This slim volume presents a highly readable study of urban church life in contemporary China. Brent Fulton, a political scientist by training, uses sources in a variety of media, including anonymised conversations with church leaders and commentators, to analyse the structures of church life and the challenges facing urban congregations. Four introductory chapters assess the economic, infrastructural and social change that rapid urbanisation has brought to China and the implications of these for church growth and development. Fulton outlines the different types of church congregations that have come into being in the economic and theological stratifications of the Reform era, from churches of migrant workers to the ‘boss Christian’ churches, from official churches to the unregistered new urban congregations. The study concentrates on these latter, as it examines in chapters v–viii how the burgeoning congregations of largely middle-class urban professionals envisage their new role in evangelisation and mission, in denominational relations, in social service and in overcoming the restrictions that having no legal status brings to church and charitable work. Fulton's study is noteworthy for being unremarkable: this is not a study of persecution or Church–State relations overwhelmed by antagonism, but of the quotidian challenges of rapid urbanisation in a secular, atheist society as the Church moves from the social fringe of rural society to mainstream urban life. Some of the issues that the Church faces relate to societal dislocation: providing leadership in the moral vacuum of a post-Marxist, consumerist society, offering ethical guidance to church members whose unmarried children are cohabiting as never before and whose parents need outsourced care. Other challenges are internal: the need for leadership development in a ‘post-denominational’ system that encourages self-proclaimed leaders in unregistered churches; of church governance in the absence of financial oversight; of inter-Church relations with no denominational bodies to facilitate these. Fulton is deft in his analysis of both, and of the relations between social and ecclesial change, whether in the professionalisation of clergy or the church-shopping of consumer-oriented youth. Written for accessibility – light on footnoting and on Chinese-language secondary sources, and generous in its coverage of the Reformed tradition – this is none the less a serious academic study, with a rare, and helpful, breadth. Statistics from China always provide food for thought, from the five hundred million increase in urban residents since the 1980s to the seventeen million followers of one Christian tycoon micro-blogger, while the ethical and theological issues that Chinese Christians are grappling with concern believers everywhere: the rethink of capital and the nature of ownership in an era of inequality and environmental degradation; church unity and relations between bodies of different theological persuasions; the meaning of Christian education. This short study is as good a place as any to begin to appreciate the vitality of Chinese urban Christianity.