The Centre for Church Growth Research is delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of an edited volume entitled The Desecularisation of the City: London’s Churches, 1980 to the Present, to be published in hardback by Routledge during Autumn 2018.
The study was edited by David Goodhew, Director of the Centre for Church Growth Research at Cranmer Hall, St Johns College, Durham University and Anthony-Paul Cooper, Research Fellow of the Centre for Church Growth Research at
Cranmer Hall, St John’s College, Durham University.
Further details around the publication of the volume and the associated launch event will be made available in due course.
A summary of The Desecularisation of the City:
It remains a truth almost universally acknowledged that the church in the West is in decline. But not all universally acknowledged truths are true. The number of congregations in London is 50% higher now than it was in 1979. Some of London’s churches and denominations have shrunk since 1980, but most have grown. London’s Churches, produced by a diverse team of scholars, explores the vitality of congregational life in a key global city. It does so by sinking interdisciplinary ‘shafts’ into the evidential strata – the diverse localities, ethnicities and denominations that make up the church in contemporary London. The volume ranges from Nigerian Pentecostals to Russian Orthodox, from the established Church of England to denominations which only arose in recent decades. London’s Churches necessitates a significant reassessment of the dominant portrayal of Christianity in Britain and the west, which has assumed that cities are secular spaces within a secularising culture.
The draft table of contents for the forthcoming volume can be viewed here