“You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the LORD” (Leviticus 19:32).
Last week I had the privilege of attending board meetings for the Advent Christian Village (ACV) in Dowling Park, Fla. During the meetings, I was struck by how countercultural the ministry of ACV really is. We live in a world that puts a premium on youth and vitality. People spend billions of dollars every year to push back the hands of Father Time trying to maintain their fleeting youth. The message is clear – old age is an awful thing to be avoided at all costs.
One of the terrible side effects of a culture obsessed with youthfulness is that it often neglects and ignores the elderly and the infirm. As writer Greg Morse puts it, “The youthful, the innovative, the beautiful, the YouTube sensations, the celebrities and professional athletes receive our admiration. The enfeebled, the mostly spent, the hard of hearing and seeing and walking do not.”
But just the opposite is the case at ACV and our other ministry to the elderly, Advent Christian Retirement Communities (ACRC) in Vernon, Vermont and Kittery, Maine. Both these ministries not only offer a broad range of care to seniors; they honor them because they are seniors. In a culture that sees the elderly as burdens or irrelevant, ACV and ACRC see the elderly for the gifts of God they are to the church and the world, and they honor them as such.
ACRC and ACV offer a continuum of care from independent living to skilled nursing care. And both have been repeatedly recognized for the professional excellence with which they offer that care. But what sets them apart from other nursing homes and retirement communities is that Jesus and the gospel of grace are foundational to who they are and to everything that they do.
Both organizations seek to minister to the whole person, prioritizing spiritual well-being. The love and honor they show the elderly is a wonderful example of living out of the truth of the gospel and the hope of the resurrection. ACRC and ACV remind us all of the Lord’s admonitions to honor and prize the seniors in our midst. I, for one, am very grateful for their faithful legacy and example.
As someone who hopes to achieve elderly status one day (even though my teenage son thinks I have already achieved it), I am very thankful to be part of a denomination that is so countercultural in valuing those whom much of society seeks to discard or ignore. Please pray often for Larry Knowles, president of ACRC, and Craig Carter, president and CEO of ACV, and their staffs. Both continue to build a faithful legacy of honoring and serving the elderly and both are worthy of your support and prayers.
To find out more, visit them at www.acvillage.net and www.adventretirement.org.
2 Responses
Gracious thoughts, Justin…thank you. It’s pretty noteworthy that a relatively small denomination like ours maintains such a proportionally sizeable ministry to seniors through ACV and ACRC. And as anyone who lives or works at those locations knows, it’s a joy to serve those who “still bear fruit in old age.” (Ps. 92:14)
ACV and ACRC are two of the best ministries of the Advent Christian Church.