Every Tuesday, Rev. Jed Hollenbach drops in at Good Samaritan Community Covenant Church in Valley Springs, California, for half an hour of Mexican Train dominoes. He keeps careful track of his record.
“I’ve won two games, which I’m very proud of,” he says. “But the competition is fierce.”
His opponents are members of Time for Seniors, a weekly gathering LaManna started at the church about three years ago. On Tuesday afternoons at 12:30, eight to fifteen people show up for conversation, a chair-exercise video, snacks, and dominoes.
“We do a lot of laughing, talking, and we really get to know each other,” LaManna says. “We kind of feel like family.”
Valley Springs has fewer than 4,000 people, and for years older adults had nowhere to gather. “We have a lot of elderly people in our community,” Hollenbach says, “and their world just gets smaller and smaller and smaller.”
LaManna and her friends used to travel to a senior center in another town. “We kept saying, ‘Why can’t we have something like this in Valley Springs?’” She and two of those friends tried a few ideas, but they couldn’t find a place to meet.
Then, during her morning devotions, the same thought kept coming back. “I read my Bible every morning, and it was on my mind: ‘Go to the church. Go to the church,’” LaManna says. “For months it just wouldn’t leave me alone. It’s something I just had to do.”
When she finally brought the idea to Hollenbach, he told her it sounded good and said he’d take it to the church board. He remembers exactly how she pitched it. “The first thing she said was, ‘I’ve been praying about this for an extended period of time. This is what I think God is asking me to do,’” he says. Then she explained the plan: get together and play games.
“As a pastor, I listened to that and I thought, Really, that’s what we’re doing?” he says. “It didn’t seem like there was much vision attached to it. But I trusted that God was going to be in the middle of it.”
The format really is simple. The group talks first. Then LaManna plays a fifteen-minute chair-exercise video set to soft music. She used to do chair exercises herself and still follows along online at home. “At our age, we need it,” she says.
After that comes the game. LaManna has a closet full of options, but the group picks Mexican Train every time. Everyone brings snacks, and there’s a break to eat them. They celebrate birthdays, and sometimes they go out to lunch together. Hollenbach says the group has also started a kind of show-and-tell, with members bringing an object or an article that stands for a season of their lives.
Apart from one couple, everyone in the group has lost a spouse. “We all pretty much live alone,” LaManna says. Some live with dementia. When members can no longer manage on their own and move in with family or into care, the group feels the loss.
Anyone can come. “It doesn’t matter what church you go to or even if you go to church,” LaManna says. One woman who has been coming for three years recently started attending Sunday services at Good Samaritan, and she brings her 106-year-old father-in-law.
Hollenbach has watched this happen more than once. “It took about a year, but then all of a sudden, the people who were coming to Time for Seniors started showing up at our church on a Sunday morning,” he says. “That was really beautiful.”
He says some of the best ministry he does all week happens between turns at the table. “I let my guard down with this group,” he says. “We tease each other, we give each other a hard time, we connect. Maybe for an hour, they just play games, but then in the middle of those games, there’s a really great conversation, and there’s actually some really good ministry that happens.” One afternoon, he says, an off-the-cuff remark, the kind he would normally wish he could take back, opened the door to a tender ministry conversation he never saw coming. He says God used it anyway.
Hollenbach thinks back to advice a mentor gave him when he was a young youth pastor. “Ninety percent of ministry is just showing up,” he says. “I think that’s what God’s helping me to discover again.”
Time for Seniors grew out of Lamplighters, the church’s senior group, which began as a traditional Bible study led by a teacher. When the church set a goal of getting 80 percent of the congregation into small groups, the Lamplighters changed formats. Now they talk through ways to apply each Sunday’s sermon. “It’s much less informational, and it’s much more formational,” Hollenbach says.
Hollenbach recently baptized a woman whom one of the Lamplighters had invited to help with the church’s coffee and cookies ministry. The two got to talking about faith, and the Lamplighter went with her to the new members class. “That’s the big tree that Cathy’s group grew out of,” Hollenbach says. “Without the Lamplighters, without their spirit, without their growth, without their energy and excitement, this ministry would have never happened.”
He sees the same thing across the congregation. “Good Samaritan has definitely lived up to its name,” he says, “because we’re a church that stops for people who are broken down on the side of the road and reminds them that God sees them, God loves them, God is with them, and God is for them.”
Asked what she would tell a small-town church hoping to start something similar, LaManna keeps it short. “You have some games, find out what it is that they like, and that’s it,” she says. “You don’t have to direct it. You’re just part of it.”
The group has changed how Hollenbach thinks about senior ministry. “When I was younger, I was not expecting really deep, rich ministry to occur with a senior group. I sold them short,” he says. “It’s been a real gift just to be with these people week after week after week.”
“There’s something about the group where you just relax, be yourself, and enjoy being together,” LaManna says, “and playing the game.”
