Two Elephants in the Room

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.