Beneath all the anxieties about church decline and strategies and restructures to reverse that, this book speaks to a problem that has not been addressed – the widespread disinterest in the church and the church’s inability to capture the public imagination or to be relevant.

It argues that the church needs to recover a sense of authenticity – in the gospel it believes, in the vision of human flourishing it promotes, in its place within a multicultural society, in its primary vocation to serve society and not be its moral guardian. It calls on all kinds of resources that can help refresh the church’s self-expression - in engagement with art, music and poetry, in searching for better language (drawing on people like Barbara Brown Taylor, Padraig O Tuama and George MacLeod), through biblical stories that resonate with the Scottish experience, through meaningful engagement with communities and with the landscape, and more.