This collection of nine essays purports to serve two purposes: (1) to tell an ‘untold’ story of the impact of Nonconformist Churches in local communities since the advent of industrial society; and (2) to function as a ministerial training resource for today's Free Churches, enabling reflection on the past to inform the practical theology of contemporary community work. The volume stems from a project overseen by the United Reformed Church, and while most essays chart a broad Free Church tradition, Congregationalists are conspicuous. Most chapters are thematic surveys: Nonconformity ‘and their Nation’, Nonconformity and the community beyond their chapel, politics, education, the city, mutual and campaigning associations, and church community work since the welfare state. These essays vary in depth and detail. Taken together with Clyde Binfield's case study of the philanthropists Titus Salt, the Halifax Crossleys and W. H. Lever, the academic reader might question how many of their stories really remain ‘untold’. Exceptions include the Welsh vignettes sketched by Robert Pope, and the twentieth-century case notes of Peter Catterall and Lesley Husselbee. Several chapters attend closely to the late-Victorian/Edwardian period, repeatedly identifying an 1880s shift away from a long-standing concern with individual morality, liberty and suspicion of the state towards more ‘outward’, interventionist social thinking, embodied in The bitter cry of outcast London, the influence of William Booth and Hugh Price Hughes, and new ‘institutional Churches’ providing welfare services. Explanations for this shift in social consciousness are brief, despite its revolutionary import for the ‘tradition’ claimed by this book. Indeed, leaving Quakers and Unitarians aside, the default social ideology of Nonconformity before the 1880s, especially Congregationalism, was individual rights and responsibilities against a ‘social’ solution. Stephen Orchard's education chapter highlights how Nonconformist paranoia about both state control and Roman Catholicism hindered early Victorian educational provision for the poor. David Bebbington acknowledges that Nonconformists were for and against factory reforms, a utilitarian poor law and the restriction of workers' Sunday recreation, helpfully identifying ‘a clash of social policies grounded on differing theologies’ (p. 50). These insights – inadvertent and somewhat contrary to the ‘celebratory’ tone intended for the volume – raise an important response to the book's stated purposes. Paul Ballard's concluding chapter, ‘Living out of history’, claims the value of history for Free Church praxis today: that congregations should view themselves ‘in a strong succession’ of community engagement (p. 192), enabling their tradition's past to ground its present. Such claims are not without merit. However, history is a critical discipline, and effective praxis demands critical reflection. Church traditions must recognise their past failings, their absences of action, their sinful silences even, and not just their successes. An equal acknowledgement of these other untold stories, of times when ideology obscured a social imagination, might also serve the Free Church ministry seeking a role in modern ‘austerity’ Britain.