand. You know, when he says in Matthew 7, everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who builds his house on a rock. The rain fell and the floods came, the winds blew, beat on the house, but the house did not fall because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand and the rain fell, the floods came, the winds blew and beat against that house and it fell and great was the fall of it. In that we don't know until the storms come exactly how strong our foundation is and there are parts of what we've used to build our life in the first half that may look good. But the process of midlife, all of the changes and crises that can come during those years can be very clarifying as to what will last.

We may think that we've got a beautiful home built, but what we have are the ingredients for a sturdy, much smaller home and that kind of is a parallel metaphor for sure for the second half of life. One of the positive things of the life of David is, of course, that God forgives and even after failures, God continues to use us if we're willing to repent. That should be encouraging to those in the second half of life who maybe have failed God, sometimes rather publicly.

God still has plans for us if we repent and turn back to Him. Let me talk a little bit with you about this whole thing of mentorship. You know, in the scriptures we see there in the New Testament, you have Paul and Timothy.

Timothy was kind of his son in the faith. What can mentorship, how can that enrich Christians in the midlife years? Well, one of those ways that we can make those intergenerational links is through mentoring relationships that our experience, even our failures, even if we think that we've got a long, long list of don't do this, do something else.

I have messed up so many ways. That is actually the most valuable gift that you can give to a younger person as they're trying to figure out what their own life is like. We see in Paul's instruction to Titus about how older women are supposed to mentor younger women. If we look at Titus 2, which is a beloved passage, that we older women are supposed to urge our younger sisters to love their husbands and children and be self-controlled and pure, be busy, productive at home and kind and in good relationship with their husbands. All of those things are very powerful, but the one thing that I like to emphasize when I talk about mentorship is that this relationship was never meant to be a one way street.

Older women were expected to be students as well as they learned sound doctrine, they were able to work out its implications and applications in the living lab of their daily lives as they interact with those who they're discipling. When rigidly prescribed roles, forms and curriculum are laid on top of what is meant to be a relationship, like a lot of churches will create mentoring programs, some of them work, some of them feel sometimes a little artificial. And part of it is because a relationship is the way that faith is designed by God to be transmitted from one generation to the next as we share his life together. We don't want to turn people into projects.

We don't want to create products. We need spiritual friendships that are a two way street. The good news is that younger women, I have found, are looking for relationships like this and they're not looking for superstar people that have it all figured out. They're looking for people that are willing just to be honest and to be humble and to be learning together. So I hear you saying that it's really authentic relationships of those in the second half of life with those that are younger. It's a two way street and we're open and honest with each other.

Absolutely. I've had a couple of very meaningful, ongoing mentoring relationships with the younger women, and I have learned from them to ask different questions of my faith than I might have if I was left on my own. I have learned from them spontaneity and slang and fun, as well as to remember well, to remember faithfully the work of God in my life and to be able to point and say he can be trusted and he forgives. Those two messages have been very powerful in those relationships that I've had. Could mentoring be looked at as basically friendship?

I believe so. It's a special kind of friendship and there is an intention that goes along with a good mentoring relationship. I like to tell this story. I was working at a university shelving books and just working in a bookstore and I had one of the college students come to me and say, would you mentor me? We'd hung out together. We worked together.

We'd laugh together. But she was looking for something that was a little more pointed. She was giving me permission to ask her some hard questions about the choices she was making and to hold her accountable. The first thing I could think of to say, I was so surprised by her request that I gave her a list of all the things that would disqualify me from that role.

Here's all the ways that I've messed up. I already know those things about you because you've shared those stories. It's because you've been honest with me that I know that we can journey together this way.

She might have said it more like a 20 year old, but the essence of what she was saying was that she wanted to hear my stories and part of it was because she knew I wanted to hear hers as well. Michelle, walk us through the stages of faith and the shifting that occurs during the transitions of midlife. I owe much of my thinking to a couple of books that I ended up finding when I was searching for some answers about what was happening to me at midlife.

One is an academic book by a man named Fowler and then a more popular book written by Hagberg and Gulick called The Critical Journey. Those books both helped me kind of see that just as we grow from infancy to toddlerhood to childhood to adolescence to young adulthood, we go through physical changes and emotional changes. We also go through spiritual growth and change that can look different. Now, the challenge with this is that we don't necessarily grow spiritually automatically in the same way that our bodies grow and change physically, for example.

So there has to be a little bit of challenge and work and I've known older people that have a very early stage kind of approach to faith, and they're kind of planted there. But if we're growing, if we're continuing to grow, we're going to begin with a simple God, I believe in you kind of acknowledgement. This may come whether we've grown up in a Christian home or whether we've had a coming to faith moment at camp or some other place in our lives.

But we start out with, I believe in you. And then if we're continuing to grow, we will look around and find ourselves in a community, we'll be looking for a community, a family that will show us what it means to believe because we belong. We belong to God and we discover the wonderful parts in a church, in a Bible study, of being a part of a community with other believers. If we are growing at some point, we will find that we've got gifts to offer, that God's given us these gifts and our experience, and we may move then into a place where we're working for God, we're leading vacation Bible school. We are serving as an usher.

We're working in a food ministry that is an outreach of our church. We're doing something and all of this doing can feel very productive and very exciting. But at some point, we may find that we've hit the wall, that we've walked into some darkness and we begin to ask God, where are you? And that can come.

It often coincides with midlife, but not always. But where we find we're in the dark, we've lost things like the list that I gave at the top of the show, relocated, losing friends because of a church split, losing a job, kids leaving the nest, even the happy additions of grandchildren can be a stressor as well on a family just because the family is changing shape. But that sense of some of the things that used to work for me maybe aren't working quite so well, and God, where are you? A lot of people hit the eject button on their faith when they find themselves in the dark.

And part of my desire in writing is to help people know you're not alone. God is there. He is walking with you through what feels like the valley of the shadow of death. And on the other side is a mature, chastened faith that is prepared to create legacy and pass on what you've learned, the most beautiful kinds of examples of faith. And the people that I learned from are people that have wrestled and have found themselves in a place of deeper trust, and maybe they're not building the great big organization, but they are like the man that you referenced earlier, praying and faithful and speaking into the lives of others in a very powerful and eternal way. And as we pass on what God has given us, it prepares us to be able to come home to God and to be able to hit that last quarter of our lives with hopefulness and not total despair. And my observation is that those in the latter part of life who have the concept of leaving a legacy for those who follow, they find the whole journey to be meaningful.

And their intimacy with God continues to be a super, super important part of their life. Let me ask you a personal question, Michelle. Here you are, you mentioned earlier, 60 years old.

Okay. I don't know what kind of health you have at this juncture, but where do you find your sense of meaning? And how do you see yourself going forward? What's on your heart? What's on your mind?

That is a gracious question. I actually have a very serious health diagnosis. It's not fatal, but it leaves me very medically fragile. And so I've had to come to terms with what it is that I'm going to be leaving behind as I go.

The diagnosis was given to me about four years ago, so I've been navigating life in very different ways. I want to be able to just be a person of faith, hope, and love. It sounds so simplistic, and it really does sound like something that you put on a mug or a plaque. But I'm seeing it from a very deep place that if I am living out those virtues of faith, hope, and love, I will be able to live in the tension of being in this world and also longing to be with Jesus for eternity. And my hope in God right-sizes in the best possible ways my sense of how important I am, my desire to perform for the approval of others, and just to be able to be appropriately honest about what my journey with Him has been. I've been walking with Jesus since I was a teenager, and I feel in some ways like I've just begun.

And that is not being childish. It's hopefully growing in childlike faith, which actually looks a lot like maturity. I think it's true that as we get older, if we're walking closely with God and spending time with Him, using the gifts which you mentioned earlier that God has given us, that there is a growing sense of satisfaction with life and anticipation of what is to come after death.

I totally agree with that. As we move towards growing sage, we should become increasingly generous, even if we have less resource at our hands, which may be the case, but it reflects the way that we're loved by Jesus. He laid down His life for us.

We lay our lives down for our brothers and sisters. And that love might look like cleaning up after a parent with dementia who's had a toileting accident, or holding out our arms to welcome home a prodigal child, or forgiving someone who's wronged us, or passing on what we possess and what we've learned to the next generation and the one beyond that. That's the kind of person that I hope I grow up to be.

I think a lot of us would echo that desire as well. Well, Michelle, this has been a great conversation, and I want to thank you for using your gifts, your abilities to write this book, because I believe it's going to be a challenge and a help to many who are in the second half of life. So may God keep His hand upon you, and may God guide those who are listening to this program today.

Whether they're young or whether they're old, to keep their eyes on Christ and to keep walking with Him rather than running away from Him. So thanks for being with us today. Oh, it's been my honor.

Thanks. What an encouraging conversation today, and a challenging one, too. If you want to find out more about Michelle Van Loon and our featured resource, go to the website, FiveLoveLanguages.com. The title is Becoming Sage, Cultivating Meaning, Purpose, and Spirituality in Midlife. Just go to FiveLoveLanguages.com. And next week, host of Family Life Today, Bob Lapine, will encourage us to love like you mean it.

That's in one week right here. A big thank you to our production team, Steve Wick and Janice Todd. Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.