Dean of Sydney Phillip Jensen has called Mother's Day the perfect time for honouring mums at church.
"[This] Sunday our community celebrates Mother’s Day again. Let’s invite all our friends and neighbours to bring their mothers to church so we as a society can honour our mothers, praying with thankfulness to God for the women who have given us so much," Dean Jensen says.
Dean Jensen cited the universal significance of motherhood to humanity as a reason to be very thankful to God.
"For many people, she is the first person who loved us " and the person who loved us the longest and the deepest," he says.
Dean Jensen acknowledges that in a fallen world "not all motherhood is so idyllic'.
"Some mothers are negligent and uncaring and others oppressive and controlling. Sin can mar any person and any relationship," he says.
However, Dean Jensen marvelled at how little sinfulness destroys the profound connection between mothers and children.
"A mother’s love can still be a byword for right relationship. For mothers are so often self-sacrificial in their devotion to their children."
Dean Jensen says one of the saddest consequences of humanity’s sinfulness is the inability of some women to have the children they wish.
"The unfair distribution of the affects of sinfulness makes childlessness particularly painful," he says.
"Be it the failure to marry the right man or the medical difficulties in reproduction " the grief of not having children can be intense."
The Dean also wants to protect the dignity of motherhood.
"The last part of the twentieth century was so negative about mothering that many women felt discouraged and demeaned. But motherhood is too fundamental to human existence to be relegated to second-class for very long," he says.
"In a fallen world like ours…it is important that we honour our mothers. The best way to do that is to give thanks to God for them and pray for them."
