Perhaps you have heard of the pharmacological agent, Rapamycin. According to some, this drug works to delay a subset of age associated pathologies. To put it another way, adherents believe a small dose each week will increase their health span.

Some of us would like to increase our ministry span, but reality sets in. What we wish we could prolong has limitations. No matter our attempts to manipulate time, we cannot change the fact it remains a passing breeze that does not return. There is no “wonder drug” to slow time’s pace and elongate ministry.

In some cases, the end of ministry is a choice that is made for us (an inoperable disease, a family crisis). But for most, a time comes when we will have to decide. It is another defining moment, one initiated ultimately by God. Sooner than expected, we enter the third third, and if God wills, move into the fourth age of our lives.

The change can be relentless. As one put it, “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.” We begin to face one curve after another: health issues, family setbacks, closed doors, and lost opportunities.

In the latter season of life, the God who has summoned us and encounters us at core ministry moments will call us to reposition. Society uses the word retirement, but reposition is a better fit. God is setting the stage to take us to a new place in our lives. Like other seasons, the choices we make will determine the course and momentum of our future.

This was my experience when I chose to relinquish both pastoral and professorial duties. Purposes changed. Formal roles shifted. God may transition us into an emeritus role; he may call us into another kind of ministry (e.g. pastor to professor or pastor to writer; a missionary serving abroad). It could also be that he is leading us to devote our full selves to caring for our family.

The Challenges We Face

One of the first things we encounter at this stage is that there is no “theology of retirement.” There are few roadmaps for old age, and even fewer role models. It can feel like we are in a thick jungle without a guide. To use another metaphor, we are like a missionary sailing back to a home we have never known before.

Most of us are unprepared, in part because we tend to live in a state of denial regarding our mortality. It can also be that we have lived for our ministry career, and in such tunnel vision, age and God’s defining moment can catch us unawares.

What adds to the confusion is the pace of our aging. We all advance in years differently, both physically and spiritually. As one put it, “When you’ve seen one eighty-year-old, you’ve seen one eighty-year-old.” But even if we have aged gracefully and enlarged our capacity for discerning and choosing; even if it seems we are flourishing like the palm tree and growing like a cedar, staying fresh and green (Ps. 92:14), our pastoral life will come to a close.

Gradually, we all join the chorus of creation that groans. We begin to experience the fear the Psalmist felt as he approached his latter years: “Do not cast me away when I am old; do not forsake me when my strength is gone” (Ps. 71:9). We have been used of God and we do not want this to change. We shudder at the thought we are becoming irrelevant.

Having journeyed through this encounter, this is what I hear God saying.

Be Honest with the Evidence

When God meets us here, it is time to do a self-audit, one that involves an honest and penetrating assessment. Here are some things I am already noting. Immunity from infection and disease is lessening. I am catching more colds from parishioners. Loss of acuity in hearing is forcing me to ask people to repeat what they said. “Live long enough,” writes geriatrician Louise Aronson, “and eventually the body fails. It betrays us.” Our minds soon follow our bodies. We forget names, fail to recall where that passage is in Scripture, not to mention where we put those glasses.

Part of honesty is recognizing that with age is the diminishing of opportunities. We begin to see we are no longer the future. Those open fields that seemed limitless are reducing in size; those “dare to dream” speeches seem more appropriate for someone else. A day comes when our ministry will need a new and younger voice.

Finally, I must be honest with the evidence of outcomes. Hard as I try, I won’t—for the most part—finish the task. We pray for an epitaph similar to David’s: “He served the purpose of God in his generation.” But things will be left undone. The notion of getting it all completed is a fantasy.

Work Through Life’s Critical Questions

One of the clues that we are in this defining moment are the questions God begins to raise. They have been there all along, but we are now much more conscious of them.

• Have I spent my life trying to find my ministry only to realize my life has been used up entirely in the search?
• Has my life and ministry mattered? Have I lived out my years? Have I carried out that which is worthy of my calling?
• Is what I have been made for still out there waiting to be done?
• Am I still trying to hold on to what is gone?

Number What Days Are Left

Though our days are numbered, the psalmist encourages us to share in the act and add up our days (Ps. 90:12). Here, Moses exhorts us to count the years we might have and divide into parts the seasons that remain. Seize what moments we have left and squeeze out of them all the life available within them.

Like Moses, David was aware of his moments. In Psalm 39:4, he prayed that God would enable him to know his end, the measure of his days, and the fleeting nature of life. Some call this the spiritual habit of memento mori, “the disciplined habit of keeping death before us.” Paul urged the same, calling us to redeem what time we have (Eph. 5:16).

We must be attentive to the days because God knows we have a propensity to lose track of rather than mind the moments. James K.A. Smith refers to this as dyschronometria, the inability to keep time. We fritter away valuable minutes in aimless conversations or waste our moments hoping for a dopamine rush on Facebook. We can get lost in a temporal fog, losing sight of the fact that time waits for no one; it consumes choices left unmade.

Be Willing to Let Go

When we sense the moment is now and God is calling us to reposition, we must begin to release. It’s not easy. We are more enmeshed in our work than we realize. Letting go means coming to terms with a dream that will not come to fruition on our watch. It will involve surrendering both power and position, relaxing our grip on an identity that has defined us and given us a sense of importance and worth. It’s scary to let loose! We might find ourselves plunging into the abyss of insignificance.

Some years ago, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld researched fifty prominent CEO’s, all of whom faced this eventual void and needed to let go. Some acted like aging athletes who would not give up. Others yielded and left, but they could not bear giving up their professional identity, so they plotted their comeback. Others did let go. Their identity was not attached to their position. They mentored potential successors, stepped aside gracefully, and remained as trusted confidantes. Others served whatever term they were called to, achieved their goals, accepted succession, and broke ties to pursue new interests.

Pastors who emulate the first two categories will upend all of the previous good work. They fail to see that letting go, while hard, is liberating—for us and others. I have found this to be so.

Step Into God’s Greater Gains

Letting go of the past also requires that we lay hold of a different future. God is still summoning, but in this later season it is a different bidding. Those who yield may discover a different kind of gain, one that transcends the loss.

The Gain of Greater Self-Awareness

Stepping away from the intensity of ministry allows us time to gain clearness as to who we are. It sometimes takes years before we grasp our true selves. Removing the titles and achievements and responsibilities make room for attentiveness. For the first time, we might find ourselves down in the substrate, the deepest level of our being. It may be that we are becoming intensely ourselves.

This season of reflection presents us with the opportunity to consider the legacy we are leaving behind. Has my life pursuit been one of doing my duty or doing my thing? Has my ultimate authority been found in God’s Word or found within myself?

The Gain of Greater Wisdom and Understanding

As our time narrows and grows shorter, our time to explore expands. Freed from the demands of ministry, there comes greater availability, connectivity, and flexibility. We have the time to think more deeply about life and the questions stated above. Aging does not change the fact we’re always in a state of becoming.

With eternity increasingly in view, we gain a vision of what is on the other side of the fake promises we’ve bought into. We are less apt to chase fantasies and indulge in nostalgia (which makes for unrealism and discontent). As Parker Palmer puts it, “Age gives us a chance to outgrow the lying days of our youth.”

The Gain of Greater Competency

If we are listening to God in this moment, we may discover that a shifting season can be about expansion, not diminishment. It is a process of moving from realizing unexplored potential (younger years) to making sense of accumulated experience (older years).

We may misinterpret this defining moment and miss that our best years are still ahead. The accretion of ministry experience enables us to be more proficient. In some cases, the heart of our legacy may find expression in our latter days.

Some of us discover, in some ironic way, that years of preaching have enabled us to preach (when invited) with more confidence, creativity, and insight; years of working with elders have given us the wisdom we wish we had when we were in our forties; intense seasons of ministry have enabled us to be more effective mentors; and years of striving to win approval have taught us to worry less about what people think.

Maybe my brain is working in a more synchronized way now. We have progressed from the need for perfection. We have moved from concerns about what people think to caring less about what people think (to the realization they never were thinking about us).

When churches recognize this reality and take advantage of the asset of one’s experience, they are wise. Most of my colleagues are grateful to pass the work on to the next generation, but it doesn’t mean any of us want to be shelved. Who wants to fade away? Unfortunately, it is easy to marginalize, patronize, or treat older pastors as rusting obstacles, old horses put out to pasture.

This is the moment to take advantage of our knowledge, our experience, our resources, and our time. Chances are we have the most to offer in this season. Moses utilized his best in his third third. Everything before was preparation. The reality is our spiritual gifts and ministry skills do not wither with age; they atrophy with disuse.

The Gain of Greater Risktaking

In one’s latter years, you suddenly have this liberating thought—So what if it doesn’t work? So what if this new approach to ministry is radical? Viewing our latter years as a time to dial it down and play it safe is a copout. This is the moment to leverage what we have and who we are, and finish well. This is the time to run the last lap of the race flat out. Old age is another word for nothing left to lose.

It is up to our successors to lead the way forward, but maybe we can serve to embolden them. Encourage them to play the edges and let them know we will stand with them when they take the heat. We must. Our culture actively discourages the courage necessary to lead. Maybe with age and experience, we can—we should—be the church’s go for broke voice. Some may find it threatening—but so?

The Gain of Shifting from Doing to Being

In this defining moment, we soon realize it becomes less about what we do; it’s more important who we are becoming. To put it another way, this life stage requires not so much doing for God as paying greater attention to what God is doing in us. But it’s not easy. The act of doing is deep into our wiring; it’s unnatural to be still. We’re still not quite freed from the “factitious urgencies of earlier days.” We still chase after the next challenge. Jump on the next plane.

Wisdom calls us to recognize when God is calling us to escape the burdens that come with running a church, wrestling with budget shortfalls, putting up with toxic people, and traversing the earth to speak to faraway people groups. He may be summoning us to enter his rest. Recover lost time with our family, as well as with God. Aging gives those of us who are goal oriented the opportunity to become contemplatives. And this is a gain.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article serves to prepare you for this twelveth defining moment, one that is inevitable. Like the other moments, we need to lean into it and do it well. Hopefully, we will be as successful as we have been in other moments.

The challenges of decline, the searching questions, the hard decisions, and the mystery of it all will lead us to ask, “Who is up to this?” But just as we cannot hide from the other defining moments in ministry, we cannot hide from this one. Like Saul hiding in the baggage, we will be found out. We will have to step up and step out. The good news is that God still intends to journey with us in our latter years. The promise to Judah applies to us: “Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you, I will sustain you and I will rescue you” (Isa. 46:4).

John E. Johnson is an adjunct professor of Pastoral Theology and Leadership at Western Seminary in Portland, OR. He has served as a lead pastor for thirty five years, and currently is a writer working on his fourth book, as well as serving as an interim teaching pastor.