When motherhood changed my church life.

“I never missed one service with any of my kids. I was right back in the church pew after I gave birth,” one older lady from our church proudly told me shortly after I became a mother. What she didn’t say, but absolutely meant, is that having a child is no excuse to miss church or stop serving in church ministries. She wasn’t the only person to say something along those lines to me.

Before baby, I was VERY involved at church. I was part of pretty much every ministry, I taught Sunday school with my husband, and I was on two worship teams. I felt like I was really serving God by being involved and “using my talents” at the church. I even worked in the church office for a year. It was the only church I had ever belonged to and so many important milestones had happened there; it felt like my home away from home. 

Without really intending to do so, I was basing my “success” (for lack of a better term) as a Christian on my frequent church attendance and my over-involvement. My faith and my relationship with God were heavily intertwined with my level of commitment to the church. 

During my pregnancy, we had just moved to a new community in a different state and we were a 35-40 minute drive from church (when there was no traffic). We decided to cut down our involvement to Sunday mornings only, so I dropped out of serving and leading worship in youth on Wednesdays. As I got into my third trimester, I was having trouble standing for service and couldn’t breathe well, so I also stopped singing in choir and dropped off of the Sunday worship team. By the time we had Spencer, the only involvement we had outside of just attending was that we were still teaching Sunday school (only because a replacement hadn’t been decided on yet). 

I had every intention of getting back to church as soon as possible, but it wasn’t as easy as other people had made it seem. He was cluster feeding almost nonstop the first several weeks, and my life revolved around breastfeeding. I was hesitant to take my newborn to a very touchy-feely church during the winter with so much illness going around. I was nervous about people wanting to hold him and pass him around. I went through a very emotional phase where I was just scared of everything (more than usual), and leaving to go anywhere would give me extreme anxiety. Not to mention I had had a very hard labor and an emergency c-section, so I had trouble even moving around for a few weeks. 

I think Spencer was 4 weeks old when we took him the first time. Since it took over half an hour to get to church, and we went over an hour early because of our class, it meant we were out of the house for about four hours on Sunday mornings.  I brought several extra outfits, a whole bag of diapers, etc, because blowouts were common, spitup was unavoidable, and I would definitely be spending a lot of my morning trying to breastfeed in the tiny cry room in a hard, uncomfortable chair. 

We would take him into the sanctuary for service, and if we were lucky, he would sleep some. The loud music usually woke him up, as well as people clapping. He was always startled by sudden noises and would immediately start screaming when something scared him (still to this day). I couldn’t tell you about one single sermon from those first few months. I couldn’t focus because I was so focused on Spencer, ready to jump up and run him out at the first whimper. I no longer felt like I was part of the church and felt very isolated. 

During this new baby, first-time-mom phase of my life, I started questioning how I could be a “good” Christian and stay close to God when I could barely make it to the church, let alone take anything away from the service, and now that my priority was taking care of my child over singing on a worship team. I didn’t know how to shut my mom-brain off long enough to spend time in prayer or to study my Bible. 

For a multitude of reasons that had been building up for awhile, we ended up switching to a new church near our home when Spencer was about 5 months old. It was going to be a fresh start for us spiritually. We would meet other young parents and find ways to serve together, and we would put Spencer in the nursery so we could focus during the service. Now that he was getting older, I could take time to do Bible studies again and maybe join a women’s group at our new church. I desperately wanted to make friends with some fellow believers in our community who also had little kids. 

That was the plan. Implementing it hasn’t been as easy as I thought. 

For the first several weeks, Spencer’s check-in number came up every Sunday, indicating he was crying a lot in the nursery and we needed to come get him. He doesn’t take well to strangers holding him, especially if one of us isn’t in the room. I had trouble focusing because I was worried about him and felt like he would think I abandoned him. I felt guilty thinking about how he must be feeling, and I usually snuck up to the nursery to get him early. 

I will say that I was at least getting to pay some attention to the sermons at this new church, and whatever I couldn’t listen to, I could watch online after. I have volunteered at a few church events, but we have yet to make any actual friends. 

It was a difficult transition for me to go from being very involved to barely involved, and I’m still trying to figure out how to balance motherhood with serving outside of my home. I feel that my main ministry right now should be serving my husband and child, yet I don’t want to face God one day and hear that I could have done more with my time on this earth. I am confident that we won’t make connections at our new church without getting more involved. 

More than anything, I have learned that my relationship with God shouldn’t be dependent on my commitment to any church, or my level of involvement in church ministries. My relationship with God should be intertwined with every aspect of my life. I don’t need to be in a church building to talk to God or hear from him. I don’t need to be on a stage with a microphone in hand to worship him. I can still have a strong faith just as me, as a simple mom and wife. 

That doesn’t mean I don’t go to church regularly or that I don’t plan to get more involved once Spencer starts enjoying the nursery more. We are already seeing improvements in that area – thank goodness. I do believe it is very important to be involved and to serve the church and community. 

But I also believe that there may be short phases of life where that is not always going to be easy or it might not be possible to be very involved, and that’s ok too. Those phases won’t last forever, and in those times, God is still there and is still speaking. My closeness to God is no longer contingent on my overachieving commitment to the church.