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No Country For Old Men - The Emergent Church and the Elderly Written by Doug Jackson   John O’Keefe, in an otherwise excellent article entitled “Image or Imagery,” describes his ideal emergent congregation. In addition to a killer website and coffee-house seating, he notes, “Best of all, the only blue hair in the place was on the tips of the worship leader’s spikes.” I hear and read a great deal about the inclusive nature of the postmodern worldview, but the “only” in John’s sentence makes me nervous about the extent to which genremandering marks much of the emergent church movement. The modern church demanded uniformity, and more or less tolerated the young as they followed their dyspeptic path through the denominational digestive system, eventually emerging as fully conformed grown-ups with short haircuts and dark suits. Hardened nonconformists were simply excreted. I fully acknowledge the justice of Leonard Sweet’s remark, “We like one type of blue hairs (60+), but not another (30-).” As the old cliche has it, however, the oppressed make the worst oppressors, and I believe the worst thing that could happen is that people could truthfully say of the postmodern church what Yeats, in “Sailing to Byzantium,” said of western modernity: “That is no country for old men.” In fact, given the worship style generally associated with azure mohawks, we might include the later line, “Caught in that sensual music all neglect/Monuments of unageing intellect.” Or, to put it more succinctly, Leviticus 19.32 still applies. Does postmodernism require that we write off the elderly, or would pomo inclusivism demand that we embrace them? In fact, I would argue that a strong feature of modernism, with its obsession with efficiency and product, was a rejection of old age. By contrast, ancient cultures embraced age as a sign of wisdom: one was no longer valued for what one could do, but for what one knew. I am aware it creates some real train-wrecks with the whole worship style thing (as an ex-modern pre-post-modern pastor, believe me, I know all about the balancing act!), but again, isn't the genius of postmodernism its willingness to wrestle with community instead of seeking the good of the largest constituency. Or will we simply agree, to return to Yeats, that “An aged man is but a paltry thing/A ragged coat upon a stick”? Two stories might help move us forward. The first story concerns the fact that my home state of Texas is considering rescinding the fifteen dollar bounty on coyotes. The government originally offered this blood money on the premise that these varmints had over-populated, leading to predations on the stock of ranchers, encroachments on urban areas, and the spread of disease. Recent findings, however, indicate that the bounty might be the cause, rather than the cure, of such problems. The theory runs, in part, like this: hunters tend to kill adult males as the most visible target. This leaves the pups with no one to train them in the intricate skill of hunting wild game. As a result, they gravitate to the easy pickings created by human habitation: calves, sheep, domestic pets, and the contents of garbage cans. Result: more coyotes with greater dependance on humans. To paraphrase Yeats, when the Panhandle becomes no country for old coyotes, the adolescents make trouble for themselves and everybody else. The second story comes from my own congregation. M. C. and Esther Klare, an elderly couple in our church, have been married for over fifty years. A few years ago, Esther went suddenly blind from macular degeneration. That summer, our senior adults took a trip to Branson, Missouri, where no doubt they listened to music many of us would not tolerate at gunpoint. They returned late on a Sunday afternoon planning, because they are senior adults, simply to disembark from the bus and go straight to evening worship. (Skipping church was not, of course, an option.) A few minutes after they arrived, several of us were standing in the sanctuary when one of our men, a classic example of an arrested-development Boomer, wandered in with an awe-struck look on his face. "Do you know what I just saw?" he asked us. "M. C. Klare is in the fellowship hall painting Esther's fingernails. They don't have time to go home but she doesn't want to come into church not looking her best and she can't see to do it herself, so he's in there painting her fingernails." I’ve told that story from the pulpit more than once. Just the other day, on his website, my sixteen year old son (who wears black T-shirts, combat boots, and jeans decorated with Officer Negative patches, and does not have blue hair only because my wife and I had to draw the line somehwere) was posting his replies to one of those on-line surveys. To the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" he responded, "I want to be an old man who paints his wife's fingernails because she's too blind to do it herself and doesn't want to go to church not looking her best." Both as parent and pastor, I would tolerate any amount of organ music to purchase that lesson for our youth. Blake’s narrator, frustrated in his search for a mentor in the modern west, announces, “And therefore I have sailed the seas and come/To the holy city of Byzantium.” That line, combined with the ageism we see in much postmodern praxis, might go a long way to explain the sudden resurgence of Greek Orthodox Christianity: people really are sailing to Byzantium. If those of us in the free church tradition wish to be true to our postmodern propaganda (to say nothing of our Bibles and our teenagers), we must find a way to pray, again with Yeats’ narrator, O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul.