For many American Protestants, too often the church is only an option for expression of heartfelt devotion, a choice that is the equivalent of personal forms of devotion or parachurch initiatives. To be sure, the church gathered in worship and led by ministers is the place where believers corporately express praise and adoration to their heavenly Father, and they should take great care in the way they express themselves to the sovereign Lord of the universe. But the church is also a place where, through his under-shepherds, God ministers to his people. Especially in the Word read and preached, and in the administration of the Sacraments, God reminds his people of his forgiveness and builds them up in holiness and comfort. A high view of the church, her worship, ministry, and creed, then, requires a piety that recognizes the believer’s dependence on the means that God has ordained to bless his children.

Scriptural Support
The ancient prophets often describe the Church in motherly terms (Is. 49;50;54;66:7,10-13; Jer. 3;4;5). The book of Revelation depicts the Church as a mother giving birth to the Messiah and then shows her hiding to avoid persecution (Rev. 12). Similarly, the Apostle Paul glories that the "Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all" (Gal. 4:26). The early Protestants were much closer to the ancient and medieval heart on this matter. Paul compares the apostles to a mother when he states that, "as a mother feeds and takes care of her child, such was our tenderness towards you . . . that we would have wished to hand over to you, along with the Gospel of God, our own life" (1 Thes. 2:7-8). Likewise, in his letter to the Galatians, Paul expresses his longing for the formation of Christ in them in maternal imagery. He states: "My children, you for whom I continue to experience the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!" (Gal. 4:19). From these two Pauline scripture references we can see four explicit roles of motherhood. These roles are childbearing, teaching, protecting and correcting. It is precisely these aspects that can be useful in the Church’s self-expression today.

Many modern Christians don't even have a mental drawer in which to file talk about the Church, let alone the Mother Church. We can speak of churches and the local church, but we don't have a place to speak of THE Church. It makes some squeamish. Older Protestants didn't have this problem, but industrial-strength individualism has beaten our thinking into submission.

Though Scripture pictures the Church in various ways, the image of a mother is especially helpful for our era. But what does it mean to speak of the Church as mother? One way to answer that is to see how Scripture describes motherhood and then look for those traits in the Church. We regularly turn to Proverbs 31 for a wonderful picture of the faithful mother. If so, that passage can also fill out the characteristics of the Church.

The Centrality of the Church: In Proverbs 31, mother serves as the pillar of nourishment and provision--"She brings food from afar. . . and provides food for her household. . . . She is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household is clothed with scarlet." We get the impression that without her, the family would collapse. Without her, we would be hungry and naked and broken. Mother holds life together.

The Church should be so central in our thinking that without her life would collapse. She should play prominently in our understanding of the past, the present, and the future. She--not the state or the family or the individual--should be first on our lips when we discuss evangelism and social change and the good life. We should turn to the Church first for doctrinal nourishment and practical raiment.

Instead, we ignore mother. We run to the state for social change and licenses. We skip her meals and change her menus. We move our families for "the job" and then only afterward whine that there is no good church around. It's as if mother is just a convenient annex to the household.

Recognizing the centrality of the Church doesn't mean spending more time at the local church (it might mean less). It means that we view the world through medieval eyes--a world where the church spire and not city hall is the most prominent point on the landscape.

The Authority of the Church: A mother could be central but not authoritative. Children might fawn over mother and say yes but then go about their business. Proverbs 31 tells us that mother "opens her mouth with wisdom, and on her tongue is the law of kindness." Proverbs also tells us to "not forsake the law of your mother. Bind them continually upon your heart; tie them around your neck" (6:20; cf.1:8).

Like mother, the Church in the Old Covenant had genuine, circumscribed authority (Dt. 17:8-13). This continued in the New, where Christ granted the Church the authority to bind and loose (Matt. 18:18) and teach (Matt. 28:18ff). In Acts, the Church "assembled with one accord" (Acts 15:25) to authoritatively clarify Church teaching, and we have these authoritative teachers "till we all come to the unity of the faith" (Eph. 4:13).

The Church has spoken authoritatively through her creeds. She has passed down centuries of wisdom to us. She has embraced many wise teachers. If she is a mother, then these can't be merely suggestions. They are law until rescinded. Yet a mother's law need not be perfect to be authoritative. And when it needs correcting, individuals have no right to do so as vigilante theologians. How disrespectful. The Church corrects her own creeds. After all, to her alone, not the state, not the family, not dad, not the parachurch, did Christ give promises of truth and eternal perseverance. And, yes, in those rare, abnormal instances in history where "mother" turns out to be a harlot who murders her children (Lam 1; Hos. 1-4), then God afflicts her for her idolatries (Lam. 1:5) and raises Elijahs and Josiahs for the true mother. But that is not normal Church life.

The Patience of the Church: With wisdom and strength comes patience. Proverbs teaches us that "strength and honor are her clothing; she shall rejoice in time to come." She may not be able to rejoice at the moment, with all the diapers and infant screams, but she will in the future. She is patient. She knows the frame of her children. Only a tyrannical mother would expect instant maturity and perfection. They have so much to learn, and she is gentle.

In English we are accustomed to speak of the Church as "it". This is most unfortunate, for throughout the history of Christendom the Church has always been a "she". The gender of the Greek word “ecclesia” is feminine, and Paul himself speaks of the Church as the "bride of Christ", clearly indicating the Church is a 'she'.

The Church is the mother who begets and bears the Christian because the Church is the “ordinary” site and means by which the Holy Spirit works in the life of the Christian. The Church with the Holy Spirit begets the Christian, and the Church bears the Christian in his or her growth "to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." (Eph. 4: 13) The Church is that tender mother who nurtures us, teaches us, guides us, admonishes us, protects us, and declares to us the forgiveness of sins.

While this language of the Church as our Mother may be strange to the ears of a modern Christian, it was familiar to the lips of the early Protestants. None have written more boldly and more succinctly than Johann Gerhard in his Sacred Meditations: “No man will have God for his father in heaven who refuses to have the Church for his mother upon the earth.”