Terry Philpot (“Golden age for silver years”, 3 May) rightly highlights the positive aspects of the dramatic growth in the proportion of older people over the next two decades. But if older people are to provide much of the social glue which holds us all together, this will entail adjustments in attitudes and resources for which the Church is presently ill-prepared.Growing Old Grace-fully, an initiative of the Diocese of Leeds, recently brought together more than 70 people (mostly of retirement age) from parishes, religious orders and organisations across the diocese, together with academics and researchers, to look at “Loving our older neighbour in the twenty-first century”. The day explored some of the positives and negatives of older age, health issues and