Mother's Day - Women In Ministry And In The Church

Mother’s Day Message - Sunday, May 9, 2021

Message on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1aGQ1B_CpA4?t=10

Happy Mother’s Day!

We’re so glad that you have joined us today as we celebrate moms today specifically and women in the church in general.

Today we are celebrating Mothers. We are doing that because, honestly, we have huge respect for Mom’s. We love our Moms. We honour and pray for you, because being a Mom is a high calling, and it is among the most challenging things, in a good way, that a human can undertake. There can be enormous joy in motherhood.

Our daughter Elia became a Mom last year and absolutely loves it. She and hubby Stephen want to have more. There are no words to express our joy at our grandson Stevie. Motherhood is fun, and it is exhausting. Motherhood is full of love, and it is full of barely any sleep.

Motherhood is full of receiving joy from her child, it is full of endless, draining self-giving that doesn’t pause. Motherhood is a thousand other joys and a thousand other loving sacrifices, and like I said, today we celebrate and honour our mothers.

Men can only second-hand at best appreciate all that goes into being a Mom, although being a Dad for sure likewise has its unique challenges. Fathers - you and I will have to wait until Fathers Day to talk about that.

So we are celebrating Moms today. And I thought that today would be a good time also to look at the role of women in the gospels and in the early church. Now, that could easily be a 12 part series, because women played a large role in Jesus’ ministry.

PPT: Women in the Bible

Whether we’re talking about the women who funded Jesus earthly ministry - Mary Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Chuza, Susanna; and many others, who we find listed in Luke chapter 8, or the women who showed up in the gospels as friends of Jesus, Mary and Martha in John chapter 11.

Or if we’re talking about women who were respected servants of Christ, and leaders in the early church - Priscilla, Junia, Tryphena and Tryphosa, Paul’s dear friend Persis, Rufus’s mom who Paul says was like a mother to him or any number of other women - there’s a whole lot of women who were key in the church and in Christ’s earthly ministry.

Let’s consider for a few moments just a few of the women in the Bible and in the early church who had a great influence on the growth and development of the church.

PPT: Happy mothers Day Banner

First let’s consider the ministry of Jesus. Jesus’ included everyone, male and female, in His ministry. He ministered to men and to women in equal measure. And He ministered through men and women. When you think of it this was a powerful witness to the early church of God’s original design for a mutual partnership of women and men serving and leading together.

In every way, usually against cultural norms of the day, Jesus created a new community of people around Himself that showed harmony and participation between the sexes.

In order to really understand this, and how significant it is, we have to consider something very important about the lot of females, the standing of women in ancient cultures; we need to do this if we’re going to be able to grasp the extent of Jesus' strong affirmation of and inclusion of women in His ministry.

In ancient times, women were considered property, something owned by another, always a male. Property of who? At first they were property of their fathers. Then the ‘ownership’ of the female would transfer to the person who became her husband. That’s as good as it got for women.

There is a lot more detail that I could go into about the profound inequality of women in general in Jesus’ day. Frankly, that detail is just very depressing. The poorest of the poor, the most vulnerable, were widows and then orphans. In those days, the culture was such that if a woman was not “owned”, they were completely powerless and subject to the worst life can offer.

This is perhaps why the Bible defines “true religion” or authentic faith like this in James 1:27: Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

So I think that when we keep that background in mind, the very low status and respect that was given to women in general, it will help us to understand the VERY different way that Jesus treated women, included women, gifted women and empowered women.

We have time today to look at just 3 of the many women that Jesus called to Himself as disciples and who played a key role in Jesus ministry. First off, we have Joanna.