Three Mother's Day Ideas During COVID-19

Graphic adapted from our Floral Burst collection.

I asked my wife if she wanted to write this post. I figured: it's a post about how churches can honor moms on Mother's Day this year—who better to know the answer than a mother of four.

I was sitting six feet from her (we're not social distancing—that's just how far apart our WFH desks are), but I could have picked up on the disgust from another room.

"Ugh. No?"

It was a one-word response, but I heard her. I heard her. You lose brownie points if you have to ask mom how to make her feel special.

So here are a few ways you can proactively make this year's Mother's Day special for the moms in your church.

Porch Portraits (or...Porchraits?) / Curbside Photoshoots

A lot of churches loved setting up a photo booth in their building on Mother's Day, letting moms have mini photoshoots with their favorite people.

This year, if your church is small enough (or you have enough volunteer photographers), you can scratch the same itch by doing curbside photoshoots. Use a scheduling service like Calendly to manage signups, and break down the area you have to cover by zip code or neighborhood to make it logistically manageable. The photographers never even have to get out of their cars. Then post the images to your church's Facebook page, or email them to the families using the emails they signed up with.

Alternatively, if that sounds like too much of a logistical nightmare, or if your church isn't suburban enough, you could flip the concept, and do a drive-through, touch-free photo booth in front of your church. Just be sure to check your local restrictions to make sure whatever you decide is allowed.

Create Your Own Mother's Day Video

Normally, editing with cellphone footage is less than ideal, but in this season while basically everything church-related is online, there's a lot more grace for production quality. We've seen a lot of churches create videos like this to encourage their audiences:

I'm not suggesting you need to create a cellphone choir music video, but you could use the same idea to get people to record messages of encouragement for the mothers and edit them down into a video message for all moms.

Better yet, we created this script you can send people to read. It'll make editing the video easier for you, and, in our experience, telling people exactly what to say will make getting people to follow through with submitting their videos much easier.

Acknowledge Moms During Your Church Service

While a few churches build their entire service around Mother's Day, most churches will simply acknowledge the day during a regular service. We have a huge category of Mother's Day media that can help you hit just the right notes, whatever your goal for the day is.

Here are a few notable mini movies worth a watch: