Bob Jackson, What Makes Churches Grow? Vision and Practice in Effective Mission:

TLDR: The latest book by Bob Jackson (Director of the Centre for Church Growth at St John's Nottingham) is a stimulating and encouraging book as mentioned in this paper, which advocates wise and immensely practical advice, the fruit of many years of experience.

Abstract: This latest book by Bob Jackson (Director of the Centre for Church Growth at St John’s Nottingham) is a stimulating and encouraging book. For years the unrelenting message garnered from available statistics is that the Church of England is in a seemingly irreversible decline. Bob Jackson, armed with many and varied statistics, argues that that is no longer the case. In many dioceses and in many different contexts, there is plenty of evidence of growth – for example, many cathedrals are seeing growth, new churches and congregations are being planted and bearing fruit. For this particular reviewer, any book that sets out to encourage, stimulate and argue for church growth immediately gets a huge tick, but there is so much more to the book than that. The author continually advocates wise and immensely practical advice, the fruit of many years of experience, at the end of many of the chapters such as handling change, encouraging dioceses to grow, how to bring back families, children and young people. Of the various initiatives that seem to be bearing fruit in recent years, the author highlights the success of Fresh Expressions and ‘Messy Church’ in particular, which he claims is, ‘The biggest single churchgoing growth phenomenon in this country since the rise of Sunday schools and Methodism at the end of the eighteenth century’ (p. 175). Scattered throughout the book are occasional nuggets that are eminently quotable: