It will take time for the historiography of the British Churches across the second half of the twentieth century to mature but this volume will surely be a significant landmark. The book is an intricate study of the ecumenical enthusiasms which were so widely felt across the Protestant Churches in the 1960s and 1970s, and of what became of them. It is also the outworking of a judgement of failure.

Martin Camroux is clearly an author drenched in his subject: as a minister of the United Reformed Church he knew the power of these ideals and also the tragic despondency which overcame them when they were evidently lost. Throughout the book the argument is founded on a rich variety of sources, used with sensitivity and insight, and a good many interviews with the wise and wistful. The whole design is sustained by a clear sense of narrative structure. The reader is carried briskly into the long-vacated landscapes of post-war ecumenical renewal and then brought to confront that uncomfortable convergence between a hopeful, then embattled and at last beleaguered, search for unity and the inexorable encroachments of a context of secularisation.

The idea of Christian unity has seen (or suffered) many definitions, of course. Here it was a unity variously understood as something ‘organic’ or structural, national or local. At first it was an ambition proclaimed by a curiously exaggerated, even strident, optimism, most famously in the proclaimed target of achieving the unity of the Churches by the year 1980. Camroux looks at the various proofs of the great enthusiasm for a ‘new reformation’ in the 1960s as one might inspect an historic album of embarrassing family photographs. He duly proceeds to unravel the labours of a great many uncharismatic committees and conferences while acknowledging the role of personality (particularly in the figure of the purposeful John Huxtable). This also becomes something of an excavation of the worlds of post-war theological liberalism and the tenacious, deepening resistance of its entrenched adversaries. The Methodist-Anglican conversations falter and fail ignominiously and when Presbyterians and Congregationalists unite in 1972 few sober judges can surely have felt much expectation that such an achievement must precipitate a wider movement of union elsewhere. Even the union which created the United Reformed Church had caused ruptures and recriminations.

At large, the age of the denomination was not yet exhausted. While many Free Church leaders moved heroically to accommodate some idea of episcopacy the Anglicans, who placed much of their ecumenical labours in the hands of bishops, yielded almost nothing in return. The best that they could produce was Oliver Tomkins and, as Camroux observes, he was very much a bishop of the old school, brimful of authority and instinctively wary of any unsanctioned form of ecclesial life on his own doorstep. Elsewhere it was still easier to nurture old illusions. The Methodists still preferred to look towards the Anglicans while many Anglicans preferred to look towards the Roman Catholics. The more conservatively Evangelical the Baptists became the less responsive they were to overtures of any kind from anybody else, and anybody liberal above all. All too soon it could be seen that the United Reformed Church might well have found its raison d'etre in a wider pursuit of unity but it only attracted to itself the tiny Association of Churches of Christ and, later, the Scottish Congregational Church. The great labours to achieve a Covenant for Unity in the 1970s turned by painful degrees into what Camroux calls ‘the great disappointment’. By now ecumenism has begun to look not a little like an alteration in house-keeping arrangements in the context of utter decline. What unions occurred were local and usually the consequence of decline rather than ideals, while in the ongoing British Council of Churches and its increasingly beleaguered successors there was still something to keep a handful of ecumenists busy – but only for a time. The Anglicans and Methodists did not even bother to invite the United Reformed Church on board when they managed to agree a bilateral covenant in 2003. This was, to Camroux, an almost crushing proof of the insignificance of his own Church.

Awkward questions hovered over the United Reformed Church itself. The new structures of union had proved indeterminant and unaffordable. The decline in numbers was brutal. Even now a dwindling number of increasingly elderly members still thought of themselves either as former Congregationalists or former Presbyterians. Few thought of themselves as Reformed at all or evidently had much of a sense of what the word might actually mean. Old bastions, like Mansfield College in Oxford – once a proud possession indeed – began to crumble or to survive only by an almost entire evacuation of their old identity, purpose and substance. The luminaries of the Church seemed hardly able to articulate a distinctive reason for its existence at all. Had union simply vitiated the claims and very strength of two historical and theological identities and precipitated the destruction of both? Ecumenism had certainly not provided an answer to their problems. To some it had clearly turned into a ‘cul-de-sac’. Although he acknowledges that the United Reformed Church still achieved valuable things, Camroux's analysis reads like a post-mortem that has been written before the life has been wholly extinguished. There is very much here that is sharp and shrewd.

There is nothing obscure about this book: it will teach far more about the realities defining, and haunting, the history of British Christianity in the later twentieth century than many studies of greater powers. Perhaps it will also raise broader questions about what actually happened in these years to the many diverse cultures of liberalism, religious and secular, which once prospered across British life.