Rethinking Retirement Dreams

Excerpts from Silver & Bold by Steve Richardson with Maxine McDonald. Follow the link to read the whole book (login required).

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I live in Florida, where many people come to fulfill their retirement dreams of endless sunshine and leisure. Almost 5 million Floridians, more than a fifth of the state’s population, are over the age of 65. And while few people actually achieve a care-free retirement, Western culture insists we deserve one as a reward for a lifetime of hard work.

No doubt there is some truth to that, but for people used to productivity, the allure of a permanent vacation often wears off after a few months. The typical anecdote involves an annoyed wife desperate to get her cranky husband out of the house. Boredom and lack of purpose are a real problem for a lot of people who step away from busy lives. From executives missing the adrenaline rush of high-stakes business deals to professors pining for an audience, not everyone finds the kind of retirement they envisioned to be fulfilling. Purpose and productivity are hardwired into us, no matter our phase of life.

While the aging process is as old as the Garden of Eden, the idea of retirement as a work-free stage of life is relatively recent. For most of history, people worked as long as they physically could as a matter of survival. The Industrial Revolution changed the employment landscape. In the 1880s, Germany’s Otto Von Bismarck is credited with introducing the world’s first government-sponsored pension system for workers over 70. Labor unions, urbanization, and rising life expectancies in prosperous times reinforced the idea. Retirement gradually became a Western ideal and an integral part of the American Dream.

I’m not suggesting retirement is bad. There is something legitimately attractive about an extended season in which we have the freedom to set priorities on our own terms. It’s an amazing privilege. I am suggesting that these societal developments offer us opportunities for thoughtful, biblical stewardship over a significant segment of life, including our most precious assets—our time, skills, relationships, and resources. It’s a season to reorient ourselves for renewed focus on eternally strategic priorities.

Is it a time to explore new opportunities?

If you’re already retired or counting down the days, you may have opportunities to be more intentional and global minded. And if retirement feels unlikely or still a long way off, this invitation is for you, too. Maybe you’ve entered an in-between stage, with an established career and no young children at home anymore. You might think you’ve already aged out of global missions, but I doubt that’s true. I invite you to consider investing your next five, 10, or even 20 years, should the Lord bless you with the time, in cross-cultural missions.

The Bible gives no indication that at a certain age, we stop being useful to God. According to Scripture, long life brings wisdom. If you have reached or are approaching retirement age, your relationship with God may have weathered many storms. Gifts like experience and perspective come with gray hair. So, view retirement biblically with lifted eyes. Start dreaming. If the corporate world doesn’t need you anymore, that’s okay. You’re needed just about anywhere on the globe you can think of, and in many places you probably wouldn’t think of.

Same song, different verse.

Does the idea of becoming a missionary at this point in your life sound completely random? I admit, setting out on an adventure of this magnitude in your 50s, 60s, or 70s isn’t common. But it isn’t really new. At Pioneers, we’ve always welcomed people of all ages. Our founders started the organization in their late 40s after a successful business career.

The new development for us as an organization is a deliberate emphasis on recruiting people who have already established a career, raised their children and even formally retired. We’ve done it before, but now we’re doing it on purpose, at scale.

Another aspect of the new-but-not-really dynamic is that, if all goes well, missionaries who start out young stay to grow old. Early in my time with Pioneers, our average age for a missionary was 27. Now it is 45, which means we have hundreds of people in their 50s, 60s, and beyond.

If you decide to join us, you might not meet many other people in your orientation program or language school who have gray hair and opinions about blood pressure medicine, but once you connect with a team and ministry, you’ll soon find yourself in good company. Many missionaries will show you photos of their grandchildren at any and every opportunity.

If you’ve walked with the Lord for many years, presumably ministry isn’t all new, either. You’ve probably shared the gospel, facilitated small group Bible studies, taught Sunday School, or encouraged friends in their relationship with the Lord.

Much of missionary life consists of activities just like that. Giving your testimony in a new language is different, but the story of what the Lord has done for you remains the same. Your small group might be divided by gender, sitting on the floor in a tent, but you’ll still pray for and encourage one another. The children you encounter might speak four languages and read from right to left, but the Bible stories won’t change. And your friends might have unfamiliar names, outfits, and perspectives, but the God you point them to will still be the same.

It may not be as hard as you think.

Although the idea of becoming a missionary over age 55 isn’t really new, it has become newly possible for a lot of people. We can travel in a wider variety of settings for more years than previous generations. The environment for missions is also much more broadly accommodating of members of the body of Christ than it used to be. For example, you don’t necessarily have to sell off all your possessions and move away for years at a time. Trips home are faster, easier, and cheaper than ever before.

You also don’t have to learn advanced linguistics and decipher an unwritten language. Schools, dictionaries, and translation apps make communicating in many of the world’s languages, at least at a basic level, relatively easy.

Many countries now welcome visitors from the West with advantageous exchange rates, retirement visas, and inexpensive healthcare. None of that makes missions easy at any age, but it does make it possible for a lot more of us.

The growing accessibility of missions to a broad swath of the Christian community sometimes generates skepticism. Will the quality of ministry suffer if we start sending all kinds of people as missionaries rather than just seminary-educated “professional Christians?”

Clearly, we need trained and skilled missiologists, ethnographers, theologians, and linguists to tackle challenges and guide the Church in effective ministry. At the same time, I believe we need a lot of laborers for the harvest, and not all of them need to be expert “agriculturalists.”

Normal, everyday Christians now have opportunities to participate in ministry in ways that used to be possible for only a few. If you are a normal, everyday Christian, welcome to the wild and wonderful world of global missions! God has promised to redeem people from every culture and place. If you follow Him, you’re invited to be part of that grand adventure. Are you ready to join Him, along with many other faithful, bold, and silver-haired saints?