The Rev. Victor Cyrus-Franklin remembers his mother getting him and his siblings ready for Sunday service.
She’d have to delegate who was doing whose hair, help them find missing socks and everything else in between to have them dressed and ready for church. His father, a public school teacher, would be up early delivering the Sunday paper to help make ends meet. So on certain Sundays, his mom was responsible for, as Cyrus-Franklin describes it, “the mad dash trying to get out of the house to get to the church.”
This was on top of her getting ready to preach.
His mother, the Rev. Shirley Renee Franklin, is a pastor at Dixon Memorial United Methodist Church in Nashville and has served a number of churches across Tennessee.
“I better appreciate it now than I could have then,” Cyrus-Franklin said.
And, this Sunday on Mother’s Day, she’ll virtually lead the service for Cyrus-Franklin’s congregants at Inglewood First United Methodist Church in Southern California. It’ll be a worship collaboration with her Nashville church and will be broadcast on YouTube and Facebook Live.
To Cyrus-Franklin, being able to worship with his mother is an example of how COVID-19 “has created a whole different opportunity for us to collaborate and share in ministry together.”
At a time when many churches cannot yet publicly gather, pastors and faith leaders are finding creative ways to honor motherhood this Sunday.
Megachurch Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California, will be hosting a Mother’s Day drive-in service. This will be Harvest’s first-ever drive-in service, which will be held in the parking lot of its Riverside campus.
“It just kind of worked out that way,” said Harvest pastor Greg Laurie. “We wanted to do a drive-in service and Mother’s Day was coming. We thought, ‘This is a good day to do it.’”
When Harvest announced its drive-in plans and asked congregants to RSVP for a parking spot, there was so much interest they added a third Sunday service at 7 a.m. The other two services will happen at 9 and 11:30 a.m. and have already filled up.
“The response to our service has shown there’s a real interest in this,” Laurie said.