





































Ecclesial Futures
2024 – Volume 5 – Issue 2

102
Ecclesial Futures – DOI: 10.54195/ef20161

B O O K  R E V I E W

DOI: 10.54195/ef20161

Foulger, Will. 2023. Present in Every Place?: 
The Church of England’s New Churches, and 
the Future of the Parish

London: SCM Press
ISBN: 978-0-334-06203-5

Reviewed by James Butler

Will Folger is an ordained priest in the Church of England and a theologian. He has 
been involved in church planting, has led the Centre for Church Planting Theology 
and Research at Cranmer Hall, Durham and is currently vicar of a Church of England 
church. This book engages with the often polarized debates around church in the 
Church of England and of the significance of place. Folger proposes that if you can 
get past the polarization in the discussion of parish and Fresh Expressions what you 
actually find is a common commitment to place, although often expressed in quite 
different ways. Locating himself much more in the church planting and pioneering 
camp, he recounts his surprise at how much he agreed with the questions and 
critiques of the likes of Alison Milbank, Andrew Davidson, Marcus Walker and the 
Save the Parish movement. However, he found their proposals somewhat baffling. 
By exploring the debate, the common commitments and the way place is under-
stood more broadly, he tries to distinguish between the commitment to parish and 
place, and the structures of parish. To do this he turns to language of vocation. He 
argues that if instead of defending parish in terms of the current structures and 
rather seeing it as a commitment to a vocation to be present in the particular place, 
then there actually quite a lot of common ground between those who want to “save 
the parish” and those committed to church planting and Fresh Expressions. I have 
heard Foulger described as an apologist and interpreter for church planting and 
Fresh Expressions, and he is clearly someone who wants to locate himself in the 
middle of a polarized debate, encouraging reconciliation and a renewed vocation to 
be present in place.

The book itself is made up of an introduction and four chapters. It begins by looking at 
the understanding of place, particularly the way it was disrupted and brought to the 



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centre of discussion by the Mission Shaped Church report. Foulger unpacks the way 
in which it was welcomed by some and rejected and criticized by others arguing that 
at the heart of the discussion is a concern about place. Chapter 2 seeks to develop 
ways to disagree better, asking what it means to be faithful tradition drawing on the 
work of Alisdair MacIntyre, specifically that it is not about appropriation or rejection 
but rather about the negotiation and debate, one might say discernment. In this 
way faithfulness to the parish might well be critique of the parish as it currently is, 
not simply needing to be more confident in it. Chapter 3 dives more clearly into the 
account of place, exploring place from a variety of other academic disciplines before 
focusing on the story of the Good Samaritan as a theological bridge into a renewed 
vision of vocation to place. Chapter 4 argues that proximity is not enough, and what 
is needed is intentionality – both from parishes and from church planting and Fresh 
Expressions. It is this intentional move to be present in a particular place that Foulger 
identifies as the difference between those who successful engage in a place, and 
those who end up living in proximity to place.

The book is based on Foulger’s doctoral research, although those wanting a careful 
account of his qualitative research, thick descriptions and thematic reflections on 
data will be disappointed. This appears to take that earlier work, which it refers to 
at various places through the book, and build on its themes and conclusions rather 
than engage in its nitty-gritty detail of actual churches. Given that his argument is 
about the particularity of place, I would have liked to have heard more of the nuances 
of how this plays out in particular contexts. The book, however, appears to take the 
broad findings and focus them in such a way to critique, develop and extend the 
discussions around Fresh Expressions, church planting and parish. This is a welcome 
development, and it is excellent to have fresh, theologically engaged reflection and 
critique into a somewhat entrenched subject. I agree with Foulger that the overly 
simplistic framing offered by some around the parish being about place, and Fresh 
Expressions and church planting being about networks and particular subcultures is 
a misleading binary, which has little reality in practice. He makes a strong case that 
place is actually at the heart of the commitment both to parish and to church planting 
and fresh expressions, and his language of vocation and the Church of England’s call 
to be present in place is one which deserves attention. It would be great to see it 
seriously taken up by both sides of an, in my view unnecessarily, polarized debate, as 
a way of finding common ground.

Where I would like to offer a critique of Foulger is around his language of intention-
ality. This is a buzzword in the Church of England, the Anglican Communion and 
beyond at the moment, and needs some more detailed unpacking. His use of Nich-
olas Healy’s work to justify his turn to intentionality does not do justice to Healy’s 



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argument. While Healy wants to make the work of the Triune God central to the turn 
to practice, and give a clearer account of the Spirit as the one who gives Christians 
their intent, Foulger’s use of intentionality draws him into a focus on human will and 
action. This move inadvertently sidelines, at least in the way it is written, the work 
of the Spirit. While I struggle to share Foulger’s suggestion of a way forward around 
intention – I think a much more complex account of human participation in the work 
of the Spirit in mission is required – I do very much value Foulger’s careful explo-
ration of place, his distinction between presence and proximity, and his surfacing 
of and turn to the language of calling and vocation (which of course gives plenty of 
scope for an account of the triune God who is doing that calling). I therefore recom-
mend the book, as one which is offering theological tools to move past an unhelp-
fully and unnecessarily polarized debate in the Church of England.

About the Reviewer
James Butler, University of Roehampton, London; Church Mission Society, Oxford. 
Contact: James.butler@roehampton.ac.uk

References
Cray, Graham (ed.). 2004. Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of 

Church in a Changing Context. London: Church House Publishing.
Healy, Nicholas M. 2003. “Practices and the New Ecclesiology: Misplaced Concreteness?”, 

International Journal of Systematic Theology, 5.3: 287–308, https://doi.org/10.1111/1463-
1652.00110.

mailto:James.butler@roehampton.ac.uk
https://doi.org/10.1111/1463-1652.00110
https://doi.org/10.1111/1463-1652.00110

