What’s Next for Risen Motherhood—Why We’re Calling Year 10 Our Last
Nine years ago, we embarked on the unknown journey of Risen Motherhood. After several months of research and prayer, we stacked our budget-option mics on books in our basements and woke up early two mornings a week to record over Skype. No fancy studio. No team members. No videos or decorative backgrounds. No donor funding. It was just us—two moms, sisters-in-law, and friends following the Lord’s lead. Along the way, we didn’t have a “master plan.” We just took one step at a time, trying to be obedient to what the Lord called us to do next. We tried to be open-handed, not claiming Risen Motherhood as ours but his.
Risen Motherhood has grown beyond our wildest imaginations. That five-episode podcast turned into hundreds of episodes. Our dream of having authentic conversations to encourage moms in the gospel expanded to include hundreds of free resources in a wide variety of digital formats. Our arms grew wider to welcome half a dozen team members. The Lord led us to become a nonprofit and graduate from our crackly microphones to a little studio in our town.
As we reflect on all of this, we’re overwhelmed with gratitude, not just for what the Lord has done in our hearts and families, but for how he’s reached millions of moms across the globe with the good news of the gospel.
Friends, it’s time for us to continue following the Lord’s lead and take a step in a new direction. After years of prayer, personal discussion, input from our husbands, reflection as a leadership team, and with the wise input of our board of directors, we want to let you know that the ministry of Risen Motherhood is drawing to a close in April of 2025.
Even though we still have important work to do for another year, we know this is still big news to hear, especially for those of you who have been following Risen Motherhood long enough to see your toddlers turn into tweens. Even though we’ve been planning toward this change for some time and we have lots of exciting “lasts” for us to enjoy together, it still feels weighty to tell you—the community of moms who have grown up alongside us as we’ve all grown in Christ.
Among our team, we’ve come to talk about the end of Risen Motherhood as a sunset. Because a sunset is something beautiful all the way to its end. It’s something worth watching as it goes down toward the horizon, giving reason to praise God as it shifts and changes in form and shade until it’s finished. It’s important to us as a ministry not to crash and burn or fall off a cliff or ghost you. We want you to know that we have an intentional and important plan for this last chapter of the ministry, and we hope you’ll savor the beauty of it with us.
Before we move on to the details, we want to pause and acknowledge the great work that God has done and give him all the glory. God has blessed this work immensely. He’s allowed our ministry to be fully funded. He’s provided incredible team members, board members, and ministry partners. He’s provided ideas and content, and he’s given us what we’ve needed to do this work for so long. We’re also grateful for all the ways you have believed in and supported us over the years. We have one of the most gracious and generous communities online—you are our fellow sisters in Christ, in the trenches of motherhood. Thank you for trusting us and giving us your time and attention. If you’ve benefited from anything in this ministry, it’s because you’ve benefited from the Lord’s work and the good news of the gospel. It’s always been him, and he will continue doing that work even after we’re gone.
The plan for the final year—we’re not done quite yet!
Here’s the important part: we really, really want you to stick with us to the end. Until we’ve packed away our microphones for good and have locked the door on our studio for the last time. We want you to be with us to heart and wave goodbye on that last post. Because this last year is going to encapsulate the essential core of everything we’ve shared since the first show released in early 2016. We will be pulling back the curtain—sharing our trade secrets and making you privy to everything we “do” behind the scenes so that you can truly learn to apply the gospel to motherhood long after we’re gone.
A key part of this will be the release of our final three published projects at Risen Motherhood. Gospel Mom and its partner workbook Becoming a Gospel Mom come out in October of 2024, and A Million Tiny Moments releases in March of 2025. When the Lord led us to the decision to bring this ministry to a close, some of our biggest questions were “What do we have left to say?” and “How can we be faithful to the end?” And these books are a big answer to that. We want to equip YOU to be the future of Risen Motherhood and to be on the front lines of sharing gospel hope with moms in your life and community.
At the end of it all, we’re going out with a bang—a big celebration party in Fort Worth, Texas on April 5, 2025. Some of you will be able to join us in person, but we hope that all of you gather your mom friends and join us via simulcast. This will be a final chance to reflect on what God has done, praise him together, and talk about how you can live a risen motherhood long after the ministry is over. Watch our platforms for more information on this as we have it.
Yes, Risen Motherhood is coming to a close but, we will still be creating new content—podcasts, articles, social media, newsletters, and more—through April 11, 2025. At that point, we’re going to stop producing new content, say goodbye to our team, and post our away messages. But our website content will remain up for one more year, until May of 2026. We’ll keep an eye on the site for broken links or other hiccups, but generally, it will be unattended yet available for you to still engage in. Come May of 2026, our digital content will no longer be available. Instead, the legacy and message of Risen Motherhood will live on through our published books, and most importantly, through you. Please visit our Sunset FAQ page for more information and answers to your specific questions.
But why?
If you’re wondering why we’ve come to this decision, we encourage you to listen to this podcast episode. It’s like a living room coffee date where we lean in and share our hearts, and walk through this tender topic together. But if you have limited time and you want the cliff notes, we’ll do our best to touch on the high-level things below.
First and foremost, we want to get ahead of any concerns and let you know that Risen Motherhood isn’t closing for any “bad” reason. We know that, unfortunately, that happens with ministries and ministry leaders, so we understand why you might wonder that. But in fact, the opposite is true. Risen Motherhood is fully funded, and we have an incredible and healthy team who love working together. We’re in a great groove right now and have such a supportive board of directors. Also, our relationship (Laura and Emily) is flourishing! We love being sisters-in-law and friends, we do a lot of life together, and we’ve long since worked through the kinks in our ministry partnership.
Here’s the quick summary of “why”—in no particular order:
Our season of life and families’ ages/stages are changing.
We no longer have babies and toddlers but are on the cusp of having middle schoolers and high schoolers. We want to protect our kids’ privacy and stories as they go into these tender years and beyond. We’ve heard that the issues kids face in their teen years are not really ones that are easily or appropriately processed publicly.
Our personal and family dreams/goals are changing.
Our husbands are in different work roles than they were when we first started Risen Motherhood, and our desires as individuals and couples are pulling our time in different directions. Just as we’ve always encouraged you to consider over the years, we want to be available and responsive to the new and different dreams, goals, and ministry-focus areas God is laying on our hearts in this next stage of life. We can’t “do it all” and need to say “no” somewhere.
We’re aging out of being able to effectively reach our target audience of moms with young kids.
We’ve noticed that, in the past few years, we’ve grown more and more out of touch with the conversations and concerns of the moment, the popular baby products, the parenting methods, and the new influencers, and we can barely keep up with reviewing the multitude of new books and resources (even in the Christian space). If we were to keep going, we feel that we’d have to make some major changes and pivots to even stay up-to-date with the issues, the tech, and the trends in a helpful way.
We see other women effectively meeting the need to bring gospel hope to moms in the digital space.
We think that God has equipped moms with the gospel in incredible ways, and there is a new saturation of women filling in these gaps that did not exist when we started Risen Motherhood. We’re confident that other moms and other voices are going to carry this torch—maybe in more niche circles online or more like micro-influencers. We are also hopeful that, most importantly, this will be carried on through women in real-life relationships in the local church and community.
We want to end on a high note.
As leaders, we put a high value on excellence and hands-on, personal nurturing of our community and team. We don’t want to artificially push beyond what God has given us to say just because we have the funding or because we feel the pressure of “could” or “should.” We think that, sometimes, that’s where leadership mistakes happen and the quality of content goes downhill and starts to feel contrived. Much like your favorite TV show that should have ended after season four but went on and on to season eight, we want the memories of the ministry to be good ones. We want to end in the golden years, not keep going until it’s so obvious that we need to stop.
We want to model “risen motherhood” and be moms who are willing to do costly things to keep Christ at the center.
In our culture, there’s a lot of pressure to do more and be all. Having a platform is considered a currency of influence and power that few would let go or walk away from. However, we want to model what the gospel means—that we’re not bound to culture’s values or expectations. We bow to the Lord and submit our lives and values to him. We’re not scared to say “no” to a good thing if it’s where God is leading and it helps us stay focused on him. We’re not afraid to go back to doing “quiet” things if that’s what the Lord has for us in this next stage of motherhood.
This doesn’t encapsulate all of the reasons or our heart behind the R|M sunset, but we hope this helps you understand a bit more of where we’re coming from.
It’s okay to have all the feels. We want to hear from you and read all the stories of how the Lord has worked in your life through R|M. If you want to share a story, please send it to hello@risenmotherhood.com. We would love to hear it!
The great thing is that we have time for this news to settle. We have time for a good gospel goodbye. We have time to give thanks for what the Lord has done. We have time to share some final important words. And we truly hope you stay with us to the end.
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