Abstract
“With,” Samuel Wells insists, “is the most important word in the Christian faith” (9). Wells would know. He has spent the last several years sorting through the theological and ecclesial implications of the phrase “God with us,” drawing deeply upon his own experiences as Dean of Duke University Chapel and Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, to write four books that integrate pastoral wisdom with theology, ethics, and missiology. The project begins with A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God (Wiley, 2015) and Living without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence (IVP Books, 2011), where he reimagines life, salvation, and ministry within the relational ecology revealed by Jesus’ presence in Nazareth thirty years before his public ministry. Incarnational Ministry: Being with the Church (Eerdmans, 2017) follows these two books and focuses on the ministry of the church in relational and incarnational terms. “Being with” not only describes God’s way with creation, but also the primary mode for ecclesial social engagement. In his latest book, Incarnational Mission: Being with the World, Wells moves from ministry to mission, exploring the implications of his relational theology for mission practice.
Because, as Wells says, “the gospel is not something that belongs to the church,” mission describes an ongoing process of learning, where good news is both given and received in relationship to those outside the church (17). He organizes the book into two sections, first addressing the individual relationships Christians have in the world before considering social and political realms of ecclesial interaction and engagement. Wells deliberately ties Incarnational Mission back to earlier works by using the eight dimensions of “being with” developed in A Nazareth Manifesto (presence, attention, mystery, delight, participation, partnership, enjoyment, and glory) to organize each chapter. While somewhat repetitive, it serves the dual purpose of restatement and extension.
In the first five chapters of the book, Wells considers the spectrum of relationships Christians might have in the world—the lapsed, seekers, those of no professed faith, those of other faiths, and the hostile—and describes how the eight dimensions of “being with” can inform and shape those relationships. In each case, Wells differentiates his approach from crass efforts at recruitment by imagining these people as gifts to the church. His approach mostly succeeds. When considering groups he calls “the lapsed,” “seekers,” and “no professed faith,” for example, Wells leans upon his pastoral experience to show how the hurts of the lapsed, the enthusiasm of the seekers, and the spiritual ambivalence of those with no professed faith invite Christians to learn, grow, adapt, and trust God in new ways. Wells wants the church to learn to enjoy those currently outside the faith, for “evangelism is a means toward the end of being with, rather than vice versa” (76). Of course, being with those who are hostile to the faith provides a limit-case for Wells’s argument, which he carefully acknowledges.
The last five chapters consider the challenges and possibilities of relationships with groups: being with neighbors, organizations, institutions, government, and the excluded. As with the first half, Wells reimagines the public, political, and social witness of the church through the eight dimensions of being with others. He encourages Christians to imagine the neighbor as Jesus, rather than “an ocean of impossible demand” (135), organizations, institutions, and government as possible sites for disclosing God’s intentions for the world, and the excluded as requiring one to accept ambiguity and human limitation. However, the structure developed in the first part of the book does not adapt as easily to the second. Throughout the final chapters, one gets the sense that Wells is writing to individual Christians or clergy who will engage with organizations or institutions. The role of the corporate body, the congregation, is often neglected. A direct consideration of ways congregations learn to be with the world could strengthen Wells’s vision for public witness within and among neighborhoods, organizations, institutions, and governments.
As the latest installment of Wells’s theological project, Incarnational Mission helps to clarify what is at stake in a theology of “being with.” By clarifying the missiological consequences of “God with us,” Wells offers a valuable resource for church mission committees, congregational study groups, and seminary classrooms.