Being a mother is a difficult job. Just ask one. Giving birth is physically taxing and sometimes terrifying; but that is the easiest part of mothering. What makes bringing up children difficult is the next 18 or more years of labor. It is far more painful than the labor of childbirth. For example, young mothers struggle with the way the first years of child rearing are so restricting. I was reminded of this while watching a young family with a baby getting on an airplane. Mothers are weighed down with baby bag, stroller, formula, baby car seat, and other paraphernalia for the first few years of a child's life. But all of that is needed because a child is completely dependent on his or her mother. A child separated from his or her mother is presumed to be lost. A child who is lost is in enormous danger. A mother and her child should never be separated. The most ferocious creature on earth is a female who senses a threat to her young. There is no separating her from her young.

This is all the more true for the relationship between our mother, the church, and her children. To separate the children from the mother is deadly to the children. But first we must presume that she is where the children are. They are born from her, so she needs to be present where they are born. Her children are on earth, therefore the church is on earth. This does not mean that she is earthly. She is heavenly, though she exists on earth. Like her children, she is in the world, not of it. The church is not some super-spiritual construct stuck in the clouds, as though it would far from us. No, the church is where her children are, where they gather around the spiritual gifts that sustain the life which she has given them. There are many accoutrements that she carries to share with her children: among them Supper, water, and Scripture. This is why we seek her everywhere in the world, but we only identify her presence by pointing to the things that feed and sustain her children: Word and Sacraments. She exists in Perm, Phnom Penh, Peoria, and Pretoria, because her children are there.

If the children run away from their mother, they are in terrible peril, like a lost child. Therefore, church membership retention is not just a matter of institutional health, it is a life and death matter for the church's children. If we flee our mother, we will fall into the clutches of our enemy the devil, or starve to death for lack of the baby formula in the Supper of the Lord (1Pt 2:2). The church chases her children not to keep buildings full but to assure that the children of the church do not lose their spiritual life. Unfortunately, this idea is lost to moderns who believe that what is on earth cannot be spiritual and that they can leave the "institutional church" because they don't believe in "organized religion" (such people have never been involved with a real Christian church, if they can describe it as "organized religion"). To such people the church on earth is purely earthly and cannot partake of spiritual things, nor convey the true spiritual gifts.