Just as a fire needs fuel to burn to be effective, so also strategy needs information. Research provides that key information. It can be quantitative (about numbers), qualitative (about motivations, opinions, or feelings) or contextual (the local community and culture); all are essential. Church research focuses around congregations, groups of churches, entire denominations, or the national and international picture. Repeating research allows for evaluation of past predictions, past comparisons and estimates for future trends, showing where God is working.

This further volume updates the numbers in the previous volumes and gives details of the number of members, churches and congregations, and the number of ministers (including gender) for the 230 or so denominations in the UK. Every known accessible denomination was contacted directly and many church websites have been searched for information (with numbers estimated from past data for replies not received).

It covers the years consecutively from 2015 through to 2020, and then gives an estimate for 2025, often provided by the individual denomination itself. The Introduction draws out the major trends and items of importance from this mass of data. A feature of this volume is the inclusion of a number of short essays explaining the significance of some of the trends in the data, such as for the New Churches, Orthodox Churches, Pentecostal and Diaspora Churches. The data was collected prior to the Covid-19 lockdown and the impact of the pandemic is as yet unknown in churchgoing and membership terms, so the data is pre-Covid.

The second half of the book breaks some new ground. This is especially seen in Chapter 12 where a history of the major denominations is given of membership, churches and ministers from the year 1900 through to 1990 in 5-year intervals and then in individual years from 1990 to 2020, with a forecast for 2025. This includes some fascinating graphs of changes over 1. centuries as well as a long list of denominational names, all indexed for easy reference. The comprehensive index has over 2,000 entries.

Chapter 13 focuses on church attendance with many more cross-analyses than in previous volumes. Attendance is analysed over time, and by denomination, age, gender, ethnicity, churchmanship, church environment, geographical county and frequency, mostly for both England and Scotland. The Social Statistics section in Chapter 14 includes historical figures for Marriages, Bible translations, GCSE and A Level results for Religious Studies, religion of prisoners, number of immigrants, population, etc.

There is a detailed extract across every UN Region globally of Christian numbers, key denominations and other religions taken from the newly published third edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia, with articles on the non-Christian religions and global Methodism, and detailed figures looking at American, Australian and African Christianity. There are also essays on the coronavirus pandemic, millennials, Gen Z, and other topics.

The value of the volume is that it gives the latest data at your finger-tips in an easily accessible and userfriendly mode. Graphs and charts illustrate the figures throughout, and the forward-looking estimates give valuable indications of possible trends (both positive and negative).