That Was the Church That Was: how the Church of England lost the English people
ANDREW BROWN AND LINDA WOODHEAD

This argumentative, gossipy, fitfully entertaining book has been eagerly awaited for several months, since the first print run was pulped in the spring due to undisclosed legal issues. With the whiff of scandal expunged, we can focus instead on Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead’s central claim - that a “yawning gulf” has opened up between the Church of England and the English people.

Over the last three decades, they declare, Anglicanism has become detached from society and retreated to the margins of national life. The central bodies of the Church of England are “increasingly isolated, defensive and concerned with their own introverted agendas”. The Established Church now seems, as the recent debacle over women bishops has shown, to be living “on another planet”.

This is a ferocious, impassioned wake-up call from an unlikely partnership. Brown, a witty Guardian journalist, and Woodhead, an eminent sociologist of religion, have come together to summon the Church of England to stop its navel-gazing, cease its internecine party warfare, quit its flirtation with managerial “voodoo”, rediscover its true purpose and reconnect with those outside its doors.