Perhaps wrong is an uncharitable word. Ill-considered or incomplete might be better, but both make for too many syllables in a title which is already too long. So, I’ll opt for a single syllable which is simple and frank. More honest, even if not very diplomatic. Here are some problematic assumptions about the Great Commission which end up stifling motherhood (and stifling the mission too):

• Wrong Idea 1: We’re all meant to be constantly expanding our range of relationships to tell the gospel to new people. There are only a few stages of life where it is possible to be constantly expanding the range of relationships you have. The early years of being a mum is a time which often reduces our relational reach. It’s harder to be in new places and meet new people. Even if we do get into new places, while ever we’re paying attention to training our children in these new places with new people (“no, son, you may not wash the baby’s hair with paint”), conversations are disjointed. If we have a skewed view of evangelism, we will end up feeling guilty about our lack of opportunities to reach new unbelievers. Or, we might be good at getting to new places and new people with little ones in tow, but we’ll be neglecting to train our own children in wisdom, love, obedience and self-control. You simply can’t carry on that many invested conversations while you’re parenting infants and toddlers. We might even conclude that we need to put our kids in the care of others so we can be free to do mission. But that would be trading a definite duty for a misunderstood one.

  God isn’t cruel. He’s not giving us incompatible tasks. The constraints of early motherhood are part of his design for bringing about his purposes in his world. If our mission strategy requires us to neglect raising our children in godliness, if it forces us to work against he realities which God built into mothering, then we need to revisit our mission strategy.

• Wrong Idea 2: Our children don’t qualify as people to be discipled. Evangelism to the hypothetical stranger is counted as more significant than discipleship of the known child. Sometimes that’s because we don’t count children in our care as full persons until they are older; they don’t heft well on the scale of our values. Or perhaps we presume that by breathing the same air as us, by being in the programs and structures custom designed for them, that their discipleship is already provided for. We rely on the odds of their exposure to church culture, and we feel more called to the people who have no social or cultural contact with the gospel. We think our children don’t count because we didn’t have to go somewhere else to reach them. We see the work to be done out there, to the ends of the earth, but overlook the biggest, longest, most influential discipleship opportunity at our fingertips.

• Wrong Idea 3: The Great Commission is only about evangelism. We forget that the mission which started with the first disciples is more than getting a hearing for Two Ways to Live. We are to baptise disciples into the name of the triune God, and teach them to obey everything Jesus commanded. This is the work of a whole church, using the whole of God’s Word, for a lifetime. When we reduce the Great Commission to first contact evangelism, we miss the deep rooted maturity which is evangelism’s goal.

  Different Christians naturally have different gifts. Some are gifted to be intensively invested in evangelism to new people. Others are better placed to bear witness to Jesus through the longer, slower building up of believers to maturity; ready to explain the reason for their hope when they have opportunity. Motherhood is mostly of the latter kind. Mothers are trusted to intensively guide a few (completely dependent) disciples of Jesus, more profoundly, over a longer period of time. Our children are not the only people we will disciple, but we may not disciple others at the expense of discipling our own kids. For better or worse, we won’t have more influence anywhere else than we do over these young persons entrusted to our care.

• Wrong Idea 4: Mission to our children is done the same way as mission to our unbelieving neighbour. Wrong. Evangelising our own children is more than making sure they regularly hear the gospel. It’s quite different from evangelising an adult neighbour. When your child is converted, it will probably be under your nose, something you discern after the fact, rather than in a documentable moment. Through your family culture, they will have many habits of godliness in place before the Holy Spirit does his unannounced regenerating work. Conversion in a Christian family is a slow, complex chemistry.

  When your neighbour becomes a Christian, it will be more of a distinct shift. They’ll need to unlearn a whole lifetime of living at a great distance from the Lord. They have a demo and rebuild job to do. The same ought not be true for the kids of Christian families.

  We’re not meant to raise kids as unbelievers in the hope they can have a more interesting conversion story. We have far more means at hand to either help or hinder our children than we have in the life of a neighbour. We are given an authority and responsibility for our own children which we don’t have over anyone else. That unique relationship of parent to child is one of God’s very good provisions for growing his people over time. We’re foolish to overlook such a profound opportunity.

There are two more wrong ideas which are worth attention, but are too big for this article: that the Great Commission is separate from and overrides the creation mandate (ie. that evangelism is the only worthwhile thing a Christian can be doing, that the cultivating work of being a human on earth is wasteful). The other wrong idea is that evangelism is the work of individuals. But the picture the New Testament repeatedly gives is that of a body working together; a body of many parts, varying strengths and indignities and functions, all knit into a whole that grows into the purposes for which Jesus formed it. The guilt we have about not being on the forefront of evangelism to strangers is a bit like a whole body trying to be the thumb. Since Jesus is our Head and Lord of everything, since he has appointed us each to our own spheres and duties, we can trust that the limitations of his provisions will achieve his mission.