iRetire4Him Show 157: If Moses Started at 80, Why Are We Stopping at 65?

Jim Brangenberg: Your retirement years can be 30 years filled with meaning and purpose as long as you connect your faith and your retirement days. Welcome to iRetire4Him. I'm your host, Jim Brangenberg. Please check us out online at iretire4him.com.

When you were 25, were you contemplating how God would use you when you turned 65? When you turned 65, did you lay out a 25 year plan for how God would use you in retirement? At 89, did you know how God would be using you at 89? Do you have a 41 year plan like Moses did when he was 79 years old, or will you make it to 110 like Joshua? We don't know the answers to all those questions, but we do know that when we retire, God's not done with us.

Bill Wagner's just that kind of guy who's done all that kind of planning and asked all those kinds of questions. At 84, he founded the Global Strategy Forum at Olivette University, and he currently chairs the Institute for Global Strategic Studies there as well. Let's catch up with Bill today as he runs through to his 90th birthday coming up real soon. Bill Wagner, welcome to iRetire4Him.

Bill Wagner: Pastor Jim, looking forward to it.

Jim Brangenberg: So Bill, most people in the church today believe that the American dream of retirement is biblical. How did you figure out that it was all a lie? That retiring and going on a 30 year vacation was just a strategy to steal, kill, and destroy.

Bill Wagner: I've always been convinced that you've got all these retired people and they're not doing a whole lot. And when I was in Albuquerque, I remember I had some older people at my church and they were in another church and they felt totally useless. They said that they like to have 'em come to the church because they give a lot of money, but they do absolutely nothing in the church.

And I just said when I get to that age of retirement, I'm going to start finding ways to use these people because they've got tremendous experience, tremendous intelligence, a readiness to serve the Lord, and so that's where I started working on this whole idea.

Jim Brangenberg: So let's take a step back a few decades. How had God prepared you over the first 65 years of your life for the work that you're doing now?

Bill Wagner: Jim, I've had a fascinating life. I really have. In fact I even wrote a book and the title of the book was From Classroom Dummy to University President. I have dyslexia. I've had dyslexia all of my life and I barely made it through grade school without having to repeat the classes. I was in the bottom 10% of my high school graduating course, and I went in and got a degree in engineering. And one reason why I did was because I was good with numbers and also my father was the head of the engineering department at University of New Mexico, so I became an engineer.

And I did get my degree in engineering. And then the next thing I knew, I went to seminary and got a degree in seminary. Then I got another master's degree, I got two doctor's degrees and just kept going. But I have actually written more books than I have read in my entire life. I just do not read, period.

And, so what it is, I feel like God has been preparing me. He's made me very practical and given me a lot of opportunities to be a practical individual. So I've really appreciated that. But one thing that happened when I was very young, when I was about 21, 22, and I was doing evangelism work as a youth evangelist, I said, what am I gonna do when I get old?

And I said when I get old, I'll just be an evangelist among the older people. I'll be an evangelist among anybody that I'm working with. I had a life insurance agent one time that said , the effective area of your ministry will be with those people that are 10 years younger and 10 years older. That is the area. And so as I've gotten older, I have changed the people that I'm working with. And now I'm working with people that are somewhere between 80 and a hundred.

Jim Brangenberg: Wow. I love that attitude and the fact that you were thinking of it as a young guy, Hey, my life's really not gonna change when I get older. I'm just gonna have a different audience. But the audience kinda moves with you because I've seen that in, in my own stuff. But it is still, you're, you still have to have peers, people that you hang out with that or still looking at your attitude going, Bill, I don't understand. Why aren't you just going on vacation?

How do you explain to your peers about your attitude for how you're spending your retirement years and how that's more of a biblical attitude than what they've been adopting? Because a lot of them sold their houses and moved to Florida, Arizona, and went on vacation for 30 years. How do you explain, what are these conversations like for you and your peers?

Bill Wagner: Actually, I've just always been active. I just, I have just never stopped. And the conversation very seldom comes up. People don't ask me about it. They just accept who I am and what I'm doing and then I always turn the conversation back to them and say, what are you doing for the Lord? And i've been amazed that sometimes I can encourage them to be more involved with the Lord.

Jim Brangenberg: Yeah. My wife and I lived in Florida for 20 years, so we lived around a lot of retirees who were really struggling to find meaning and purpose. You're in the Dallas area where there's a lot of retirees - in Texas, all over Texas.

Do you ever have a chance when you're having those conversations with them, when you ask them, Hey, what are you doing for the Lord? Do they ever say I'm retired, I can't do anything? Do you ever get pushback? Because a lot of them have been told by their local church that they're really, they don't have anything for them to do.

Bill Wagner: No, I just don't give 'em the chance to do that. They don't tell me that. One of the things I've been doing lately, Jim, and I was in California and I noticed all these older people in the church and they were not being used. And so I started a senior lead old fashioned revival in my church in California, was very successful.

And then I came to Texas and I started one in one church, and that was successful. And I have another one coming up in my church now. And what it is, I get all of the senior citizens that are in the church and they're in charge of all the committees and they're in charge of going to the senior citizens homes and the assisted living homes and getting them to come. Everything like that.

And I'm putting these people to work, doing the work they used to do because all of these people grew up in a time when they used to have revivals in the spring and the fall in the churches, and they used to have testimonies and everything. And the type of music they had was this old fashioned hymns. And so we're doing exactly that now, and they have really enjoyed it and they've appreciated it and they've enjoyed being used for the Lord.

Jim Brangenberg: So the books that you've written, have you written specific books on retirement?

Bill Wagner: No. None whatsoever.

Jim Brangenberg: I have, and I wrote it alongside my 89-year-old father-in-law, and we'd like to invite everybody to go out and check out getting a copy of iRetire4Him. Maybe you wanna give it to 'em for helping them start off their new year as they contemplate retirement this year. Get a copy of iRetire4Him for your friends - you could choose audio, digital, or paper copies as well as a PDF format.

Go to iwork4him.com/bookstore for all of the different details iRetire4Him - a book that I wrote alongside my 89-year-old father-in-law who wrote about the stories of how he was living out of the faith in his retirement. Get a copy of iRetire4Him and start changing the lives of those who are contemplating retirement all around you.

Alright, Bill, so let's talk about the Institute for Global Strategic Studies. What's its mission?

Bill Wagner: Okay. I'm a missiologist, Jim. I'm not a theologian, I'm a missiologist. I'm an international missiologist. Both of my doctor's degree are in missions. And so I was saying, why is it that some groups are growing and some are not? So I studied seven groups and they were the they were the Jehovah Witnesses, the Southern Baptists, the Assemblies of God, the Mormons, the Muslims, the homosexuals, and what I call the cover organizations, the World Council of Churches, the World Evangelical Association, and the Sun Movement.

Why are these groups growing? And what I discovered when I studied Islam and by the way, I've written a book on Islam, how Islam plans to change the world, but I studied, I found out that the Muslim missiologists divide their strategy into three levels. They call it a micro, a meta, and a macro level. Now for us, micro would be personal evangelism and church planning.

We do that, we do a good job as evangelicals at that level. The meta would be where we create unions and conventions and associations and universities and seminaries. This is where you're working at a larger level, and we do a good job at that level. But the macro is where you are changing the society and where you are planning to change the society.

And there's only three groups that actually work at the mega level of the seven I study. They are the Mormons, the Muslims, and the homosexuals, and they have been very successful. So I said, why don't we as evangelicals call together mega thinkers? You are mega thinker. You don't think in terms of just saying I'm gonna go out to my local church and win people to the Lord. You're saying, how do I reach the whole retired community?

This is thinking at a mega level and sometimes mega thinkers are put off on the side. They're not really appreciated as such. So I'm bringing all these people together and I brought together about 120 from 26 different countries, and we have these meetings where we just sit down and say, what can we do?

Let me give you one very brief, quick idea. I don't wanna preach here, but the homosexuals, up until 1990, they did not have a strategy in place. And then in 1992 homosexual professors from Harvard University wrote a book entitled After the Ball and they said, we are going to change the American perception of Homosexuality and we're gonna change the society. And so they wrote all their strategy down on this book, and if you wanna find out how they changed it, here it is. They tell us what to do. The only problem is if you wanna buy that used book now it costs you about $400. They don't want people to see it.

But one of the things they did, they said, where is their money and influence in the American society? It is in the corporations. How do we influence the corporations? You don't go to the CEOs because the CEOs at that time were not sympathetic to what they were advocating. And so they said, we will study the board of directors of all of the major corporations until we find one homosexual or one person sympathetic to our cause.

On the board of directors, we will create a beachhead until we influence another board member, until we take over the board, then we can use that corporation for our agenda. They took over Disney, they took over Ford, they took over General Motors. They took over many of the major corporations in America that began to advocate for their cause. And this is what I'm saying. Why don't we as evangelicals think a little bit differently so that we might be able to do some greater work for the Lord?

Jim Brangenberg: Because people have been told - I believe the answer to that question is people have been told, Hey, business is evil and it's a necessary evil and stay outta governments, stay outta politics, when in fact all of those missiologies that you've described, the Muslims, the Mormons the Jehovah Witnesses the LGBTQI plus community, and you said one other one - they all understand. You gotta get all the way to the top. You gotta influence from the top down. You gotta build a control policy. And that's what's amazing.

So how does this apply to the 40 million retired believers in this country right now? How do you activate them? Because just imagine if every one of them knew that their work, now their retired years ,mattered? That they could change the world? We do have a president that is 80 years old.

Bill Wagner: I must admit, Jim, that that's why I'm here with you now. I have not given a lot of thought as to how the older generation can be involved in the mega missions. That's your job now. We'll have to have more contact on that and find out how we can do that. But I think there are ways that we can do it, but as to how we're gonna do it, I'm not sure. Right now my senior led old fashioned revivals is working just simply at the micro level.

Where we're bringing just these individuals, maybe we could develop some type of a system whereby we could have these type of revivals all over the United States to use senior citizens and to get them involved once again, because there's a large number of senior citizens that are gonna go into eternity without Jesus Christ.

Do you realize that there's two groups of people that we lose the most rapidly among evangelicals? Young people between the ages of 18 and 22. We have a lot of groups working with them. And the older people over the age of 55 and, frankly, nobody's working with them because as you say, they're retired. They're not going to be very useful in the church. And so what we need to do is say, okay, how can we mobilize them to be more involved in the proclamation of the gospel? Let's do it.

Jim Brangenberg: Well, and I think it goes beyond just the proclamation of the gospel to the living out of the gospel, because it's the kingdom part that a lot of retired believers have never been taught, that they can bring the kingdom to earth and then when they're retired, they're actually fully funded missionaries. They could go wherever they need to go. They don't need to worry about making a paycheck.

And what's amazing, Bill, is that there's so much wisdom in the people 55 plus. I like to go 65 plus. If you look at the wisdom that's capped in that, those generations, what a shame it is that stuff's not being passed on to the next generations.

I know you just, you made a comment as we're connecting up for this. You don't like, technology's not your best friend. But technology allows us to impact more people today than ever before. I have conversations all the time with people in other countries because of technology and to be able to share that stuff.

So how do you see any of your peers, people 70 to 90, pouring their lives into that tech savvy generation of the Gen Zs and the millennials? Do you see anybody being intentional about pouring their life into them?

Bill Wagner: One thing I didn't mention, I'm gonna take a step back. On the Global Strategy Forum we determined that there were 12 cultural building stones for any culture. And so we divided the culture into 12, what we called mountains, they were art and theater, technology, government, sports, music politics... we've got 12 of these and one of them is technology. And so we have one person that is very sharp in the area of technology and so we will have to get together with that person and say, start thinking about the older generation.

How can you do that with technology, with the older generation? And this person knows technology and so all we can do is inspire them to move further in that area. So to come together and to share and to challenge will be our next task.

Jim Brangenberg: And speaking of technology challenges, Bill, a lot of us are having problems with our computers 'cause there's constantly enemies trying to get into our computers. That's why we partner with SaferNet. You see it on my tv, behind me.

SaferNet.com is a company that's a kingdom company that absolutely wants to make our computer time productively delivered. They take care of web filters and antivirus and they take care of getting us out there on the internet with a VPN so people can't see where we're going and what we're doing. SaferNet's a great partner with iRetire4Him. We invite everybody listening to check out SaferNet online safernet.com. That's SaferNet.com.

Bill, can you imagine a time where the church wakes up to this huge idea that they've got all this biblical wisdom and all this spiritual maturity on the sidelines? And can you imagine a time when we can get those people off the grandstand and back into the game? What would our country be like if retired believers could be mobilized again?

Bill Wagner: I think it's a tremendous task, and Jim, I am thrilled to death that the Lord has called you to do that. I'm greatly impressed with you, and you will be invited to our next conference for the Global Strategy Forum to represent the older generation.

Now, how that's going to be done, I am not overly optimistic because in most churches the older generation is not appreciated, and I'm not entirely sure how we can do that. When I started these senior led old fashioned revivals, the seniors were very excited about it. The younger generation were accepting of it, says, we better let the old people have something. So how do you change this? I'm not entirely sure, but we need to work on it and find out what we can do.

Jim Brangenberg: I think we need to change it by just doing it. When you look at the spiritual maturity - how many years have you been a believer?

Bill Wagner: I've been a ordained minister for 81 years.

Jim Brangenberg: Okay. 81 years. So you started following Jesus as a 9-year-old.

Bill Wagner: No I started following Jesus as an 18-year-old, and I was ordained as a 19-year-old.

Jim Brangenberg: Okay. All right. So we had a little math problems, so that'd be 71 years, not 81 years. 'cause you're not 99.

Bill Wagner: So 71. I'm sorry.

Jim Brangenberg: No, that's okay. I'm like, oh, wait a minute. That's why I went to nine instead of 19. All right. So you've been following Jesus since you were 19 years old. Imagine what you have learned about following our Lord in those 71 years, and then you multiply that by 40 million retired believers who have been following Jesus from one to a hundred years or whatever it may be. When you unleash that wisdom, that spiritual knowledge, on the next generations, they could learn... think how many mistakes could be avoided if people would just start listening to people that are chronologically superior to them.

Do you have any of your friends that people that you hang out with that are looking for ways to put that wisdom, that spiritual discernment into action? Besides you, you've got your peers, but do you have other people that you hang out with that are like, Hey, I've got something to offer here?

Bill Wagner: Not really, Jim. The challenge has not gone out really for this group of people at this point. I think that's one of the major things we're gonna have to do. One of the foundational stones we're gonna have to build to begin to challenge them to say, what can you do? Now my Sunday school teacher that says I'm retired now, he retired two days ago and he says, I don't know what I'm gonna do with myself. And I thought, you don't know what you're gonna do with yourself? You are a wise Christian leader. You can do so much. And so I have to talk to him on a private basis and encourage him.

Jim Brangenberg: Yeah, get him a copy of iRetire4Him and get him on the phone with me, let's get this guy going. Let's kick him in the rear and go, Hey - because Bill, that's the issue. So many people know what they're retiring from, but almost nobody knows what they're retiring to.

So Bill, you've spent the last 25 years of your retirement being active and vibrant in the kingdom of God doing things all over the country. Do you have some words of encouragement for those listening today that are going, Hey, I wanna be like Bill, I wanna be at 90, running really hard?

Bill Wagner: One of the things that I've done, Jim, is two things and I'll talk about both of these.

One of them is I studied Joshua and Moses and both of these guys were 80 years old when they began their ministries. 80 years old. And they both worked until they were 120. So they had 40 years there of very good work at this particular point. And so I've always felt like I've got 30 more years to go before I can pass on because I wanna be like Moses and Joshua and these guys started at that age.

And so I think that many of our older people can start at this age. But one of the things that I tell my people is this, my older ones, is this: is that if I wanted to really be the person I think that God wants me to be, I would say I need to pattern my life after somebody. And so what I did is I said, I wanna pattern my life after somebody. Who do I wanna pattern after?

I wanna pattern after Jesus. And so I thought in Jesus. We know about his birth, we know about his ministry from 30 to 33, but we know practically nothing about his growing up right until the age of 30. Except we've got one Bible verse in the Book of Luke where he says, "and Jesus grew in stature and wisdom and favor with God and man."

And these were four areas. And so I have used these four areas in my life and every two months, I come back and evaluate my life and say, how am I doing in these four areas? And I use these with older people too. I say, even though you are old, you need to be active in all four of these areas. And they are wisdom, academic- you need to continue to learn and to grow. I continue to, I don't read books, but I still learn a lot from a lot of different areas. You need to be very active academically.

Stature. You need to run. I won't wanna brag, but I've run about three times around the world now and about two years ago they had a West Coast Masters track meet out in California where they had all these masters. And so I ran in my age group and we could only enter five events. And so I walked away with four golds and one silver at the age of 88. And I keep my body in good shape and therefore it is still going. So you've gotta have academic and physical and social - social is so important - favor with man.

And I tell these older people, that's why we have church. That's why we have our Sunday school, our life groups, so that we can have this relationship. And that's why you need to go out to the senior citizens homes and to visit older people so you can build a personal relationship with other people too. Many of our older citizens become couch potatoes and they sit at home. They have to be active socially.

And then the fourth one is a favor with God. Spiritually. They have to continue to grow spiritually. And some of our older people have been very great spiritual giants in the past, but they've let the spiritual life go. There's been no more growth in that area. So I say for our older people, be involved in all four of those areas if you wanna be like the Lord.

Jim Brangenberg: Wow. Bill, there's so much we can cover today, but we have covered a lot and I'm grateful. , And maybe this has gotta be a, maybe we'll have a future conversation about how do we work this together to motivate and mobilize?

Because there's so many, we're talking millions of retired believers all over the country, and that's not including all the people that are quote unquote retirement age around the globe. But Bill Wagner, thank you so much for being on iRetire4Him today. Thanks for sharing a little of your story. Thanks for those words of encouragement for our listeners, that's grateful to spend some time with you today.

I'm gonna close out the show and hang on 'cause I'd like to talk to you after we're done recording. You've been listening to iRetire4Him with your host, Jim Brangenberg. In this retirement phase of life, we all want our lives to be full of meaning and purpose. So in the end we can say, iRetire4Him.