Peter Orr speaks with Jocelyn Loane about her new book on Christian motherhood from Matthias Media: Motherhood: How the gospel shapes our purpose and priorities. In the book and in our conversation, Jocelyn helpfully shows how the gospel, more than anything else, should shape Christian motherhood. It’s very easy to read parenting books that contain a lot of helpful things, but in this conversation, Jocelyn shows us how key gospel truths are the most powerful things for thinking carefully and properly about Christian motherhood.
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Runtime: 26:32 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been edited for readability.
Introduction
Peter Orr: In this episode of the CCL podcast, I speak with Jocelyn Loane about her new book on Christian motherhood.1 In the book and in our conversation, Jocelyn helpfully shows how the gospel, more than anything else, should shape Christian motherhood. It’s very easy to read parenting books that contain a lot of helpful things, but in this conversation, Jocelyn shows us how key gospel truths are the most powerful things for thinking carefully and properly about Christian motherhood.
[Music]
PO: Welcome to Moore College’s Centre for Christian Living podcast. I’m joined today by Jocelyn Loane to speak about her new book, Motherhood: How the gospel shapes our purpose and priorities. Welcome to the podcast, Joss!
Jocelyn Loane: Thank you!
PO: I wonder if we could kick off by you telling us a little bit about yourself, your family and how you became a Christian.
JL: Sure. I’m married to Ed. We’ve been married for 23 years. He’s in university residential ministry, so we live on the campus of Sydney University with our five kids. We’ve got Jemima (age 18), Sophie (age 16), Ben and Sam (age 14), and Abby (age 8). I mainly muck around with them. I’m also here at Moore College as chaplain and I also do some alumni relations work.
I grew up in a non-Christian home. My dad was not a believer. My mum was an occasional church attender, although I don’t think she’d say she has any faith anymore. I started school at a Catholic primary school. So I don’t remember ever not believing in God. I always believed that God was real. But I always thought that he was really angry at me.
I remember we had a really strict nun as our teacher one year, and she told our class that if we were naughty, God would send a little raincloud to rain just over our heads [Laughter], and I was really convinced that this was going to happen to me! [Laughter] I lived in fear of it—until one day I realised, “I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone with a little raincloud over their head!” [Laughter]
I had this idea that God was angry at me and was waiting to catch me doing the wrong thing. But then in God’s kindness, when I got to high school, I was sent to an all-girls Christian boarding school. My mum was worried I was going to turn out really weird, never talking to any boys [Laughter], so she arranged for me to go to a local youth group. There, I was taught about Jesus faithfully, and at my school, and I remember being read Ephesians and being taught that while we, by nature, are deserving of God’s wrath, in his mercy, he sent Jesus, and because of him, we can be in right relationship. I came to understand the gospel of grace and realised that God wasn’t angry at me anymore; he was delighted in me because of Jesus. That’s how I became a Christian.
PO: Wonderful! Praise God for faithful youth groups.
The book’s origins
PO: You’ve written this book on motherhood. You’ve got some experience as a mother. But what prompted you to write the book?
JL: I was pretty hesitant to write the book, actually! [Laughter] I think when you put yourself out there to write a book, it’s like you’re saying you’re some sort of expert on something. [Laughter] I’m certainly not an expert mother: I often stuff up. I have done a lot of things I regret as a mum. I keep sinning against my kids. So I didn’t really want to put myself out there as somehow knowing how to do it perfectly, because I don’t.
It came about because I gave some talks on motherhood, and an editor at Matthias Media, who’s publishing the book, got in touch and said, “I think there’s legs in this to be a book. Would you be interested in developing a book proposal?” I went home to my husband and said, “I don’t think I can do this!” He encouraged me to think, “Well, it’s not you saying that you’re an expert; it’s just you’re speaking the gospel into people’s lives.” I thought, “Well, that’s something I can do.” [Laughter] So I wrote a book proposal and they said, “Yeah, this is a book,” and I got going with that.
I guess I also saw a need for it. There are so many books on parenting. There’s heaps of them, and a lot of them are really good as well. [Laughter] So why write another one? I guess because there’s not a lot from an Australian perspective—particularly thinking about being a mother, not just a generic substitutable parent. I wanted to think about that space and write into that area.
The distinctives of Christian motherhood
PO: It’s a book about motherhood, but it’s obviously from a Christian perspective. What do you think makes Christian motherhood distinctive?
JL: Well, I guess as a Christian, the Lordship of Jesus Christ changes everything about our lives. There’s no area of our lives that’s left untouched by living as a Christian—living with Jesus as our Lord. Parenthood is affected by that as much as anything else.
As Christians, we want to be having the Bible as our authority. We want to be living for the glory of Jesus—for the glory of God. That’s going to shape how we parent. I think it’s going to shape how we see our kids as well.
When I look at my children, I want to see them the way God sees them. I want to see that they’re made in his image, so they have an inherent value and dignity that comes with that. They’re precious. I want to understand that they’re good gifts from God to me—that they’re a blessing in my life. But I also want to see that they’re born with a sinful nature, and their greatest need, actually, is to be put in a right relationship with their creator. So as a Christian mum, I’m going to see that need, and I’m going to see the greatest need they have is to be put in right relationship with God. That’s going to shape my purpose and my priorities as a mum, and how I think about my kids and what I’m doing as a mother. I’m going to be thinking that what I want most is for them is to be a disciple of Jesus. That’s going to shape everything I do as a mum.
PO: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I was struck at one point in the book where you refer to the Great Commission in the context of motherhood. I thought that was really interesting. But that’s exactly what you’ve said—that motherhood is connected to discipleship.
JL: Yeah, that’s right! I think we can see motherhood as fulfilling that Great Commission in many ways. We’re not just to fill the earth, but to fill it with disciples of Jesus, and some of those disciples will be birthed from our own bodies or be adopted into our own homes. So I very much see motherhood as discipleship.
Sin and forgiveness in parenting
PO: You have a chapter on sin, which is very helpful. I was particularly struck by the line, “To regularly seek forgiveness of our children will be the mark of a biblical mother”. 2 Now, you’ve obviously just spoken about how children have a sinful nature. But reflecting on the idea that as a mother, you need to ask forgiveness of your children, can you expand a little bit on that?
JL: Yeah. I think as we parent, we really want to think about ourselves as well [Laughter] and who we are. I think understanding ourselves as forgiven sinners is really important as we come to our relationships with our kids.
We know that while we’re freed from the penalty of sin because of Jesus’ death, and we’re freed from the power of sin, we’re still going to battle its presence. So in our homes, we’re going to sin against our kids. That’s something that will happen.
We also know that we’ve been forgiven and shown so much grace, we need to extend that grace to our children when they sin. We need to also ask them to extend it to us as well. [Laughter] The Christian life is one where you’re going to have to apologise a lot: you’re going to confess your sin to God, but also to the people whom your sin affects. So I think we want to model that in our homes. We don’t want to get our kids to deal with their sins and apologise to each other, and just ignore the fact that we’re also going to sin.
I think as a parent, it can be really easy to justify your own sin, or minimise it. I can lose my temper at my kids and think, “Well, that was justified. They did this and I had a horrible day, and I still had to get dinner on the table.” Actually, we need to keep holding ourselves to God’s standard—knowing he will forgive us, but knowing that when we’ve done the wrong thing, we need to seek forgiveness from our kids. I think that just sets a beautiful culture in the home, too—of not being prideful or pretending we don’t sin, but relating to our kids with humility and with gentleness.
PO: As a mother, you understand you’re sinful. But it’s also important to understand that your kids are sinful as well. How does that shape motherhood?
JL: Yeah. Obviously it’s a biblical truth: David says, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Ps 51:5). There’s that idea that we know our kids are born as sinners, so it kind of sets the expectation for us. We know our kids are going to struggle with sin. They’re not born as these perfect little beings that we’re going to somehow stuff up by parenting them [Laughter]. They’re already broken. They already have the sinful nature.
I guess that prepares us for how hard motherhood can be—that we’re going to face challenges and there’s going to be discipline involved in raising our children. It’s freeing in a way: I think if you’re holding this idea that kids are somehow inherently good inside—that they’re not sinful—then you’ll be surprised when they sin, when they show defiance, when they resist authority the same way that we do that. So I think it’s quite freeing to know they’re suffering from the same condition we are and they need the same solution: they need Jesus.
Motherhood and discipline
PO: We’ve talked about motherhood as discipleship. Obviously within that is the question about discipline. I know that’s a bit of a hot topic. Your book is really helpful. Can you just give us a few pointers about what the Bible says about discipline and the mother’s role in that?
JL: Yep. I think often when we think of discipline, in our heads, it’s something that’s synonymous with punishment or getting your kid in trouble. That’s what you do when your kid is being naughty. But I think it’s helpful to realise that in the Bible, discipline is a term that’s much broader than that. You can see in the New Testament it’s often translated as “training” or “teaching”, and in the Old Testament, it’s things like “instruction”, “exhortation” and “warning”. It’s a much bigger picture than just when you deal your kid doing something wrong. It’s the whole process, really, of bringing them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. That’s how we can think our discipline: it’s got a positive side to it as well as dealing with negative behaviours.
I think the other thing we want to think about discipline is we want to reflect the way God disciplines us in our discipline. God has a long-term focus when he disciplines us as his children. He’s thinking of our eternal good. That’s the same with our kids: we don’t just want a nice, compliant, nicely behaved kid; we’re thinking of their eternal good. We’re disciplining them because we care about the people they’re going to be.
Furthermore, it comes from a place of love: discipline is not just something we do in anger. In fact, it shouldn’t be something we do in anger. It should be a result of our love for our kids: we discipline them because we love them, and while it might be temporarily unpleasant for our kids, it’s aiming to do something that’s loving for them in the long-term.
I think also we want it to be characterised by grace: because we are forgiven people, we will forgive our kids. We don’t need to be punitive and pay them back. We really want to have that training aspect in our discipline.
Probably I think the most important thing to think about with discipline is we want it to address the heart of our kids. We’re not just trying to modify their behaviour; really what we want to get at is their heart. It’s their heart that needs to change. They need a heart that’s oriented towards God. So we want our discipline to really be aiming at looking at what’s going on inside our children [Laughter], not just the behaviour we’re seeing on the outside.
PO: Yeah, it was striking to me. The first chapter in your book is on love, and that’s, as you say, the fundamental thing: loving our children. Discipline comes out of that, and as you say really helpfully in the book, it’s the positive aspect of discipline.
Gentle parenting
PO: You also engage a little bit with some alternative ideas that are floating around. Can you say a little bit about “gentle parenting”? You touch on that and that is a phrase that you hear a little bit.
JL: Yes. Actually that’s been the big change I’ve observed: having a ten-year age gap in our kids, I’ve seen a bit of parenting stuff come and go [Laughter]. I think the big change has been Instagram [Laughter]. That’s really made a whole lot of this stuff—especially this “gentle parenting” movement—very accessible to mums. I started seeing it even in our churches in the way parents were interacting with their kids.
If you don’t know what it is, “gentle parenting” is kind of an amorphous term covering a parenting style or philosophy. It sounds lovely: we do want to be gentle! Obviously there are some commendable things there, and there is some common grace wisdom in it. The big problem I have with it is that gentle parenting is often based on the idea that your kid is inherently good. I think any discipline method or parenting philosophy that doesn’t consider the sinful nature of our children and the saving Lordship of Jesus Christ means ultimately that its diagnosis of the problem with our kids is wrong, and so the treatment it applies is going to be wrong as well. It’s not seeing what our kids’ greatest needs are.
So if you think your kid’s misbehaviour comes from a point of dysregulation or emotional unmet needs, as opposed to sin, those things can be in there, but that’s going to change the way you parent. A big mantra in the gentle parenting movement is this saying that “All feelings are okay; all behaviours are not”. That drives a lot of how you parent your kids. It’s okay to have any feeling as long as your behaviour is in line.
You’ll hear it in the way a gentle parent interacts with their child. If the brother throws a block at the sister’s head, the mum would say, “Oh, it’s okay to be angry, but it’s not okay to throw blocks at your sister’s head. I’m going to take the blocks away now.” You can see what happens there: there’s no restitution made with the sister. That relationship is not addressed at all. The kid: they’re kind of okay-ed in their sin.
This is really different to how Jesus approaches things. Think of Jesus talking to the Pharisees in Mark 7 and Matthew 15: he has a go at them, because they’re very concerned about their outward behaviour. But their hearts are far from him: “These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Mark 7:6). Jesus is much more concerned with what’s going on inside than just getting the outside right. So I think gentle parenting is really flipping what Jesus says with that phrase. Okay-ing the feeling is really unhelpful: Jesus isn’t saying it’s okay to be angry. Think of the Sermon on the Mount: even if you’re angry at your brother, you’re subject to judgement (Matt 5:22). Jesus really points to the heart of the issue.
Feelings are not neutral. Feelings are a good gift from God. But they can stem from a place of sin. So if your child is sad, they can be sad because their puppy died: that’s a sad thing. That’s okay. It’s okay to be sad when your puppy dies, and you as a parent would want to sit with your child and be sad with them. But your child could also be sad because it’s his sister’s birthday and she got a present and he didn’t, and he’s crying because he’s jealous, because he’s greedy, because he doesn’t love his sister. The sadness can come from a part that’s oriented rightly or wrongly. With our kids, we want to be saying that feelings point to what our hearts are saying, and we want to be looking at our heart and addressing what’s going on there.
PO: That’s really helpful.
Engaging with secular books on parenting
PO: It just raises a question about other voices. You’ve written a really helpful book on Christian motherhood. Do you have any advice on how we engage with secular books on parenting in general? We’ve talked about the specific of gentle parenting: there’s some good, but there’s some bad. Any wisdom on that?
JL: Yeah. I’ve read a lot of secular parenting books. I’ve read a lot of parenting books now [Laughter]! I think there’s lots of helpful stuff you can glean. I guess the thing as a Christian is you always want to first see things through a gospel lens. You want to have your biblical principles—the foundations of a Christian worldview—in place first as you engage with this stuff. You want to question it all: you think, “What’s this saying about human nature? What’s this saying about what my child’s greatest needs are? Where’s this pointing my child?” So I think a lot of that stuff can be really helpful. I’ve benefitted a lot from more psychology-driven parenting ideas. But we do want to hold them up to the gospel and disregard them if they’re going to contradict what Scripture tells us about our children.
PO: It just struck me: that idea of gentle parenting, as you say, gentleness is a scriptural idea, but it’s just very subtly distorted, and so we need to be really careful as we think about these things.
JL: That’s right. I think the thing with books is, read them, but I think it’s great to read books in community. I’ve been really helped by older Christian women talking through things. They’ve often seen fads come and go a bit. I think it’s really good to remember God gives us each other in the church. Reading books with other women in your church is a really great way to help each other discern what’s helpful and what’s not as helpful.
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Priscilla & Aquila Centre Research Conference
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This conference takes place the day after the Priscilla & Aquila annual conference to make it easy for women to attend both.
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PO: Now let’s get back to our program.
Christian motherhood versus Christian fatherhood
PO: It’s a book on Christian motherhood, not just on Christian parenthood. Can you speak about the particularities you see in being a mother, as opposed to being a father, or just being a parent in general?
JL: Yeah. Well, the first thing to say, of course, is a lot is very similar [Laughter]. It’s not like there’s one way to be a Christian particularly for a woman and another for a man. So much of the Bible is written to both men and women, and so much we could say about parenting is true for both of us.
But I think there’s a distinction, because we understand as Christians that God has made us men or women: there’s a distinctive there, and it’s a good and beautiful distinctive. It’s not that you’re human with a side of man or human with a side of woman; you are human in a type of man and human in a type of woman. So everything I do as a woman is going to be a bit different, because I’m doing it as a woman.
In reading for the book, I did a read a lot of studies that look at the differences in parenting. I find that stuff really interesting—stuff like dads tend to play more roughly with their kids, and mums tend to be more gentle. But the problem with all these studies and why I didn’t end up putting them in the book is they’re based on generalisations of what men and women are like, and there’s always differences. I’m sure you can think of some. I can think of a family I know where the mum is a much more rough player and the dad’s a very gentle type. So I don’t think generalisations help.
But I think it’s worth noticing places where Scripture draws out that there’s a difference in how we experience parental love. God, who clearly reveals himself at Father, at times in the Bible, uses the language of motherhood as a metaphor for for how he’s relating to his people. Think Isaiah 66:13: “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you”. Jesus, when he’s weeping over Jerusalem, says, “I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” (Matt 23:37), expressing this aspect of motherly love. We also see it in 1 Thessalonians 2:7 and 11, where Paul describes himself as being like a mother and a father. We see there is this distinctiveness in different parental love.
Further on from that, obviously the Bible sees there being a significance in the created order. We see that work out in the home: in Ephesians 5:22-33, we see that the husband is going to lead the family with that kind of self-sacrificial love that Jesus shows the church, and a wife is going to voluntarily submit herself to that loving leadership and respect her husband. That’s a dynamic we’re going to see play out in our families.
I don’t think we want to think about it as putting on a certain set of characteristics necessarily, but I think a lot of what it comes down to is just embracing that God made you man or woman by his good design, and we want to rejoice in that. We want to rejoice that it is a good thing that I’m a woman and a mother. That’s what God made me to be. I can let my kids know that I’m happy in that and I’m not resenting the sex that he’s given me; I’m rejoicing in his goodness in making me this way.
PO: That’s really helpful. As a father, I read the book and found it very helpful, and I took away lots of encouragement. I think it’s so helpful to see the biblical clarity on the difference between being a father and a mother.
Mum guilt and mum pride
PO: There’s lots of really helpful things in the book. Your chapter on prayer is really encouraging. I wonder if we could just finish by talking about two aspects where maybe motherhood can go wrong. You talk about how to deal with mum guilt—when you feel like a bad mother. Maybe on the other side is the kind of idolatry of motherhood when we almost become too proud of how we’re doing. Can you say something about those two extremes?
JL: Well, mum guilt is something that is very common [Laughter]. I think all mothers feel it, whether they’re Christian or not! I think a lot of us are just walking around with a low level/grade guilt at all times. It can be appropriate or it can be inappropriate [Laughter]. As a Christian, you want to think, “Where’s the guilt coming from?”
For me, sometimes that guilt comes from comparison, which I don’t think is appropriate. I’ll look at another mother and I’ll compare myself to her. Even the other day, I was spending time with a mother who had really carefully chronicled every detail of her children’s lives [Laughter]. She had photo books and journals with everything they said, and all these cute things they’d done. One of my kids asked me the other day, “What was my first word?” and I’m like, “I’ve got nothing. I can’t remember!” [Laughter]Isn’t that terrible! Anyway, I don’t remember my first word either and I seem to function as a human without that [Laughter]. You can look at that and think, “Gee, I’m doing this wrong.” I think there can be this comparison that comes in. I think social media has made that even worse. It can make me think, “I’m not taking my kid on that holiday. They’re not winning the Irish dancing competition. What’s wrong with my kid??”
I think also our limited capacity can drive our guilt. Sometimes I have in my head this list of things I want to be doing with my kids and I just don’t have the hours in the day to do it. I don’t have the energy or the stamina to do all the things, and I can always think I’m failing because I’m not doing everything.
They might be inappropriate ways that we feel guilt. But as Christians, we know that the Holy Spirit is going to convict us sometimes that we are doing something wrong. The right thing to do with that guilt is not to say, “Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I’m just tired or I’m just comparing myself.” It’s actually saying, “Oh Lord, I’m sorry. Thank you for convicting me of how I’m not mothering the way you want me to here. Please help me change.” Then we can let go of that guilt, because we know we’re forgiven; we don’t have to carry it around. We don’t have to wallow in it, knowing that forgiveness can really free us from that, knowing that no situation is beyond being redeemed by God—that he uses us even in our sin and our mess to achieve his purposes in our kids’ lives. There’s the real weight that can be lifted from Christian mums. I think we don’t need to be walking around with mum guilt, because we have the goodness of the gospel to deal with guilt.
I think the idolatry side of things can happen when we start to get our value, our meaning and our significance from being a mum. If you’re someone who’s very thoughtful about motherhood and you’re putting a lot of energy and effort into that relationship, it can slip that way. I guess we want to see our mothering as being something ultimately that we’re doing for God to his glory. We’re doing it out of our love for him. It’s not that we somehow have to think our love for our children is competing with our love for God: we need to love our kids bit less or we love God more. No, we’re loving our children as a way of loving Christ: it comes in the same package.
I think we need to ask ourselves sometimes if we’re making our kids an idol, or if we’re getting too much of our sense of who we are from our relationships with our kids. If we’re devastated when our kid fails at something, that might be a sign we’ve done that. Or if our family culture is revolving around the kids and their needs, and there’s this anxious focus on our children, that might show we’re doing that. Or if we’re making our children’s choices about us and how they reflect on us, and we’re making them about our glory, that could be a way that would make our kids an idol as well.
PO: Brilliant.
Conclusion
PO: Well, Joss, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for writing such a helpful book. I really appreciate your time today.
JL: Thanks for having me, Pete!
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PO: To benefit from more resources from the Centre for Christian Living, please visit ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a host of resources, including past podcast episodes, videos from our live events and articles published through the Centre. We’d love for you to subscribe to our podcast and for you to leave us a review so more people can discover our resources.
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As always, I would like to thank Moore College for its support of the Centre for Christian Living, and to thank to my assistant, Karen Beilharz, for her work in editing and transcribing the episodes. The music for our podcast was generously provided by James West.
[Music]
Endnotes
1 Jocelyn Loane, Motherhood: How the gospel shapes our purpose and priorities (Newtown: Matthias Media, 2024).
2 Ibid, 55.
Bible quotations are also from THE HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by International Bible Society, www.ibs.org. All rights reserved worldwide.
Photo by ketan rajput on Unsplash
