Books by John Bodycomb

With familiar candour and colour, John Bodycomb excoriates church leadership for evading, and layering over with platitudes, two huge questions:• What future for organised religion in Western societies? and (in light of this) • What future for the so-called 'religious professional'?Fifty years a sociologist of religion, specialising in the ups and downs of organised religion, Bodycomb is plain-spoken and provocative. Institutional Christianity as we have known it began to decline 600 years ago, and with it a model of religious professional. We are entering a new era, in which people must still make sense of existence with some kind of meaning system - but the old ones are obsolete.The defenders of tradition, theologians, institutional power brokers and thought police will hate 'Two Elephants', he predicts.