Mother Churches

As the EC conversation continues to buzz more loudly in the ears of so many evangelicals, I think statements like this must be just as loud.

The unwieldy, old-fashioned church communities we've emerged from are like mothers--some supportive and helpful; others worn out, not well, depressed; all of them carrying a certain amount of history and baggage with them (because that's the price of growing up).  Of course we should grow up and do our generation's thing.  That's what parents want deep down.  But let's remember to be kind to the mother church--without her we wouldn't be here.

Maggi Dawn in Steve Taylor's The Out of Bounds Church?, page 56.

Comments

[Tim]

Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. - Titus 2:3-5

If the analogy holds, there are requirements on both sides. The older women are to teach the younger ones. I think the "love their husbands" is especially fitting in this analogy as Christ is the bridegroom.

[Steve McCoy]

Tim, I agree. I think Maggi does too because she says that some mother churches are "supportive and helpful." That's the ideal and biblical best, but it's not always that case, for mother churches, or older women in the church.