It feels like yet another retail gimmick as shops replace ‘Valentine’s Day’ with ‘Best Mum’ cards and pink bouquets of flowers. Companies offer ‘unsubscribe from Mother’s Day emails’ options while pubs encourage ‘Sign up for a Sunday roast – give Mum the week off!’

This Sunday in the year marks a beautiful celebration of mothers. For those of us with great mothers, it’s a chance to thank them for all that they have given us – safe places to grow and learn – and to celebrate that these women echo some of the beautiful picture of motherhood painted in the Bible.  It’s also a day some of us find hard, as we mourn the people we miss, the people we longed to become, or a series of disappointments.

The of this celebration is not some cosy idyll of family life, but Mothering Sunday. This was the Sunday in Lent when people were given holiday to go back to their ‘mother church’, the place where they had grown up, and spend time with family and their faith communities.

When I look back at the little Baptist Church in New Zealand where I grew up, I have lots of memories of playing on balconies (including the forbidden condemned balcony), laughing with friends, and learning memory verses. It was a safe and nurturing place to be a young disciple of Jesus.

Those first months and years of faith are shaped by the people around us. As we see an uptick in people coming to know Jesus up and down our country at the moment, I wonder how we are ‘mothering’ people in the early days of their faith.

How do we make a safe home to mess up, to read Scripture, and to learn to be disciples? How do we help equip them for all the challenges of following Jesus in a way that is relevant to all of their life?

Paul’s writing to the Colossian church inspires me: ‘We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all God’s people’ (Colossians 1:3–4). Let’s thank God for these new believers as we welcome them into the church. Let’s pray that our churches become ‘mother church’ to many more people who don’t yet know Jesus.

Jo Trickey
Jo is a Church Advocate at LICC and writes regularly on family life, women, and theology for Connecting with Culture.