There are tentative signs that the long decline of Christian worship in the Western world may be slowing, or even going into reverse. ‘The Quiet Revival’, a recent Bible Society report based on YouGov polls of over a thousand people aged between eighteen and twenty-four, reported a dramatic growth in regular church-going among members of Gen Z. If such a revival is indeed under way, books like Fergus Butler-Gallie’s Twelve Churches deserve to play a role in deepening our understanding of the faith.

According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus Christ pledged that when two or three people gather together to worship God, he will be there with them. Butler-­Gallie’s learned, highly informative and readable book tells us of twelve such places, built to house not just two or three but congregations of hundreds in many corners of the world, from the Bible Belt in the Deep South of America to sub-Saharan Africa and even Japan.

Butler-Gallie, like the Galilean fishermen first recruited by Jesus to spread his word, has cast his net widely. Appropriately enough, he begins at the beginning: the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where, according to tradition, Christ came into the world. In the author’s description, this