American authors bravely attempt wide-sweep history, in this case four centuries coupled with an attempt at global coverage. To provide guidance to the way in which the family of Baptists have developed in different continents Johnson's analysis is prefaced by a Global Baptist timeline which helps to provide a visual appreciation of comparative developments, underlining that only in the United Kingdom and North America does the denomination have the four hundred years of history which the publication of the book is designed to celebrate. It is this that leads to his concern with what he sees as an over-dominant ‘Anglo’ tradition. Because dates are sparsely distributed in the text, there is a consequent need to reference the timeline for chronology. Whilst an overburdening of text with footnotes may be undesirable, in this book references to sources are less complete than is desirable for the reader who wants to follow the subject further.

The history is set out in three periods, the significance of which are not immediately transparent – the primal (broadly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), the frontier (broadly the nineteenth century) and the period of proliferating the tradition, or global stage, of Baptist history, the years since 1900. Within the limits of just over 400 pages some of the analysis necessarily appears as over-summary and incomplete. For example, if you pursue William Carey through the index you will learn nothing about his engagement with Indian culture or indeed of his cultural contribution to Indian identity: what indeed were the missiological principles that he was working out? Because Baptist thinking in this area is underplayed, this reviewer looked in vain for the contribution of Raymond Fung and Kyaw Than from Asia, or of Orlando Costas, Samuel Escobar or Rene Padilla from Latin America, all of whom would have illustrated important ‘non-Anglo’ contributions.

Given the author's concern to ensure that the story is not over-burdened by its early predominantly British cultural context, even in its North American variant, it is surprising that the author does not tackle the connections with continental Anabaptism and how this may have influenced the denomination's early years, not least as the source of General Baptists’ Free-Will theology. But, as Johnson rightly stresses, many parts of the Baptist family have much later, and therefore different, roots to their witness so that there is not one history that shapes the whole movement. Unlike some other writers, Johnson consistently makes a special point of finding space to consider the contribution of Baptist women though sometimes this lacks specificity – for example the section on ‘European Baptist women’ (pp. 319ff) cites no names, no dates, no events, no places, no organisations.

One merit of deploying the language of frontier, very much a North American concept, is that he rightly considers migration alongside missionary activity as part of the explanation for the global spread of Baptist people. But if there were internal frontiers of class, gender, colour, language and wealth in developed nations, then those frontiers continue to exist well into Johnson's third period.

Arguably Johnson is over-concerned to discover theoretical patterns within which to locate a developing Baptist tradition. Accompanying this is a tendency to explicate context at the expense of an accurate analysis of content, though in one important respect this concern for context provides a useful corrective to that Protestantism which fails to appreciate the importance of those elements of the Catholic tradition that the reformers retained as much as the significance of those that they rejected. The first need to accommodate other than a western European cultural inheritance was experienced in early encounters with American Indians where basic missiological issues had to be worked out with varying degrees of both sympathy and insensitivity in terms of oppressive modes of evangelism. Even more complicated was the influence of African religion on Black religion in the USA and the Caribbean, especially when mediated through the miseries of slavery. In these and every new mission situation there was the challenge to liberate the essence of the Christian message from the cultural envelope enclosing it.

The book concludes with a helpful description of current ‘Baptist beliefs and practices’, which generally fairly reflects the diversity present within the constituency.