Mothering in Community & The Midwife Who Delivers Us All
God could have used any number of analogies when describing how His people were to relate to Him and to one another. But instead of a corporate hierarchy or military ranks, the most common metaphor used throughout the Bible is family. God uses marital language again and again to help us understand our relationship to Him. And our relationship to fellow Christians? We are mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, people united into a new kind of spiritual family. To best understand how to relate to one another in the church today, we are meant to observe the best qualities of healthy, thriving families in our midst.
Family life guides our understanding of love and sacrifice and how to work and learn together. In families, we see tons of overlap in the purpose and activities of those involved. In different times and seasons, everyone pitches in to help with daily functions from cleaning the dishes to planning a major move. Often, parents do more of the formal instruction and decision making, but in reality, we all learn from one another in myriad ways. Some seasons require “all hands on deck,” like welcoming a new baby (my soon-to-be reality) or gathering the harvest in the ancient world. And sometimes we settle into roles and chores that are best suited to our individual gifts and capacities—one usually takes out the trash, another makes sure the fridge stays stocked. In everything, the family is united under a common vision to love the Lord our God and seek flourishing for our neighbors.
This is the picture of household life that we should read into Titus 2, when older women are encouraged to teach younger women to be good workers in their homes. Women learn how to mother by watching the older mothers in our midst. This is both very practical, for those of us who learn about the ins and outs of childrearing from our church community, and also meant to be spiritually rich for every woman. The metaphor of mothering as a vision for womanhood asks us to observe physical realities of mothers to guide our engagement in the family of God.
This doesn’t always mean a prescribed set of functions, like standing barefoot in the kitchen (my current reality), but it does mean that no matter the task at hand—organizing finances, executing home renovations, or venturing into the workforce for paid labor—I do all of these things as a mother and sister. I do not shed my personal identity to plug into some kind of productive machine. I am free to be a woman. And the world is better off when I engage as my full self in this way.
As we conclude the series today on growing life, I want to look at one more feminine image of God in scripture. We have seen thus far how women image our creator through nourishing, housing, and nurturing life. Today I want to consider how the image of a midwife gives us an intimate picture of God’s deliverance and inspires the communal nature of mothering within the family of God.
In Psalm 22, David cries out to God a lament of feeling forsaken. He remembers the deliverance of Israel:
“In You our fathers trusted;
they trusted and you delivered them.
To you they cried and were rescued;
in you they trusted and were not put to shame” (4-5).
In perhaps a matter of days, I will cry out in the anguish of feeling forsaken. As my body experiences the unique sensations of labor, the feeling of being torn apart from the inside, I will weep and groan. I will beg God to rescue me and trust that He will not put me to shame.
And then, when the time is right, I will go into the hospital for delivery.
Before there were hospitals and epidurals and stirruped beds with collapsable ends, birth happened in the home, on a stool, with the help of a midwife. In the Biblical era, some estimate that half of all babies and up to 25% of women died during childbirth. So a good midwife could truly mean deliverance for mother and child.
As the Psalm continues, David describes God’s deliverance through the deeply personal lens of midwifery:
Yet you are he who took me from the womb;
you made me trust you at my mother's breasts.
On you was I cast from my birth,
and from my mother's womb you have been my God.
Be not far from me,
for trouble is near,
and there is none to help” (9-11).
Sometimes God’s deliverance looks like parting seas and slaying giants. But sometimes we experience His deliverance as the intimacy of a Holy Midwife, rescuing us from the clutches of bleeding out in our corrupted world. Where an earthly midwife is bound by the physical constraints of post-Fall broken bodies—a breech baby, placenta previa, and any number of other naturally-occurring and life-threatening birth scenarios—God has the capacity not only to attend to our labor as a source of comfort but also to determine its outcome. When the Holy Spirit is our Midwife, we can trust Him to bring forth new life even in the messiest circumstances. His deliverance is full and perfect because He not only died laboring on our behalf, but three days later, burst forth from the womb of the earth, resurrected, whole, and forever alive.
I often think about my spiritual sisters in this midwife role, supporting the labor process as the hands and feet of Jesus. They speak into my labor as a wife, bear with my labor in the professional sphere, and encourage my labor wiping down the dining table for the thousandth time. As beings designed for interdependence, we need this kind of community support to fight against the sin which clings so closely. Of course, brothers and fathers are an important part of full family growth, and their input is also essential. As allies in serving God, our partnership is what makes the family flourish. And yet, the influence of these women cannot be overstated. They are able to speak into some of the most personal spaces of our hearts, not just so we experience all the happy-clappy feelings, but because sin is there and sin will only bring forth death.
The support and deliverance of a midwife is intimate, but it is still death defying.
Until very recent human history, childbirth was exclusively the realm of women. When a woman’s labor began, she and the women in the household would call the village midwife or an older, experienced woman nearby, and gather behind closed doors to pray, perform rituals, and support the mother in bringing her baby into the world.
In other words, women rally around the laboring woman. And while God accomplishes this midwifery solo, in His complete and perfect power, we reflect it through collective strength.
Alastair Roberts offers some interesting assertions about the difference between masculine and feminine strength. (It’s a long, dense, and sometimes challenging read, but if you dive down that rabbit hole, I’d love to hear whether your experience agrees or disagrees with his conclusions.) Among his assertions is one that I find quite compelling:
“While men generally do dominate in positions of overt and direct public power and authority, women often exert considerably more indirect and relational power in their communities and societies.”
In fleshing out his descriptions of the male and female arenas of power, Roberts helps to explain why a society that requires complete adherence to either form begins to crumble. We need both the overt sparing of intellectual discourse that he attributes to the masculine realm, as well as the communal feminine power that prioritizes care, equality, and empathy. The incredible ways in which we can balance one another support a more holistic flourishing:
“If we are to make progress, it will not be through submission to raw and antagonistic masculinism, but in the prudent, careful construction of societies and communities of discourse that harness both male and female social strengths, while counteracting their respective weaknesses and dangers...Each sex needs to learn how to create a space for the other. While agonistic discourse, for instance, may represent a social location primarily created and maintained by men, chiefly operating according to male rules, it should not be an exclusively male location. Rather, men should hold this space open for women to learn this pattern of discourse and to bring their own strengths to this arena, while tempering men’s weaknesses. The same can be said of the more collaborative forms of discourse in which women can excel. Both of the sexes must become the appreciative guests and students of each other.”
If feminine strength has the capacity to either contribute to cancel culture or powerful hive protection, it’s worth examining how we wield that power. Are we using our mothering tenacity for God’s purposes or to craft a society in our own image, to our own advantage?
They say it takes a village to raise a child. To raise a little girl into a mother, we must look to a diverse village if we are to flourish in the powerful social skills that women can bring to the table. Our vision for womanhood must include women of all stripes because no individual woman reflects the full feminine Imago Dei. Both the naturally demure suburban housewife and the fiery single academic have much to teach us about growing our own maternal nature. In a thriving Christian community, we should be able to see and celebrate the ways in which all types of women demonstrate the complex and beautiful picture of support and deliverance that God embodies so perfectly.
We must harness our collective social strength as women to support and deliver according to the image of our Maker. Learning from one another, may we build a church that radiantly displays God’s character to all who sees her.
A Benediction
I hope that this series has cast a vision for your personal experience as a woman.
I hope it has uplifted the strength and value of the women in your community.
But most of all, I hope that it has inspired you to amazement in the Mothering God who nourishes, houses, nurtures, and delivers us all.
Growing Life Series
Part 1: All of Us | Part 2: Nourishing | Part 3: Housing | Part 4: Nurturing