Before Helen Leddy moved to Shell Point Retirement Community in Fort Myers, Fla., last year, she got the lowdown on the place from her best friend, Judy Burget.
Ms. Leddy, 86, wasn’t interested in leaving her condo if it meant adopting one part of the culture Shell Point emphasized on its website: “If you go online, you see they’re built around religion,” she said. As a Unitarian Universalist who grew up Jewish, Ms. Leddy was concerned that the denomination that founded Shell Point, the evangelical Christian and Missionary Alliance, might promote values that did not match hers, and that her new neighbors might proselytize. Ms. Burget, who has lived at Shell Point for six years, told her that wasn’t going to happen.
Faith-based communities like Shell Point, which was established in 1968, generally don’t insist that residents subscribe to the religion that shaped the communities, according to Katie Smith Sloan, the president and chief executive of LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit providers of aging services. Instead, residents have come to expect different kinds of benefits, and the religious aspect, which was once a meaningful calling card, is now often seen as just another effective marketing tool, like on-site beauty salons or golf pro shops.
Like other continuing-care retirement communities — developments where people over age 55 can live independently and then move to higher levels of caregiving when needed — Shell Point encourages residents to find their mid- or late-life groove in any number of ways. Here, a meandering pedestrian may be honked off the road by a golf cart driver hurrying to the woodworking shop, a photography or pottery class, a personal training session or a show at the 44,000-square-foot arts center.
Ms. Leddy, who recently attended a pizza party in her building, said that gatherings at Shell Point “generally start with a blessing, and maybe there’s a blessing at the end.” Otherwise, acquaintances toss off the occasional “God bless.”
About 56 of the 200 largest continuing-care communities in the United States are faith-based, according to Ziegler, a financial company that specializes in senior living. A majority are sponsored by Christian or Jewish organizations, and most faith-based communities are nonprofits. They are competing for a customer base that is not only graying, but attending church services in declining numbers.
That has led to what amounts to fancy footwork among some of the market’s major players, said Eloise Tweeten, the founder of Tweeten Eldercare Advisors, a company that matches families with retirement communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Faith-based communities “are doing a bit of a dance,” said Ms. Tweeten, who has been advising older people for 17 years. Her father chose to move into a Lutheran-based community in Madison, Wis., in the early 2000s; today, a similar community might call itself Lutheran-inspired. “They don’t want to limit the population that moves in, so they have to walk this line,” she said, adding that “to sustain growth, they’re focusing not so much on religion as philosophy” — like pacifism or progressivism.
That is evident at Enso Village, a new community in Healdsburg, Calif., that several of Ms. Tweeten’s clients toured recently. The community, which will hold a ribbon-cutting in June, is a collaboration between Kendal, an East Coast retirement community operator founded by Quakers, and San Francisco Zen Center, an organization of Zen practice and retreat centers that has public programs and provides housing to some practitioners.
Susan O’Connell, 76, started dreaming up Enso in 2006, when she was a resident at the Zen Center. She lives at Enso now. “I didn’t want to age in the ways that I saw were available, so I tried to create something,” Ms. O’Connell said. “And I found out that a lot of people had my same ideas.”
The Zen Center formed a partnership with Kendal after the two organizations assessed where Quaker and Zen values merge. “Quakers sit in silence and, as they say, wait for the still voice within to arise,” Ms. O’Connell explained. “Of course, in Zen, we meditate.”
Openness and ethical conduct are shared values, too, she added. But like other faith-based communities, Enso is open to everyone. Quaker, Jewish and agnostic residents have welcomed Sufis and Christians to the community, which has an on-site garden and teaching kitchen, a meditation hall and organized volunteer outings. Regardless of religion, “we’re all seekers,” Ms. O’Connell said.
They are not all baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, but the values associated with that generation seep into retirement communities, Ms. Tweeten says. She recalled that a client who recently toured Spring Lake Village, a Santa Rosa, Calif., community with Episcopalian roots, was sniffing around for cars with bumper stickers that might signal conservative values. “He wasn’t going to move there if he saw signs of people not being politically liberal,” she said. At Enso, Ms. O’Connell noted, marketing materials have included images of peace signs and a vintage Volkswagen bus.
HumanGood, a nonprofit that runs 19 faith-based continuing-care retirement communities across the country, was founded by Baptists and Presbyterians in the 1950s and still identifies as faith-based. But its director of spirituality, Sharell Shippen, said it would be a mistake to think of HumanGood as a Christian community. “The way we see spiritual service has evolved,” she said.
At Rydal Park, the company’s campus in Jenkintown, Pa., a majority of residents are Jewish. A rabbi is on site on Friday evenings for Shabbat, but there is also a priest for Catholic Mass on Sundays. A HumanGood campus in California held a Wiccan service at a resident’s request. And the spiritual needs of agnostic and atheist residents — a presence in all HumanGood continuing-care communities — are not overlooked, either. “If spirituality for you is a nature walk, we’ll walk alongside you,” Ms. Shippen said.
Choosing not to participate in HumanGood’s spirituality programs is also an option. “You can engage or disengage,” Ms. Shippen said. As at Shell Point and Enso, there is still plenty to do.
The variety of leisure opportunities and amenities often translates into hefty entrance fees and contracts that can seriously dent a grandchild’s inheritance. According to the nonprofit National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care, the average upfront entrance fee is about $450,000. And that’s followed by a monthly maintenance or service fee of several thousand dollars. Faith-based communities are not necessarily cheaper. Though some acquired their land from a religious foundation, not many get funding from the church that shaped them, said Ms. Smith Sloan, of LeadingAge.
Residents have to qualify financially before they can move into a continuing-care community, and then pay high entrance and monthly fees, but if the community is a nonprofit, they may not have to worry about being kicked out if eventually they can’t pay their bills. Dee Pekruhn, LeadingAge’s director of life plan communities services and policy, said that if residents “outlive their resources,” the communities “often have an affiliated foundation established to pick up those costs.”
Bob Dawson, 74, and his wife, Gretchen, toured several communities in Florida before choosing Plymouth Harbor, an interfaith community on Sarasota Bay, in 2018. Its website once trumpeted “the dream of the Reverend Dr. John Whitney MacNeil,” the Congregational minister who founded the community in 1966, but those references were recently removed. ”I felt that we didn’t need that passage,” said Plymouth Harbor’s president and chief executive, Jeff Weatherhead, adding that “while it was his dream, it took much more than that one man’s dream.”
The Dawsons paid more attention to the financial viability of Plymouth Harbor and the community’s friendliness and amenities when they were planning to move. “We plan to live here the rest of our lives, so we needed to make sure that in return for our money, it will be able to take care of us,” Mr. Dawson said. He is not particularly religious, but it’s OK with him if his neighbors are. Mostly, they don’t talk about it.
“Do we feel constricted or constrained or directed by a religious agenda here?” he said. “No, not at all.”
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