“Narrative histories are not much in fashion these days,” admits Andrew Chandler in the introduction to The Church of England in the Twentieth Century. “Institutional histories certainly are not” (3). Notwithstanding, he has written a big book that is unabashedly both.

He tells the story of the Church Commissioners, formed in 1948 by merging the assets of Queen Anne's Bounty (a fund established in 1704 for the “benefit of poor clergy”) and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners (originally established in 1836 to assist the “cure of souls”). In the twentieth century their chief concerns were the “trinity” of stipends, pensions, and houses. In these and other respects, the Church Commissioners aimed to reconcile the “demands of modernity … with as much grace and fluency as the legacies of the past would allow” (137).

The book draws its evidence mainly from the hitherto untapped and evidently immense records of the Church Commissioners, located in Bermondsey, south London. These “bulging archives” (2) well suit the author's love of detail, which he doles out lavishly upon his readers. There were, for example, the West Riding parishioners who opposed the scheme to rename their rural deanery, on the grounds that the proposed name derived merely from “a large stretch of uninhabited water”; they preferred an ancient wapentake associated with the district (211–12). (Evidently the other eleven parishes involved in the renaming were unfamiliar with either the reservoir or the wapentake and did not care.) Then there was the thirteenth-century church in the diocese of Ely that, by the 1980s, was overgrown with creepers and inhabited by bats, owls, and a fox: because of its unusual flora and fauna, it was duly converted to “a nature reserve and a field study centre for natural history” (295). The proposal to give an empty Victorian church in Derby to a Serbian Orthodox congregation drew more controversy (in part because elsewhere it had been reported the Serbs dripped candle wax on carpets, poured sand on the floor, and left toffee wrappers in the pews), while plans to use a redundant church in Southampton as a Sikh temple or to convert a chapel-of-ease near Wakefield to a mosque were even more controversial (115–17, 291–95, 231–39). There was also the case of St. Mark's Episcopal cathedral in Salt Lake City, Utah, which applied to the Church Commissioners to purchase the weathercock from a derelict church, “to stare back … at the Mormons’ Golden Angel” (296).

Literally dozens of anecdotes like these bring life to what could easily, in the hands of a less-engaging writer, be a bland account tracing the “obscurantically Anglican” (203) ins and outs of the Church Commissioners’ concerns with incomes, expenses, and investments. Nevertheless, it is hard to peg exactly what audience the book intends to attract. It even seems as though the author, fondly absorbed in the memos and minutes and balance sheets of the Church Commissioners, may occasionally have forgotten his readers: his penchant for detailed description (“intricacy mattered,” he observes [25]) would have been welcome in elucidating the finer distinctions that set apart the boards, panels, and commissions that absorb so much of the book's content. The purpose of the Friends of Friendless Churches may be readily inferred, but the authority, competence, and relation of the General Synod, the Estates and Finance Committee, the Central Council for the Care of the Churches, the Diocesan Board of Finance, and over a dozen other similarly opaque bodies—often given as an alphabet soup of acronyms—need more thoughtful attention. Similarly, the narrative would benefit from giving human faces or personalities to recurring key members of various boards and commissions. In these respects, the depths of the source material may have been too much of a good thing: clearly the author knows these bodies and individuals intimately—but overlooks the fact that others have not lived and breathed the archives in Bermondsey.

The book's organization—five main parts (two to four chapters each) corresponding to the tenures of five archbishops of Canterbury—fits its institutional approach (and probably also reflects the organization of the archives). But such a scheme is not always satisfactory: obviously many debates transcended episcopal tenures of office, and, as a consequence, the handling of some discussions is cut short without clear resolution, and other sections appear unnecessarily repetitive. A couple of its appendices also add bulk, but not much substance, to the book.

In spite of the author's claim that the history of the Church of England cannot be understood without grasping the activities of the Church Commissioners (2), the book's primary title is misleading, not the least because, after the first thirty-two pages, its focus rests squarely on the second half of the twentieth century. Its subtitle, The Church Commissioners and the Politics of Reform, 1948–1998, prostions, whether or not the Church Commissioners “exercised their discretionary powers effectively on behalf of their legal trusts and their financial resources” (3), is addressed more effectively. “And if there is one thing that Christians evidently dislike more than the making of money,” Chandler tells us near the end, “it is appearing to lose it. In fifty years the Church Commissioners did both, prodigiously” (473). Insofar as making money is concerned, the Church Commissioners over time drew up lists of ventures in which they would not hold stock, including armaments, alcohol, tobacco, newspapers, and so on. But even these guidelines were not always free from ambiguity. For example, did holding a portfolio, a tiny fraction of which was invested in a steel firm, mean indirect investment in war? Views differed. Year after year the question of sanctions or disinvestments in South Africa yielded no obvious solution, in part because the opinions of Archbishop Tutu, Chief Buthelezi, and liberal whites—within the Anglican community and without, and in South Africa, Britain, and beyond—were much divided (306).

Certain reservations aside, then, this remains a useful book, and one that should appeal to specialists and nonspecialists alike—although the latter may think twice before hefting such a heavy tome. It is true that Andrew Chandler could have produced a vastly shorter work, and one that probably would lose none of its argument or coherence. But at the same time, he would almost certainly have written a book that was less enjoyable to read.