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In the most recent issue of Christianity Today (May 2010), a number of people were asked about the wisdom of celebrating Mother’s Day in church. Here was my reply:

“Mother’s Day, even if it’s a good holiday and a good remembrance, is a consumerist holiday like Valentine’s Day. I think there’s a lot of good in celebrating motherhood, but I’d want to ask some further questions about how we order time in general. If Mother’s Day and a distinctively Christian holiday fall in the same day it might be good to honor both, to make sure we’re thinking through how we order our time and not simply catering to the whims of the consumerist culture we’re in.”

You can see a number of other replies, ranging from “absolutely, yes” to the “absolutely, no”.

(For the record, the church in which I currently serve does recognize the mothers in our congregation on Mother’s Day, as do most of the evangelical churches in our area. I am happy to celebrate Mother’s Day with my church family. Please don’t misconstrue my remarks as being anti-motherhood. I’m simply using  Mother’s Day as a launching pad for thinking seriously about how our churches order our time.)

Now… back to the question I posed in the title of this post. Many people wonder why we would even ask about celebrating Mother’s Day. The evangelical assumption seems to be “Of course!” Yet, if I were to ask about celebrating Pentecost, the Ascension or Jesus’ baptism, I suspect I would get some puzzled looks.

Should it not trouble us that “Of course!” is the default answer when it comes to a consumer holiday and yet it doesn’t even cross our minds to mark the historic celebrations of the Christian church?

I think the reason Christianity Today asked me to comment on this question was a post I wrote two years ago called “Earth Day or Easter? Mother’s Day or Pentecost?” You can read the whole post here, but here is an excerpt that might provide some food for thought:

Every church has a calendar. Whether the church chooses to follow the traditional calendar of the Church and preach according to the readings in a lectionary does not change the fact that every church has a way of ordering time.

The question is not, Will we follow a calendar? but Whose calendar will we follow? In other words, does our church’s ordering of time follow the wisdom of the ancient church or the whims of the consumerist American culture?

Many of our churches have a list of unofficial celebrations that order our congregational time.

  • New Year’s Day.
  • Valentine’s Day.
  • Mother’s Day.
  • Father’s Day.
  • Fourth of July.
  • Memorial Day.
  • Halloween.
  • Veteran’s Day.

By rejecting the traditional church calendar, we did not reduce the number of our celebrations; we merely replaced them with the celebrations of the culture at large.

Granted, churches do well to emphasize many of these celebrations. We can benefit from using the cultural opportunity to speak to the biblical vision of motherhood and fatherhood, etc.

But we should be willing to listen to the tough questions from those outside our culture about what our church calendars represent.

Why should the consumerist culture of the United States dictate what we celebrate as a church?

Why is it that so many American churches celebrate with great fanfare the birth of their nation (July 4) without even so much as mentioning the birth of the church (Pentecost)?

Does the way we order our time shape us as the unique, called-out people of God or merely reinforce our nationalist, consumer-shaped identity?

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