![\"Newbold](\"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/sitenews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/images_news-2019_Newbold_Diversity_Lecture_Sep_2019-4_edited.jpg\" "\\"Jennifer")
<\/a>The speaker asking that question was the youngest-ever Diversity Lecturer \u2013 Scottish anthropologist, Jennifer Logan.<\/p>\n“Anthropologists,” she said, “sit on the boundary \u2013 engaged enough to be able to know<\/em> and far away enough to observe<\/em>“. Logan\u2019s professional interest has been in the life journeys of religious people and how they \u2018make faith\u2019.<\/p>\n The study she described in this lecture focused on a group of older Seventh-day Adventists who had been employed by the Seventh-day Adventist church in a variety of different capacities: pastors and their spouses, teachers, aid workers, administrators, secretaries. In a series of intensive interviews, she had explored their views on faith, on life in the church and inevitably, on changes in faith from the perspective of old age.<\/p>\n Their challenge is intensified if there is loss of memory. In that case, community \u2013 in this case, the church \u2013 becomes more important than ever. “As you lose yourself, you rely on the community to give you back a sense of who you think you are and who you were,” she said.<\/p>\n So how did her interviewees think of God as they aged? Some saw God as a business manager or director, some as a God of justice, others as teacher, friend or a creative person. People reveal a lot about their picture of God in their accounts of “the ways they engage with God and with each other,” she said. Logan described this as a random rather than a systematic process which must make space for humanity. \u201cPeople make sense of God with as much mess as there is in other parts of life.\u201d<\/p>\n This one was no exception. People asked questions about methodology and confidentiality in a small community. Logan said that people had had the chance to “curate what they didn\u2019t want shared”.<\/p>\n There was a substantial discussion of pastoral identity and the difficulties of pastors being human with anyone except other pastors. Logan had found that some aging pastors have difficulty in coming to terms with who they are when they are no longer employed professionals.<\/p>\n<\/a>She compared retirees to teenagers coming to terms with themselves. “Old age is a time \u2018for reformulating yourself, for self-evaluation”, she said. She observed how her interviewees were changing as they aged and how they negotiated new physical and mental experiences. She described the process of \u2018self-actualisation\u2019\u2013 how they were putting together the pieces of their lives past, present and future to make meaning.<\/p>\n<\/a>One of the most significant adjustments is the business of coming to terms with your own death. For many retired Seventh-day Adventists, who had believed all their lives in the imminent return of Jesus, growing old was \u2018not meant to happen\u2019. “Making sense of the environment in which you find yourself now, is a challenge,” she said.<\/p>\n<\/a>At every Diversity Lecture someone says, “The Q&A was the best part”.<\/p>\n