In conversations with members of our congregation the topic of youth and children often comes up. There are a few older members who can remember the days of the baby boom when the congregation had more young families and the number of children per family was higher. Those were also days of a major construction project, so the members who were involved at that time grew together through the process of developing a vision, sacrificial giving, and construction. Those days, however, are past. As those dedicated members aged, they stayed together in the church for the most part. And the church grew older with them.

That graying congregation effect was enhanced by the sociology of our community. Rapid City is a retirement community. Many people live their working lives in other states and come to the hills to retire. The natural beauty, the abundance of good medical care in Rapid City, and relatively low prices combine to make the area a good place for retirement. It is often the case that new members attracted to our congregation are people who are retiring.

This age profile, however, isn’t what our congregation wants. It isn’t how we envision ourselves. We want to be a congregation with all ages, where the tiny children get to know the grandparents and where the seniors have contact with the youth. More often than not, when someone speaks of all of the gray and white haired members of the congregation, it is a lament. We wish we had more young families.

At this particular moment, we are growing in the younger age segment. We do have more younger families than was the case a decade or so ago. We have more children in our church school and more youth in our programs. But the patterns of participation for this generation of young families is vastly different than was the case a generation ago. The seniors in our congregation mostly think of regular attendance as participating in worship every week. Young families consider themselves to be regular participants when they come once or twice a month. A wide variety of activities pull young families away from the church on Sunday mornings. There are many people that we know and who consider themselves to be a part of our congregation who we see only occasionally.

Despite the way we see ourselves and our desire to be a congregation that is full of children and youth, there is a significant future in a graying congregation. The fastest growing segment of our community’s population is in the 65 and up age category. For the foreseen future there will be an increasing number of people in that age category and they need the services of a church in their lives. Our congregation can sustain and even grow without becoming substantially younger.

Furthermore, the children and youth of our community are not, for the most part, the future of our church as many refer to them. They are, rather, our mission to the world. Children who grow up in Rapid City are most likely to move away from the community - in fact most move away from the state. Having them in our congregation is wonderful, but their mission in life is not to replace us when we get too old or too tired to continue in our positions of leadership. They are going out into the world. We hope that their experience in our congregation can equip them to carry the gospel with them and to be persons of service wherever they find themselves, but we don’t raise our children to maintain our institution. We raise them to serve in the world.

The aging of our town can be seen on several fronts. There is a ground breaking ceremony set for today at the site of Lutheran Social Services new $4.8 million 50-unit apartment complex. The apartments are specifically designed to be homes for individuals and couples aged 62 or older who have limited incomes. This investment by the nation’s largest nonprofit housing provider, which funds its projects with state and federal programs, follows a much larger investment in the upscale St. Martin’s Village housing complex and that came on the heels of the mid-income Echo Ridge complex all products of the same organization. The for profit sector is growing in our city as well. Golden Living Centers, specializing in full nursing care, now operates four facilities in our city. Fountain Springs nursing home, once a nonprofit church-related facility, is now owned by Welcov healthcare, a for-profit corporation. Despite the statewide ban on new nursing home beds, investments in nursing homes in Rapid City in the past decade have been in the tens of millions of dollars. Healthcare facilities are investing in and banking on a growing population of seniors in our community.

All churches serve the place where we have been planted. And we are no different. We are called to serve a population that is, on average, growing older. It isn’t a depressing mission.

Serving our aging population gives us skills that are useful with all ages. With people coming to Rapid City to retire, the average length of membership in the congregation is shortening. We have to learn to say “hello” and “goodbye” more frequently than was the case when people joined the church and stayed in the same congregation for 50 or more years. Our society is more mobile. We need to learn to involve people in the congregation as deeply as possible in a shorter amount of time. We need to allow people who don’t know the whole long history of our church to be active in shaping its present. This skill is useful not only in working with seniors, but also in working with children and youth, who come to the church with their families and then move on to other communities when they become adults. Learning to greet new people and to say good bye in meaningful ways is an important part of serving our community.

Some people worry when they look at our congregation with all of the gray and white haired people. I see it differently. I see a vibrant congregation that is ideally situated to serve our community and that resists the urge to market to only part of the population.

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