Yes, Time waits for no one or no thing.  Everything ages, if it lives.  This means that we need to be aware of the seasons of life and to be prepared to celebrate these seasons of life with people at every stage on the way.  In a church which has a wide variety of ages of its people, you do that pretty much all the time.  If you are a church with a large group of people/families who become a part of the church when they are young with young children, you have the joy of watching the children grow up and the parents grow into more mature adulthood.  Then if the families stay with you longer, you can see the children become adults, marry, go to work, and begin to raise their children in the church.  The cycle begins again.

If the children and their children move away to a different city or state, then you are left with the older folk who remain from the original group, and you have those persons from the community whom you are able to reach.  In all, you have an older church.  In an older church you tend to reminisce.  You remember when the children were still a part of the church family.  You remember when they started to school, then when they started to date, when they went off to college, and then when they got their first jobs.  You remember when they married and began having their children.   Those are precious memories, and if you let them, they can keep you stuck in the past and not functioning in the present.  Older churches must realize that time marches on, and so must we.  If the young folk have moved out of the community, we cannot make them return.  We can, however, take seriously the people who have moved in and who are in the community now.

To minister to the  people who are in the community now may require some serious changes and adjustments.  Not everyone is willing to make those adjustments.  If, for example, you have always thought of your church as a young church, to think of it as an older church represents a significang change in thinking and in acting.  Older people need to be reached just as younger people do.  Older people  can minister to others very well if they are motivated and trained.  You can even minister somewhat to a different ethnic group which may have moved in to the neighborhood.  Again, much prayer and thought must precede the action.  You may need to get help and further training in order to minister with any degree of effectiveness to the new group in the neighborhood.  But if you can do that and stay viable, it will be worth it.  The church which refuses to change anything will quickly realize that it won't survive for  very long.  So, as we affirm that time marches on for everyone, including churches, then we who are a part of these churches must march on, also.  We must adapt, age gracefully, and minister in ways that are appropriate for those who are our neighbors at every point along the journey in the community.