I’ve Heard It Said That Motherhood Is a Woman’s Highest Calling
This article is part of the I’ve Heard It Said series.
Our Primary Family Is Eternal
I’ve heard it said that “motherhood is a woman’s highest calling.” And if you’re a woman in the church, I’m guessing you’ve heard it too—maybe at a baby shower, maybe at women’s Bible study, maybe from the pulpit. This is something we say inside the church fairly frequently, but I do want to encourage us to stop and think about it.
First of all, what’s true is that motherhood is so good. Motherhood was designed by God, and it’s a good gift from above. I love being a mom. I love coming alongside other mothers. I love being in groups of moms and just encouraging them to look at their motherhood through the gospel, how to raise their kids in the Lord, and to have joy in motherhood. I think that is a worthy endeavor.
But if we really pause to think about what our highest calling is, I just want to encourage myself and my friends to remember that it really can’t be motherhood. First and foremost, we are children of God. We are Christians, whether we’re man, woman, young, old, married, or unmarried. We are Christians. We are God’s children.
Cultural Counterfeits
Jen Oshman
Jen Oshman casts a vision for women to reject the idols of our age and find real hope in Jesus, embracing their identity in Christ and recovering his design and purpose for their lives.
And so our highest calling is to know God and to make him known. Or you might say it’s to love God and to love others. It’s to glorify God. It’s to know him and to share him with others. That’s our highest calling, whether we are married or single, mothers or not.
I think what many of us aren’t considering on a daily basis when we say things like “motherhood is a woman’s highest calling” is we’re maybe just not thinking about how that is hitting the ears of our sisters who are single or our sisters who do not have children. How does it resonate with them?
Without intending to, I think phrases like this make them feel like they are not fully mature or they’re not fully sanctified; or they can’t somehow lead, influence, or disciple inside the church; or that they are less worthy, less worthwhile than those who are married or who have children.
Our family in Christ is our eternal family.
So when I talk to my friends in that situation, what I find out is that “motherhood is a woman’s highest calling” is actually a phrase that has caused a lot of harm inside the church. And so while I do think it’s so good that the church has pushed against the secular perspective of family, marriage, and motherhood—the church has rightly said we want to protect marriages, we want to protect families and children and motherhood, we want to lift those up and cherish them and preserve them. That's good!
The church has rightly done that for decades and shouldn’t stop now. But at the same time, maybe we shouldn’t swing the pendulum so far that we put motherhood on a pedestal that God himself did not design for it to be placed upon. We have put this reverence and power—maybe even idolatrous thinking—on motherhood that, really, God did not create himself.
So what I think we’ve got to do inside the church is just remember our faith family, our family in Christ, is the family that’s eternal. That’s actually the family that is primary. We are siblings for all eternity because we are in Christ. Our families here on earth are actually temporary and maybe should be rightly placed as secondary under belonging to the family that we have in Jesus.
While I get the sentiment behind saying “motherhood is a woman’s highest calling,” I get that we want to protect motherhood and celebrate it because it’s hard and we want to be cheering for each other and we want to be valuing motherhood—I get that sentiment and I totally agree with it. But there is a downside to this phrase as well. So at the end of the day, I would probably give this phrase maybe a five, right there in the middle—valuing motherhood, but at the same time not putting it on a pedestal where it should not be.
Jen Oshman is the author of Cultural Counterfeits: Confronting 5 Empty Promises of Our Age and How We Were Made for So Much More.
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