The Church as Our Mother | Happy Belated Mother’s Day

This week, I just wanted to pause in order to honor mothers, truthfully, to honor women. I have been blessed to have many powerful, loving, and dynamic women in my life. From my mother, an excellent preacher and storyteller who God has used to travel the world bringing healing and the goodness of God as she goes. To my cousin, who is an OG in the Vancouver Hip Hop scene, a prolific emcee, and one of the reasons I found myself rockin' mics as well. I could go on and on about the women whom I have seen elevate everyone around them, leaving a wake of flourishing behind them.

Even though we are a few days past Mother's Day, I want to say happy Mother's Day to all of the mothers—past, present, future, and figurative. In the words of Tupac Shakur, "And since we all came from a woman [and] got our name from a woman." Shakur's words are a reminder that we must be thankful because women are the ones who bear, carry, and nurture life into the world, from Eve to the woman who bore you. They become the unveiling of another world beyond the dominator culture that imagines and practices violence as the only solution. They are the apocalyptic cataclysm that ends one world and brings forth the one hidden behind the violence. From the midwives in Egypt, to the women of the early Church, to the Civil Rights movement, and even now, women continue to be on the front lines of liberation and life.

"The metaphor of midwifery is an alternative metaphor to the sort of militaristic 'band-of-brothers'—let's take this city for Christ!—metaphor for mission. Midwives don't deliver babies, they attend births, hold the space, help open doors, and nurture the birthing process."

—Christiana Rice & Michael Frost, To Alter Your World

When we change the metaphors we use, we change what we imagine to be possible. For too long, the Church has been held hostage by metaphors of war and triumph. The biblical text holds many metaphors for the Church, and perhaps we have neglected some of the most life-giving among them, such as the Church as the midwife of new creation.

Before the Church was baptized by the empire, it was common for Christians to refer to the Church as their mother. This past weekend, I had the honor of preaching at a local expression of the Church called Resonance. At the end of the gathering, one of the elders of the community invited all the women to the front to honor them for the many ways they embody motherhood. As we prayed a blessing over these women, I was deeply moved by the image. Seeing them standing there together was a powerful reminder that women are often not just the ones who have carried the Church forward. Their faithful presence is itself an example of what it means to be the Church. If the Church is our mother, it is only because women are the exemplars who reveal the cruciform reality of the Church.

Women have faithfully testified to this reality throughout the history of the Church. One of the things that I have learned from and been inspired by within the Black Church tradition is the way women in the community are honored as Church Mothers. In the Black Church tradition, the title of Church Mother signifies the faithful presence of women throughout the history of the Church. It reaches back to the language of the early Church and the faithful witness of women at the foot of the cross and at the tomb. They are the only ones to see Jesus both die and be raised to life. They are the first preachers of the resurrection. Without them, we would have no testimony of the empty tomb. Without them, we could not hear the last words of Jesus on the cross.

So perhaps when we struggle to understand the role of the Church, or our role in the Church, we should ask:

WWWD?

What would women do?

How have women historically carried communities through grief, violence, survival, nurture, faith, and care?

What might the Church recover if it paid attention to that witness?

So, we need more women leading, not just in the Church, but in every facet of society. We live in a world that constantly slides back into violence. Dominator culture is violent, even when we experience momentary reprieve. Women have often borne the highest cost of that violence, just as they have so often carried the heavier burden of peace.

This year, I learned something new about the history of Mother's Day. Julia Ward Howe and Ann Reeves Jarvis organized Mother's Day as a protest against the violence and degradation that claimed the lives of too many children. Jarvis saw the violence of the Appalachian mountains being strip-mined and the poisoning of the people sustained in the mountains' bosom. Howe saw those dying in the Franco-Prussian War as her children being robbed of life. But dominator culture has a way of assimilating and pacifying resistance. With the stroke of a pen, Woodrow Wilson transformed Mother's Day into a recognized national holiday. The day was laid bare, strip-mined of the resistance and protest that birthed it. The founders have all but been forgotten.

But Mother's Day began as a voice in the wilderness testifying that another world is possible.

Women do not just deserve liberation and justice; they are perhaps our greatest hope for helping bring both into being for all of us.

Happy Belated Mother's Day.

Head | Heart | Hands

Head (Insight & Understanding)

How does the witness of women throughout Scripture and Church history reshape the way you understand the nature of the Church itself?

Heart (Emotion & Experience)

Who are the women whose faithful presence has helped carry, nurture, protect, or transform your life and community?

Hands (Embodied Practice)

What would it look like this week to embody the kind of life-giving presence women have so often modeled, a presence that resists domination and helps another world become possible?

Benediction | A Blessing for the Journey

May you honor the women whose faithful presence has carried life into the world around you.

May you learn from those who remained at the cross, bore witness at the tomb, and proclaimed resurrection before anyone else believed it possible.

May you resist every form of domination that strips life, memory, and dignity from the world.

And may you become part of the unveiling of another world hidden behind the violence of this world.

Amen.