Article courtesy of Outreach Magazine | November 12, 2024
Mandy Arioto is president and CEO of The MomCo (formerly MOPS) and the author of Have More Fun (Zondervan) and Wild Hope: A Realist’s Guide to Doing the Impossible (MomCo Media). She was a featured speaker at the 2024 Amplify Conference for forward-focused church leaders and their teams.
In the following interview, we discuss our culture’s loneliness epidemic, what it looks like for church leaders to encourage and equip moms, and why she thinks moms could be leading the next wave of evangelists you launch into your community.
You are the CEO of The MomCo, formerly MOPS, but you also have experience in pastoral ministry. Moms are held in very high regard in the church, but church leaders don’t always know what to do with them. Drawing on your experience as a church leader, how do you think the church could better disciple and support moms?
I spent 15 years in [pastoral] ministry, like you said, before coming to The MomCo. And I was thinking recently about how I sat in year after year of strategic meetings at really large influential churches in Southern California. We discussed how to reach our community, how to disciple people and cultivate lifelong faith formation in our congregants, and never once did we intentionally talk about how to uniquely raise up moms in our church.
And that is not a judgment on the pastoral staff or anyone. I was a mom of three kids. It is completely on me. It literally never crossed my mind. I was thinking about kids. I was thinking about teens and 20-somethings and men and married couples. But moms weren’t on my radar.
My friend Hank Fortener, who was a pastor at MOSAIC when I was there, tells a really funny story about a time when his wife Sueann took their kids on an airplane. He said she walked on and she had a kid strapped to her chest and like another kid she was holding hands with, and everyone’s not wanting to make eye contact with her because they’re like, Please don’t sit by me. She gets on, and it’s a super stressful flight.
A week later, Hank takes their two kids on a trip by himself and he has a kid strapped on his chest and a kid holding his hand, and he gets on and everybody’s like, Oh my gosh, you are such a good dad. This woman invites him to sit next to her so that she can help. Then halfway through the flight, he had all of these people coming up and, crouching down next to him and being like, Hey, do you need some snacks? I have some stickers. You are doing such a good job. You are such a good dad. So proud of you. Well done.
It’s funny because I think sometimes it’s just assumed that moms have got it all together, or they’ve got it handled. And quite honestly, that is not the case.
What we hear from the women who come to our groups and come through the doors of our meetings is that when they are at home, they are taking care of kids and making coffee and making sure everyone’s welcome and all of their needs are met. And then they go to church and they’re asked to do the same thing. They’re asked to serve in kids’ ministry. They’re asked to make coffee. They’re asked to make sure everybody’s needs are met, and that they’re doing okay. So, for many moms, the conversation is, I do those things at home and then I go to church and I’m asked to do the exact same things. It would be easier just to do those things at home.
We have an opportunity to invite moms into different spaces in the church, to serve on committees, to do things that are different than the typical things that we invite them into. It’s an opportunity to elevate the unique giftings that moms have, and to provide them with new opportunities to serve in ways that might be outside of the ways that they’re serving their families at home.
In your podcast Motherhood Today you mentioned a stat that really stood out to me. You said that 76% of MomCo leaders have shared about Jesus in the past six months as compared to 38% of average Christians. You think that moms are the next wave of evangelists to be released on the world. So why do you think moms are in such a strategic place, and why do you think they seem to be doing a better job of sharing their faith more consistently and more naturally, it seems?
I get asked to speak at a lot of marketing conferences with Fortune 500 companies, and you might think that’s very odd for the leader of a Christian nonprofit that works with moms to get asked to speak at these big marketing conferences. The reason is because about five years ago, these major corporations became convinced that moms are some of the most influential people on the planet.
So, I was speaking at one of these conferences, and a VP at Unilever was on the stage before me. He put up this quote that his team was rallying around. He said, “We’ve made a strategic shift to focus all our marketing dollars on reaching moms. The reason is, because it’s effective. Moms influence everything from what brand of detergents gets purchased to what religion families practice. Moms are evangelists. And if you want the fastest, smartest and most efficient method for spreading a message, start with the moms.”
This is from a guy who works in a secular space and leads a huge company, and he is the one from stage who’s saying that moms are “evangelists.” I just love that he used that word. And honestly, the data that marketers are looking at that supports that is that moms control 85% of household purchases. Their spending power is $2.5 trillion, which is more than Italy, France or Canada’s GDP. Moms say that the first place that they look for recommendations is other moms. So “word of mom” is a very powerful tool.
According to the UN, if you want to raise the community out of poverty, the single best way to do that is to resource the moms. And according to our internal studies at The MomCo, 82% of families say they started going to church because mom said it was important.
If brands like Google and Unilever and Amazon and Chick-fil-A and Dove are taking moms seriously as evangelists, what would it look like for the church to do that as well?
We have a tremendous opportunity to mobilize moms who are raising the next generation, who are talking about faith to their families and to their friends and in their community. It feels like this untapped potential is sitting in our pews, and when we mobilize them they will spark a movement.
So what does that mobilization look like?
What we find at The MomCo—and we are in the business of mobilizing moms—is that when you train women how to talk about their faith in meaningful ways, it happens very organically and very quickly. What that looks like for us is training them how to raise kids and have meaningful conversations about faith in their households, around their dinner tables. But it also means really robust, specific evangelism training that we have. That is a 20-session leader training, and it goes through, How do you talk about your faith? How do you welcome people into a meeting? How do you use hospitality to woo women in who are searching and hungry?
How do you trust the Holy Spirit to guide you and guide your words? How do you walk people through reading the Bible for the first time?
What we see is that there are so many women who don’t even know how to open their Bible and find a Scripture reference, so we start at the basic level with a lot of these women. We have a course called Bible Basics, where we teach them the foundational elements of Scripture. It’s really just providing resources for women to mobilize their faith and grow. Then they take that and they go to their school and they talk with their friends. They go to their workplace and invite friends to church. It might start with bringing their families to church, and then their families get baptized together. It’s these small ways that we train women that then mobilizes them to reach their families and community.
Something else that we’re experiencing in culture is a loneliness epidemic. I get the sense that moms are already doing a lot of networking. So how do we get that networking spirit [unleashed]?
Collectively, as a culture, we’ve lost the art of hanging out. I saw a stat recently, I think it said in 2010, on average, people spent 6.5 hours a week hanging out with friends, and today that’s plummeted 60%, I believe to less than two hours a week. So it feels like we need a resurgence of normalizing hanging out again. I think one way we do that is to recognize that we need to not wait for invitations, and we need to be the inviters.
People are longing for in-person connection. They’re longing to be known, and they’re longing to be loved for who they are. One of the unique things that we experience at The MomCo is that we have people come and sit around tables who vote, believe, look and parent differently, yet motherhood is this neat common denominator that rallies them and brings them together and is this focal point [so] that the other things don’t really matter. I think we need more things like that where we can come alongside each other and not have to have homogenous relationships because we can be honest about how we feel without having expectations that we all have to be alike.
The thing I love most, and the thing that we really focus on as an organization, is that the kingdom of God is a shocking place. I love that Jesus broke the rules to heal people. He sat and had meals with people that other people were offended by. He had all sorts of things that he healed on the Sabbath, all sorts of things that he did that were shocking to other people that were normal in the kingdom. I would like to see us as people of faith start inviting our neighbors over who have a different political sign in their front yard than the person that we’re voting for, and to show up and radically love people in our community.
We have a MomCo group that started providing dinner at a strip club in their community once a week on Wednesday nights because they said that there are so many moms that are working there and they want them to know that Jesus loves them and that they’re welcome at their MomCo group.
When we practice those acts of shocking hospitality, we become people who radically change the framework and fabric of our culture and our communities, and we invite people into relationship in a really powerful and authentic way.
What advice for encouragement would you have for church leaders who want to champion relationships?
My advice would be to get comfortable being uncomfortable. What we see at the churches that we partner with is that we have so many women coming who need desperately to talk about the hard things that are going on in their life. At our conference where we have 5,000 women, the things that women are navigating … women are coming who are engaged in prostitution in order to provide for their families. They’re selling their kids’ Adderall. Their marriages are crumbling. Fifty-four percent of moms said that they’re having less sex this year than they were last year, and that’s not a funny, trite stat. That’s a legitimate issue that we need to look at in the church because of the epidemic rates of addiction to porn and lower fertility.
These are very real close-to-home topics that people are coming through the doors of our church[es] navigating, and we have to be comfortable having an honest conversation and speaking hope into the broken parts of our lives—engaging in relational evangelism.
Right now people are longing for a word of hope that mends the broken parts of their soul, that points them to Jesus in a meaningful way, that doesn’t tiptoe around sin. So many people know, I need help to stop doing the things that are not serving me well, and I don’t know how to stop. We need to be brave and have honest conversations and talk about the things that we are scared to talk about.
To hear more from leaders like Mandy Arioto, who are mobilizing their churches and ministries to reach their communities with the gospel, preregister your team now for next year’s Amplify Conference and take advantage of super early bird pricing.
