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Authorized King James Version |
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Martyrs |
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Book of Common Prayer |
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Anglican Communion |
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Broad Church is a term referring to Latitudinarian churchmanship in the Church of England, in particular, and Anglicanism, in general. From this, the term is often used to refer to secular political organisations, meaning that they encompass a broad range of opinion.
After the terms High Church and Low Church came to distinguish the tendency toward Ritualism and Anglo-Catholicism on the one hand and Puritanism on the other, those Anglicans tolerant of multiple forms of conformity to ecclesiastical authority came to be referred to as "Broad." As the name implies, parishes associated with this variety of churchmanship will mix High and Low forms, reflective of the often eclectic liturgical and doctrinal preferences of clergy and laity. The emphasis is on allowing individual parishioners choice.
Broad church as an expression is now increasingly replaced by references in the Church of England to liberalism. For example, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his "text of reflection" The Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today, released in 2006[1], described the three "components in our heritage" as "strict evangelical Protestantism", "Roman Catholicism" and "religious liberalism", accepting that "each of these has a place in the church’s life". These would broadly correspond to the Low Church, High Church and Broad Church parties in the Church of England. By 2008 this coalition was pushed to near breaking point over the issues of Female Bishops and Homosexual ordination, as The Spectator noted in an article entitled: 'A Very British Coup- The End of our National Church.'
As said above the term can describe the membership of other organisations. When James Callaghan, the Labour Party Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said of his party that "ours in a broad church", he meant that it embraced different strands of labour and socialist tradition.
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