1. gen. A church free from state control. In pl. a name often given by Nonconformists to the various churches of Congregationalists, Baptists, etc., as distinguished from the Established Church.
1869. Skeats (title), A history of the Free Churches of England from A.D. 1688–A.D. 1851.
1891. Church Quarterly Review, XXXIV. July, 355. The Liberationists (who, indeed, seem mostly to be Scotch, Welsh, or Irish, rather than English) demand that the English Commonwealth shall abolish by law the oldest and most national of all her traditions, and substitute for it, by Act of Parliament, their new American or French-Swiss notion of any number of ‘Free Churches.’
1897. Fairbairn, in Oxford Free Ch. Mag., Jan. 1 (article), The Free Churches and the education of their sons.
2. The Free Church (Kirk) of Scotland: the organization formed by the ministers who seceded from the established Presbyterian Church in 1843.
1843. [see DISRUPTION 3].
1874. Blackie, Self-Culture, 47. In this matter the Free Church of Scotland, among its other notable achievements, has recently shown us an example well worthy of imitation.
So Free-churchism, the principles or doctrines of the Free Churches; Free-churchman, a member of a Free Church. Also Free-kirker (depreciatively), a member of the Free Kirk of Scotland.
1847. R. S. Candlish, in Life, xiv. (1860), 402. I feel on this subject far more as a Christian patriot than as a Free Churchman.
1881. The Saturday Review, LII. 23 July, 116/2. There was a hard grain of logic in the midst of this egregious assumption of the Freekirkers that a runaway daughter is three hundred years older than her mother.
1884. Chr. World, 21 Feb., 135/3. Thus, Freechurchism goes ahead in these colonies.
1897. Oxford Free Ch. Mag., Jan. 3. These important bonds of faith between all Free Churchmen.
