Word.ws English Dictionary

mother church

mother church noun: the Church regarded as nourishing and protecting its members.

Noun

mother church (plural mother churches)

  1. The Church regarded as nourishing and protecting its members.
    • Catholics regard Mary as Mother of the Church but an all-male hierarchy as the Mother Church.
  2. A church with oversight over another or others, now especially a cathedral or metropolitan church.
    • Mothering Sunday arose from the custom of visiting mother churches at Mid-Lent, rather than the usual parish church.
  3. The original church of a denomination, regarded as having birthed the others.
    • The mother church of Christian Scientists is in Boston, Massachusetts.
  4. The original denomination or community of believers from which other denominations and communities of believers sprang.
    • The Church of England is the mother church of Anglicans around the world.
    • Not Rome, but Ierusalem should be the Mother Church.1667, Matthew Poole, Dialogue between a Popish Priest & an English Protestant, page 35

Forms of mother church

pluralmother churches

Origin of mother church

From an association of spiritual comfort and hierarchy with familial relationships, probably originally as a calque of similar expressions in other languages, especially 2nd-century Latin mater ecclesia (“mother church”) and 12th-century Old French mere eglise (“mother church”).

Words formed from mother church

Questions about mother church

What does mother church mean?
Mother church means the Church regarded as nourishing and protecting its members.
What part of speech is mother church?
Mother church is a noun.
What is the plural of mother church?
The plural of mother church is mother churches.

Words near mother church in the dictionary

  1. Mother Carey's goose
  2. mother cell
  3. Mother Christmas
  4. Mother Christmases
  5. Mother Christmasses
  6. mother church
  7. mother churches
  8. mother cities
  9. mother city
  10. mother countries
  11. mother country

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mother church (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “mother church.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mother_church. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.