After nearly 40 years of ordained ministry, I am entering into a new phase of life known as retirement. When people discovered that June 30 was my last day on the job, and after they congratulated me, they then asked me what I intended to do in my retirement. And I confess that I sort of struggled to answer that question. In part I wanted to ask them, “Isn’t the idea of retirement that you are not supposed to “do” anything?”
I have the sense that when people ask me what I want to do in my retirement, what lay behind their question is whether my life will contribute something positive to the world. “Will you have a ministry assignment?” a university president asked me. “Will you write?” others inquired.
Now, many do lead impressively productive lives when they retire. My father took his pension at the age of 55 when his corporate life was no longer fulfilling. He proceeded to become a home-building contractor, and then he rehabilitated a laundry business. When he “retired” the last time, he took up a ministry to troubled boys serving time in a juvenile correction facility.
Other examples include former board chairs of Wycliffe College. They essentially took on unpaid staff positions and donated skills and expertise that the college could never have afforded to buy. Is this, then, what retirement is? An exchange of one set of obligations for another? Having the time, or even the duty, to become a volunteer?
Of course, retirement as we experience it is largely a modern phenomenon. In the pre-modern world, people typically worked until they were unable to continue. An interesting exception to this is the Jewish law regarding Levites. Numbers 8 says that those who served in the Tent of Meeting were to retire at the age of 50, but that they may assist their colleagues. That is to say that while they were excused from the labor of tending to the demands of worship (the rabbis thought that this was chiefly singing), they were still valued for their wisdom and knowledge.
In the period of industrialization, people began working in factories, and the older workers grew, the less productive they became. At some point they became a liability. In Germany, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck introduced the first state pension in 1889. The retirement age was set at 70, but the state rarely paid out because the average lifespan was more like 45.
It wasn’t until after the Second World War that life expectancy (for middle-class workers, at least) increased to the point that retirement became a norm. While there is no mandatory retirement in Canada, census data indicates most people retire at 65. Today, with an increase in longevity, many countries are raising the retirement age—for most it is 66 in the States and soon it will be 67 in the United Kingdom.
Now, this dynamic between age, productivity, and the viability of pension plans points to the two matters that most shape our view of retirement: work and mortality. If there is such a thing as a Christian view of retirement, perhaps it should grow out of a consideration of these two things.
Regarding the first, we should remember that work is a vocation. At the creation of the world, God fashioned human beings in his image, and he put them in the garden to till it and keep it (Gen. 2:15), and in our work we participate in God’s care for the world. St. Paul calls us co-workers with God (1 Cor. 3:9). This means that our worth is not defined by productivity, title, or salary, but by our faithfulness to Christ’s call to love God and neighbor. Retirement is not an exit from this vocation, but a transition within it. In retirement I may have ceased to work for Wycliffe College in any direct way, but I have not surrendered my responsibility to serve the gospel.
The idea of retirement as the individual achievement of society’s drive for a “leisure culture” is not, in the end, Christian. Retirement should be embraced as a calling. Those who are retired have precious gifts of time, experience, and insight that are of great value in the mission of Christ’s Church.
While retirement is a vocation, it is also an acknowledgment of human limitation—physically, mentally, and emotionally. I am particularly aware of this at the moment. There is a lot that I miss already about college leadership. It was a privilege to serve with so many great staff and faculty colleagues, and it was an honor to be a part of such an important Christian organization.
But in many ways, retirement is a gracious release from the unrelenting demands and intricate challenges of institutional life. There was a time when I would rub my hands with excitement at the prospect of tackling a complex issue. Over the years, that zeal has been quietly eroded by the slow fatigue that often accompanies long service. In the end I no longer rubbed my hands but rolled my eyes!
So, retirement is a way of admitting that we are, despite the titanism of our youth, finite creatures. But if retirement is a vocation, we ought to receive it graciously and greet it as a new stage in our personal and spiritual growth. And the image that this suggests to me is that of sabbath.
Sabbath, of course, is the weekly or yearly pattern of rest that God instituted in creation and in his covenant with Israel. God honored it by blessing and hallowing it, and by resting from the work of creation on the seventh day. His directive to his people was that they also should observe the holiness of the day by resting from their labor. One of the major indictments leveled at the Israelites in the latter part of their history is that they had desecrated the sabbath by conducting business as usual, instead of observing the day as a time of worship (Neh. 13, Jer. 17).
In 1880, Harvard University established the principle of the academic sabbatical, in which every seven years a professor was permitted to take a year away from teaching and administration to do research. Last autumn, Wycliffe granted me my first sabbatical. It was a glorious time of rest and study, and it was deeply nourishing to my soul. But I vividly remember a moment of sitting in the University Library at Cambridge, when I was surrounded by books and the sun was streaming in through the window, when I thought, “This is what retirement could be like!” I have since been imagining retirement as a kind of research leave, and I intend to spend a portion of my days reading, reflecting, and writing.
And this brings me to my final thought. In Scripture, sabbath is described as a foretaste of the everlasting rest promised in Christ (Heb. 4:9-11). Is it too morose to suggest that retirement might be approached as a period of preparation for our deaths? One of the last college events I attended was the funeral of a former faculty member, David Demson. After lecturing for nearly 40 years, David retired in 2001. Since 2007, he had been teaching a couple of courses per year for Wycliffe in systematic theology. When he fell ill just after Easter, I visited him in ICU. While the prognosis was not good, one of the things he wanted to discuss was what course he should teach in the fall.
David was not a workaholic, and he was not one of those fellows who had to keep working for financial reasons or because he wouldn’t know what to do with himself otherwise. It was that he loved teaching and he loved theology and, although he would not have used these terms, I think teaching theology was for him a way of leaning into the eternal purposes of God and of sharing his hope for resurrection.
Perhaps that is what retirement should be for all of us. When I asked a retired insurance company president, an actuary, to help in my retirement planning, he began by pointing out that, actuarially, I would be around for another 11½ years, and that Fawna would survive me by another 10!
Retirement marks an end, but is not The End. Maybe the chief vocation of retirement is to press on toward the eternal purposes of God and nurture our hope for resurrection. This takes work. But we are, after all, mortal creatures, and Genesis also reminds us that work will be a part of our existence until we return to the dust.
The Rt. Rev. Stephen Andrews, PhD served as Principal of Wycliffe College, Toronto (2016-2025) and Bishop of Algoma in the Anglican Church of Canada (2009-2016). Previous appointments also include President of Thorneloe University College, Principal of James Settee College for Ministry, and Dean of Saskatchewan.
