KEN BENJAMIN’s thesis is that the Church needs fundamentally to reorientate itself to think less about worship on Sundays and more about how the people who come to church on Sunday go about their lives from Monday to Saturday.

On the positive side, this book is packed with genuine wisdom and insight. Making the point that no one calls up their priest on an average day, he feels that ministry too often gets skewed to the crises in people’s lives, and the Church thereby overlooks the more everyday struggles people have to deal with; there is something in this.

In another chapter, he flags up how church structures exercise a gravitational pull towards the internal rather than the external. Hence, at an APCM, you may record how many people came to services that year, an internal thing; you probably won’t record the fact that, in that time period, someone was inspired by their time at church to challenge unfair behaviour in their workplace, or whatever; this external impact is just as important, if not more, but probably goes unnoticed, and certainly unrecorded. Or again, his chapter on how the Covid-caused lockdowns induced imperfect responses among church leaders is brilliant. In many ways, Benjamin is helpful and incisive.

The problem, for me, lies in the wraparound: the insights in the book are swamped in consultancy-style jargon. For example, Benjamin makes great play of “The Six Ms of fruitfulness”, a heroically contrived way of slotting common-sense Christian behaviour into six phrases that begin with the same letter: “Model godly character”, “Make good work”, “Minister grace and love”, “Mould culture”, “Be a Mouthpiece for truth and justice”, “Be a Messenger for the gospel”.

I do wonder how Benjamin regards something like the Beatitudes: presumably, he would be fine with the peacemakers, the pure in heart, and the poor in spirit, because they all begin with a “p”, but would regard mentioning the merciful or those hungering and thirsting for righteousness as a mistake on Jesus’s part, since there seems to have been no attempt at alliteration at all. In fact, Jesus didn’t even put a number on how many Beatitudes there were: madness.

There will be some for whom Benjamin’s style doesn’t grate; for them, I commend the book wholeheartedly. For others, unfortunately, his style will undercut the important points that he is actually making.

The Revd Robert Stanier is Vicar of St Andrew and St Mark, Surbiton, in the diocese of Southwark.

Vital Signs: 20 ways to put whole-life discipleship at the heart of your church
Ken Benjamin
IVP £12.99
(978-1-78974-498-9)
Church Times Bookshop £11.69