This coming Sunday is Mother’s Day, which likely means that you and/or your worship team will be expected to honor moms at some point in the service. This is a great and important thing to do. Chances are also good that you and/or your worship team are planning to acknowledge all women in attendance as many churches have come to recognize that motherhood has many expressions.

However, we need to be aware of how the role of mother is presented throughout the whole service. Asking all women to stand and giving them a round of applause is a nice gesture, but if everything else in the service lifts up the stay-at-home biological mother as the ideal… Well, that round of applause intended to communicate, “we honor you,” begins to sound like, “nice try.”

This doesn’t mean we can’t honor the traditional image of motherhood. I am so grateful to have had a stay-at-home biological mother who taught me to read before I started school, chaperoned most of my fields trips, and made sure I got to baseball and band practices on time (among countless other things I need to thank her for). Any story I tell from my own experience is going to highlight this expression of motherhood, but I will want to make sure that I explicitly acknowledge and give thanks for other expressions as well.

The single mom. The working mom. The adoptive mom. The community mom. The grandmom mom. The women who couldn’t have kids. The women who chose not to have kids. The women who have lost a child. The women whose kids aren’t poster children.

Being United Methodist, I will direct you to our denomination’s page of Mother’s Day worship resources. In particular, there is a Litany for Mother’s Day by Pastor Julio R. Vargas-Vidal from Puerto Rico that recognizes motherhood in many forms.

UPDATE: The good folks from the Pulpit Fiction Podcast also have a great page of Mother’s Day resources.

Image by Flickr user Jim Ray. Used under Creative Commons License. Cropped from Original.